SOLS Podcasts

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Peggy Coulombe: Hi, this is Peggy Coulombe and welcome to Science Studio. If I say the word "embryo" what leaps to your mind? A frog egg being fertilized under a microscope in a biology classroom? The flashpoint for religious, ethical, legal and political tension? A treatment for Alzheimer's or something maybe more deeply personal?

Sitting down with us today are School of Life Sciences professors, Jane Maienschein and Manfred Laubichler, co-directors of the Embryo Project, a resource for discussion and scholarly discovery that examines everything around embryos, embryology, developmental biology including those sticky legal, ethical, moral, cultural, religious and political considerations that one sees in the news. Together with a bevy of partners, they are seeking to launch a central site to create insight, understanding and leadership around some of life's and modern science's more elemental and controversial subjects.

Welcome Jane. Welcome Manfred.

Jane Maienschein: Thanks.

Manfred Laubichler: Thanks.

Peggy: Jane, I should mention quickly here for our listeners besides being involved with this project and being a regent's presidents and parents' professor in the school of Life Sciences that you are also the Director of the Center for Biology in Society and have a fundamental interest in the history of science. So, tell me what spurred you and Manfred to create the Embryo Project?

Jane: Oh, we like to do crazy things I guess. [laughs] But the main thing was that people in the public were saying idiotic things and assuming that stem cells and cloning and embryos were all new things.... That somehow we had just discovered them in the last ten years.

There is a rich history. Stem cell research has been around for a century. Cloning has been around for a half century. We wanted people to know that. It's important if they are going to understand science.

Peggy: And Manfred, what got you involved?

Manfred: What got me involved is that you do better science if you know the history. Since developmental biology or embryo research is among the most prominent areas of the life sciences right now, I think it is absolutely important to create that kind of historical depth to that research.

Scientists, actually, or biologists, I should say, are very interested in the history of their field, but only if it is presented to them in a way that they can A. understand and B. have access to. That is a main motivation for the Embryo Project to be created for the scientific community, to make that kind of historical scholarship available to working scientists and to foster that kind of interaction.

Peggy: So Manfred, why do you think there is such controversy around the fields of embryology and developmental biology that is maybe more compelling than some of the other sciences?

Manfred: Because it hits closer to home. We all once were an embryo. Therefore, it has a lot to do with questions of personal identity and self–understanding. And it has to do, of course, with sex. All of this makes the conservative "nut" cases jump onto this and create all kinds of misrepresentations of embryo research that Jane was talking about.

I think by and large it lends itself more easily to political misappropriation than many other areas of research because you are supposedly messing with the "miracle of life" or you are destroying life in its early stages. There is a lot of mystery because until very recently you can't see embryos, so it's a very complex issue that lends itself to a lot of the current obsession in our polarized society.

Peggy: Now, Jane, you mentioned that this study of embryos and some of the other issues around embryos have been around for hundreds of years. We tend to think of them as being more modern things. Is it in the public's mind or in my mind that it's a more modern thing because of the ability of us to now control our reproductive destiny?

Jane: In part, but even with in vitro fertilization, that came in 1978, became fairly common in the United States in the 1980s, so that's not new. Lots of embryos in a dish, so to speak, but that were really often a private clinic and like Manfred said, there is something sort of personal about that. There is something that connects to individual parents wanting to have children and people didn't connect that to a history of trying to understand how we got to that point. Somehow there is this miracle of life and it works and we just go with it.

And so I think for people it was the picture of a sheep. So here was Dolly, the sheep, in the news 1997. We have cloned a mammal, a sheep. Oh, no, it's going to be humans next! The public became interested in it. Because the news media picked it up, most of the people who are reporting the story didn't understand the science, didn't really understand that there was a rich history. Actually this is another argument that we need people communicating science who really understand science.

Manfred: And history.

Jane: And history.

Peggy: Yes, because when people talk about science they don't really talk about the history of how science came into being. It's just sort of, suddenly, exists.

Jane: Right. We get the great discovery without a sense of the process of putting the pieces together. We couldn't clone Dolly until we understood what was going on with eggs, and what's going on with nuclear transplantation and lots of other pieces. That really for over 50 years people had been working on and people laboring away in the lab, people whose names we don't really hear very often, have really put together the pieces that were quite important.

And sometimes there were Nobel Prizes but people don't really understand what they won the Nobel Prize for, they just know their names. There really is a deep ignorance about what goes on with science, I'm afraid, and its history.

Peggy: What do you think the biggest stumbling blocks are toward an open dialog, an understanding between parties on all sides of the questions of things like abortion or stem cell research?

Jane: Actually, the way you ask that is really complex. Let's just start with "all sides." What are all sides? What are the relevant sides in an issue? What happens sometimes is we say: Oh, embryos. There is a science of an embryo and then there is the conservative Christian view, the Catholic view, the Muslim view, the Jewish view, the whatever view.

Why are those – the sides? Why isn't it the side of the developmental biologist, the geneticist, the evolutionary biologist, etc., etc.? So part of the problem of having real communication about the issues involved with understanding what stem cells are, what stem cell research would involve, those kinds of things.

Part of the problem is really starting with laying out what's at stake, and understanding the embryo and its complexities as an evolutionary product, as having genes in it but that's not the whole story, as something that's part of reproduction and all of that as part of the biology, we need to get all that, and then we need to look at what are some of the religious, moral, personal, social etcetera issues involved as well.

So there are a lot of different parties and a lot of different issues that get muddled up together. We need to de–muddle some of them.

Manfred: We also need to make one very important distinction between the science or the biology, and different aspects of the biology, whether it's evolution or development, and then the so–called biomedical hype that's produced around those fields. Because a lot of the problems that we really have is not so much that the public doesn't understand the science, but that some areas of the scientific or biomedical establishment I should say, are hyping certain aspects of the science without really understanding them either, and that creates a lot of the misunderstanding.

Jane: That's a really important point, because right now in the U.S. especially but other countries following suit are really emphasizing translational science. We want to take our science, but as quickly as possible. We want to translate it into what's called "bedside applications" and sometimes science is just slow. It takes a lot of work and it takes a long time to sort out what's going on. If we rush too quickly into the bedside and into the clinic, we end up with bad science, we end up with problems, we end up with hype, like Manfred said.

Peggy: Now why do you think it's important to understand something about the life of the people who did the early research?

Manfred: Because we also need to contextualize science, not as an abstract Platonic ideal done in the clarity of thought, but it's also something very real that was done by people with particular ideas and particular dreams in a particular historical setting. And in bringing that out, one not only humanizes the sciences but one also learns a lot about the conditions in which knowledge gets produced.

The natural sciences are not like mathematics, where you can have a kind of deductive logical proof. Discovery in the natural sciences goes in very interesting ways and understanding the history in great detail actually helps us understand the way science is done and therefore we get a more holistic illustration and conception of what science really is to the public.

I think it's a big mistake to eliminate the actual process of discovery from a lot of the textbook representations of science, because students expect that it is that kind of pristine clarity, and since they can never accomplish that they turn away from science and the problem is we have all those English majors and no science majors. And that's another big problem.

Jane: And when we get beyond stereotypes we actually find some surprises. Some of the scientists who were central to discovering early birth control, chemical birth control methods, were Catholic and really wanted to help reproduction be good reproduction. So there are a lot of things–when we say science versus religion, for example, or morals versus scientific inquiry, and make those "versus" we're making a lot of stupid assumptions, in fact, about who was doing the scientific work, what motivated them.

In many cases the scientists were working for very humanistic purposes. Other factors are really important to understand.

Peggy: So Manfred, I read that there are two core elements to The Embryo Project. One's the encyclopedia, and the other one's collaboration, called The Embryo Project Research Network. How does such a network work to support, for example, the Max Planck Institute for the history of science in Berlin, one of your project's core partners?

Manfred: When we started this project, it was clear that even with our level of insanity we can't do it by ourselves. So it involves an ever–growing network of people. And this is, for the humanities, actually something rather unusual, because there's the model of a scholar in an archive or a library working away and then presenting the work as a finished project in the form of a book.

So we consciously adopted the model of current science, which is all international collaboration in large teams and adapted it to that more kind of historical or humanistic scholarship and it actually is a truly inter–disciplinary network that involves scientists, historians, philosophers, people interested in science policy, and the like.

Now in order to do that we had to develop a lot of supporting technology and that is now taking advantage of, it's what Web 2.0 basically enables us to do, and we are lucky here at ASU that our library is a very supportive partner in that endeavor and has really put a lot of effort into helping us set up that technological infrastructure.

So, that being said, there are of course the face to face contacts in terms of workshops and meetings and visits, but there also is the interaction in virtual space that our new technology enables us to do. So we are bringing historical scholarship into the kind of cyber infrastructure that the scientists are already used to interacting in, and therefore also to draw many more scientists into our project, because that's the kind of work environment that they are used to.

And we are more recognizable to them than if somebody comes with paper and pencil and trying to move around in the lab, talking to them and uncovering strange archival artifacts. That's the two world scenario. We have created one world, where both the science as well as the history of science meet.

Peggy: And what do you hope will come out of this project, not just for the scholars that are involved, but for the public?

Manfred: For the public, again, what kind of public? There are many elements of the public out there, and from the beginning, our project was aimed at reaching as many different user groups as possible. So on the one hand, we create a repository. We collect a lot of things. But today that's not an issue; today everybody has access to Google and search engines like this. The big problem is that once you Google something; you don't know what it is. So we basically add a layer and record an encyclopedia that interprets and annotates diverse information that's out there.

So that's one user group, and then it's targeted to particular policy makers – Jane works with judges. And, of course, we work with Chuck on "Ask a Biologist" that goes to school children here, or teachers – but also scientists, historians... Everybody can find something there. That's the outreach component.

Then, of course, we also create scholarship in a traditional sense, that we use the resources that we collect to come up with new layers of interpretation. All of that can be done within one continuous, virtual space. It's a completely open access online project.

Peggy: Jane, what's your hope for the project?

Jane: I think that the two sides that you've mentioned are equally important. So we're producing the encyclopedia, which is a product which, as Manfred said, lots of different user groups can come to. They can hit the "Ask an Embryologist" button and get answers to lots of questions. And on the other side, developing the scholarly community and getting people to think in different ways is really important.

So now the lawyer knows how to go into Lexus Nexus and do legal scholarship but is never lead from that to look at how does an embryo develop? Or what do we know about in vitro fertilization discoveries? And equally, a historian doesn't get lead to the embryology work or the embryologist doesn't get lead to the work from 75 years ago and understand why it's relevant.

So we want people to work across what have been rather strong disciplinary bounds, and its working.

Peggy: Jane, you've built your career examining the intersection between science and society. What excites you about being in that line of study?

Jane: The great thing about doing Science and Society is you don't have to be good at any one thing. [Peggy laughs] You can sort of sample everything. But that's not the real answer.

There are so many questions where science impacts society in various ways, society impacts science – the two interconnect in many, many, many different ways. It's not really that they're just two, but there are many instantiations of science and society and looking at the interconnections and the kinds of questions that get raised.

Manfred would say there's a dialectical process where we're having new scientific discovery....that raises societal…questions, which raise questions for science... Back and forth, back and forth, constantly. It improves our thinking and challenges our assumptions on both sides, and that's really important.

Peggy: Manfred, Jane mentioned earlier this idea that people look at discoveries as if they were instant. And you mentioned the same thing, and that there is in fact a whole history behind it. Do you think this is wise, sometimes, that it seems like our technology outstrips our understanding?

Manfred: Well yes, in a sense, because technology is always, of course, application driven and more recently – or let's say on this side of the Atlantic – are commercially driven. But it doesn't really look backward or forward.

I think a lot of the problems we have is that we know that we have a new toy and we don't really investigate the consequences. Now, of course you don't want to have a long study for each of the new technological innovations – what it might or might not imply. Therefore history's so important, because a lot of those things are basically repetitions of an old theme.

So if that history repeats it, by knowing what has happened before in historical time we develop a much better understanding of what might happen in the future. Missing that historical dimension, I think, is a lot of the root causes of our current mess that we get ourselves into by jumping very fast without really ever seeing where we are going.

We need historical understanding in order to have any kind of idea where we are going. And that's another reason why we want to have that project be a really well–documented and well–researched history of embryo research.

Peggy: Jane, do you want to add anything? J: I think the one interesting thing about the technology that's a completely different direction than you were taking us, but the importance of bringing students into our project is absolutely central. We have a number of undergrads working in the project as well as graduate students and post–docs. And they are able to do the work that they're doing because of the technology. So it's another side of technology than what you were talking about.

But because of the online interactive database that we're building, because people can work virtually across spatial boundaries, we actually have a team of students who are working together very effectively. They're meeting faculty members in other universities and other countries scattered around the world. They're part of a team working together which would never happen otherwise. So another side of technology, but very important for this project.

Peggy: That's good. I'm glad you brought up mentorship. You have a huge history of mentorship.

Jane: We love working with students. It's great to work with undergraduates on a project like this.

We start out and we think we know how to do it a little bit, but they come in and they challenge our assumptions. They can do things that we didn't even think were possible.

We've got one student now from South Korea. He's looking at the South Korean controversy and the research that was done there with so–called cloning, which turned out not to be so, but the questions of fraud, etc. He can look at the English sources, the Korean sources and raise questions about what the rest of us were assuming was the case in a really interesting way, because he doesn't have any particular bone to pick. He's just excited about what he's discovering, and it's great.

Peggy: Well, Manfred, I want to take this opportunity to congratulate you on achieving tenure and becoming selected as an ASU Exemplar by President Michael Crow.

Manfred: Thank you.

Peggy: And thank you both for taking the time to sit with us today and talk a bit about the project.

Jane: Thank you.

Manfred: Thanks, Peggy.

Peggy: To learn more about the embryo project and its research partners and goals you can go to their website. That's http://embryo.asu.edu.

[music]

This is Peggy Coulombe, and you've been listening to the School of Life Sciences' podcast "Science Studio." Our theme music comes from the website Magnatunes and was composed by Yongen from the collection "Moonrise." The School of Life Sciences is in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University.

[music ends]

All things Embryo

Transcript - [Printable PDF format]

SOLS Podcasts 2007