December 11, 2002: Microbiology and Ethics - Jon Beckwith

Art Bell speaks with Harvard professor Jon Beckwith, a pioneering geneticist whose lab first isolated a pure gene from an organism in 1969. Beckwith discusses how he held a press conference to announce that achievement and simultaneously warn the public about the dangers of genetic manipulation. He reveals that colleagues at Harvard once attempted to have his tenure revoked for raising ethical objections to a controversial study screening newborn boys for the extra Y chromosome supposedly linked to criminal behavior.

The conversation centers on the announcement by J. Craig Venter and Hamilton O. Smith that they plan to create a new single-celled life form in a laboratory dish. Beckwith expresses skepticism about the hype, noting that Venter himself admitted scientists still understand very little despite completing the human genome. He cautions that while engineered organisms may cause harm, nature has already selected organisms to be as destructive as they can be, and genetically modified creations are unlikely to outperform natural pathogens long-term.

Art and Beckwith also examine human cloning, genetic privacy, and biological weapons research. Beckwith argues that defending against biological warfare inevitably involves developing offensive capabilities and warns that the pace of genetic discovery is outrunning society's ability to establish adequate privacy protections and ethical safeguards.