Next

E-BOOK EXTRAS

A Conversation with Michael Crichton, Author of NEXT

Q1: NEXT challenges the reader’s sense of what is happening, what is true and what is invented. How much of what’s in the book has already taken place?

It’s odd but nearly everything in the book has already happened, or is about to happen. The book does look to the future a bit, particularly with regard to some transgenic animals that become important characters. But for the most part NEXT is not really speculative fiction at all.

Q2: What scares you the most about NEXT? And conversely, which possibilities do you find the most encouraging?

I’m not really scared about anything in the genetic realm. My research actually reassured me, because I concluded that many of the things people discuss with great fear or great longing-such as designer babies, or extended longevity-are probably not going to happen.

I think that we’ll have some remarkable new therapies from this area, and we will also find that the genome is vastly more complicated than we anticipated. In that sense, the genome is a bit like the human brain-much harder to understand than we once imagined.

Q3: What first sparked your interest in genetics?

It’s a longstanding interest for me. I studied genetics and evolution in college, and of course as a medical student. Genetics has been one of the most exciting areas of scientific research in my lifetime. It’s hard to remember that when I was born in the 1940s, people weren’t really sure what a “gene” consisted of. And they thought human beings had 24 chromosomes, instead of 23! And they had no idea at all how an embryo grew and differentiated into a live birth.

Q4: In the past you’ve said that you usually do research to answer a question of your own that interests you. What was the origin of NEXT? (possibly for Powell’s)

This novel began when I attended a genetics conference at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. I learned just how fast the field was progressing, and how inappropriate certain legal positions were. The field obviously needed some broader attention from the public.

In terms of the novel, the question I asked was: what’s the current view of how the genome operates-how you get from genotype to phenotype? Because such ideas have changed hugely in the last decades. Of course, this question is ultimately the old nature/nurture issue, and so it is politically charged. How much of our behavior is ruled by genes, and how much by upbringing and experience? I ultimately concluded I couldn’t really address this question in the book, because it is so complex. But I arrived at answers for myself that surprised and satisfied me.

My answer is that genes are an integral part of our adaptive apparatus as organisms in an environment. So we find both heightened importance for nature and also for nurture. But the whole interaction is far more complicated than people thought fifty years ago. And it continues to change.

Q5: NEXT poses many complex questions and presents the audience with many moral gray areas. Where do you stand on the ethics of genetic engineering, stem cell research, genetic therapy and gene patents?

I oppose patenting genes, and argue such patents should never have been granted in the first place. The genome is our common heritage, going back millions of years, and it is absurd that anyone should own any part of it. I hope this book helps undo gene patents. The practice is obstructive and even dangerous.

Genetic therapy is highly experimental. It has great promise and great hazards. Stem cell research is more a political football than a therapeutic issue, at this point. Politically it’s a continuation of the abortion controversy that has wracked this country for nearly half a century, with no end in sight. What stem cell research will ultimately offer us is wholly unknown. It may be hugely powerful. It may be a dead end. But in any case I oppose bans on research. They don’t work and they displace the arguments, which become about the ban and not about the subject of the research itself.

As for the ethics of genetic engineering, most people argue excitedly about what is not possible. If it were possible to pop genes in and out of embryos, to make designer babies, then we would indeed have serious ethical questions to face. At the moment, that is not possible at all. I therefore don’t think that talking about it does a lot of good. On major human life decisions, I don’t think there is great value in deciding what you will do until you are actually faced with the issue. For example, I think it is fruitless to speculate what you would do if you had a fatal disease. Eventually we all get one, and our behavior at that point will probably not be what we imagined.

Similarly, I think we don’t know in advance how we will respond to opportunities in new technology. We just don’t know.

Q6: What is the latest court ruling as to what constitutes cell ownership? Are there any upcoming cases that you’re keeping an eye on?

Rules regarding tissues are fragmented. A recent Sixth Circuit decision regarding the tissue collection of Dr. William Catalona has set back the efforts of patients to have some control over what happens to their tissues, once donated to medical research. There are good reasons why patients deserve such control. If you give your tissue for prostate research, you might not want the tissues used for other purposes you disagree with. You might have religious or other objections. You might have legal concerns, because if your genetic information was published your insurance might be cancelled. These are genuine concerns.

Federal guidelines regarding tissues are much more humane. And they don’t interfere with research. We need Congress to make these guidelines the law of the land.

Q7: One of your characters warns that science is as corruptible an enterprise as any other, academics and entrepreneurs are way too cozy and data can be massaged to achieve any desired result. Is this something the American public should be more aware of?

I hope that such unsavory narratives as the Vioxx scandal will convince the public that we need better and more independent sources of information. But it is also true that the British slaughter of livestock at the height of the BSE scare now seems to have been unnecessary, the result of a flawed computer prediction. We are going to see more such errors in many areas of science. I believe we live in the greatest era of snake oil salesmen in the history of mankind. Unless government acts to assure us of independently verified information, we will continue to suffer bad science policies, and even deaths.

Q8: How do you stay informed about current and cutting-edge science? How much do you read? Are you actively involved in the scientific community?

There is no secret. I just read a lot. I don’t talk to a lot of scientists. It’s faster to read than talk.

Q9: Many of your previous books have ignited public discussion and debate. Do you think NEXT will provoke a similar response?

I am never sure how the public reaction to my books will be. I’m usually surprised. I won’t make any predictions about this book.

Q10: In 2005, you appeared before the United States Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works to discuss the politicization of scientific research. What was your message? Why is this such a big problem and what is the solution?

Essentially I argued that what we need is a government policy that assures independently verified information in any area that is important to policy. This is the essence of the scientific method. There are well-established statistical procedures to make sure that the information you get is unbiased. It’s simple enough to do, although expensive. But bad information is expensive, and bad policies are very expensive.

I argue that we live in a technological society where science matters, and it is up to the government to make sure that what we’re told is accurate.

For this rather ordinary argument I was thoroughly attacked. There are many people out there who don’t want their data to be checked!

Q11: What’s so striking about all your books and now NEXT in particular is your ability to make complicated science comprehensible to a mass audience while also showcasing your tremendous expertise. How do you pull that off time after time?

Again, there’s no secret. Making the story clear is accomplished by rewriting and rewriting until the technical passages are understandable. In any book, there are usually a few pages that I end up rewriting about twenty times.

Q12: After the final thrilling page, what would you most like readers to take away from NEXT?

The future is bright and exciting, and it will challenge us to think in fresh ways about our lives. But among our challenges today, we have some legal problems in genetics that need to be fixed. We need some laws passed, and some laws changed.

But I am optimistic about the future. Very optimistic. Michael Crichton NEXT Audio Interview Transcript

JB: Hi, I’m Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins, and I’m here interviewing bestselling-author Michael Crichton about his new novel, Next.

Michael, as with many of your other novels, Next is a vivid dramatization of what can happen when cutting-edge science goes a little too far. Is Next a cautionary tale?

MC: Well, I think it is, in the sense that many of the books are. But for me what’s different about this book is that so much of it is real-or that so much of it is very thinly-disguised versions of actual events that have occurred. Genetics, which is the subject of the book, has advanced extraordinarily rapidly in the last 15 years or so and sometimes in directions that many people are troubled about, or disapprove of, and so it is a very interesting and hot contentious area.

JB: And have you been tracking the science of genetics for the last 15 years, watching it, seeing what’s going on, and building a portfolio?

MC: Actually, you know it’s odd, I was very interested in it at the time of Jurassic Park which now to my astonishment was 15 years ago, and I lost track of it a bit, so to return is to have this odd sense of coming into a world where so many things that were fictional 15 years ago are now taking place.

JB: You’ve chosen a very interesting and I think new form for this novel, which is to break down the conventional narrative into many different stores, some of which overlap, some of which are self-contained, and others which move forward and become the principle themes of the book. How did you conceive of this book, in formal terms?

MC: Well, I think there were two considerations that I had. One was that I was unable to overlook the structure of the genome as we are now starting to understand it, and how individual genes interact with other genes, or may seem to be silent, or we don’t really know what they do, or sometimes there are repetitions that are not clear to us, and it struck me as an interesting idea to try to organize the novel in that way, even though it’s not what one ordinarily does. The second thing that was driving me was the notion that there are a great many stories of interest in this area, and they’re all quite different in terms of the legal and ethical problems that are raised in the field, so I wanted to do a number of different stories.

JB: Next poses a large number of ethical issues to the reader. Do you personally have a strong position on these issues?

MC: Well, I do on some and not on others. The feeling in general that I have is that we have too little information, and the impulse in some quarters to ban things or prevent research or curtail it seems to me ill-advised and also not very practical. Whatever research isn’t done in the United States will be done in Shanghai, so what exactly is being accomplished? I do think that there are some things that have been done in a business sense that are tremendously bad and dangerous and inappropriate, and among those are the patenting of genes. We have within our bodies, for the most part, identical genes, and many of these genes are millions or even billions of years old-they’re found in other animals, they’re found in microorganisms, and yet they’re being patented now-diseases are being patented: Hepatitis C is owned by somebody, Haemophilus Influenza is owned by somebody, the gene for insulin is owned - this seems to me to be very wrong on a number of levels and I hope that this will be changed and the book will be influential in starting a discussion.

JB: You’ve written about many frightening areas of science in your novels-how does genetics rate in the large field that you’ve covered, in terms of the elements of fear connected to reality that are built into it?

MC: As a person, I think I am myself not very fearful, and it may be that I get out all of these fears in my work. The first sort of genetics book that I did that addressed any of these things was Jurassic Park, and that was of course entirely fiction. What’s happened at this point is that many of these possibilities are real, and so you see because of the structure and the way that things are being done, when you hear for example, that scientists were reluctant to study SARS-the severe acute respiratory syndrome that was spreading across the world-a disease that had a 10% fatality and was suddenly in 24 countries-and scientists hesitated to study it because there was a conflict over who would own the genome-who would get the patent. That’s very scary-that business interest might put us all at risk for a pandemic-it’s kind of insane.

JB: How do you keep abreast of new developments in science?

MC: For the most part, it’s simply reading. I do visit occasionally laboratories, but not very often, and there are sort of two reasons for it: one is that when one goes to an individual laboratory, one spends time with someone who has a particularly strong interested in a very narrow area, which is usually not my area of interest, and the other thing is that to read is the equivalent of talking to people on the telephone-it’s just simply much faster, it’s a much quicker way, and the journals stack up in my office and I go through them as best I can.

JB: Your first goal as a writer I’m sure is to entertain, and you’ve done that brilliantly in this book, but in terms of asking readers to think about the issues that you’re exploring, what do you want the reader to take away from Next after they’ve finished it?

MC: What my experience was in working on this was a kind of combination of anxiety and excitement-the possibility of really wonderful things that might happen-the possibility that for example, certain genetic diseases might actually be cured, and people who might previously either were certain to die or could only be treated in fairly unsatisfactory ways-there now is the likelihood that you will be able to inject the gene and that person is cured-that’s quite extraordinary, and there are many other examples of new cancer treatments and other things that are just amazing. And then on the other side, there is this connection of law and business and academia which is very distressing in the directions that it’s going, and it involves a tremendous amount of secrecy and involves a tremendous direction which I think is against the public interest and which I think really ought to distress and frighten people.

JB: If you were in a position to create legislation, how would you being to reign in the “bad science”-the combination of science, business, and academics moving in the wrong direction as you see it?

MC: I think there are actually three or four things that would really transform the field. The first thing that I would do is I would make the testing of genes for medical diagnoses completely legal, irrespective of patents. I think that would do a great public service and also oblige scientists to start to look at the patenting business in a different way. The second thing I would do is I would require universities to follow federal guidelines for use of tissues in research. Federal guidelines are excellent-they give people a tremendous amount of control over the tissues that they donate-many universities, institutions of higher learning, are trying to break these rules, trying to go in another direction-they ought not to be allowed to, and I would change that. The third thing I would do is I would make sure people got the information that they needed to make informed decisions. There are some situations now where patients have died from gene therapy, and the institutions involved have said that they don’t want the deaths reported because they’re a trade secret. This is so insane «laughs» that the mind boggles-this, whatever legislation is needed to stop that we ought to do. And the final thing is that in 1980 there was a law passed that was called BiDole-bipartisan law that enabled universities to sell their products to industry, and it was well-intentioned, but it has had the effect of creating this gigantic commercial consulation within universities that is very damaging, and so I would reverse that law.

JB: In spite of the serious message of the book and the profound issues you’re tackling, there is a lot of fun in this book. There are many jokes, there are many very amusing passages and stories, and there are a number of ideas-concepts-that perhaps are true or perhaps are fictional. Is there anything in the book that you would like to be real, that perhaps isn’t real-that would improve your life?

MC: Interesting question…I don’t know how to answer that…I guess what I feel is that whatever I might imagine is probably right around the corner anyway. «laughs»

JB: Absolutely.

Thank you so much for this interview, and we are sure that this book is going to be a huge success. This Essay Breaks the Law

By MICHAEL CRICHTON

The Earth revolves around the Sun.

The speed of light is a constant.

Apples fall to earth because of gravity.

Elevated blood sugar is linked to diabetes.

Elevated uric acid is linked to gout.

Elevated homocysteine is linked to heart disease.

Elevated homocysteine is linked to B-12 deficiency, so doctors should test homocysteine levels to see whether the patient needs vitamins.

ACTUALLY, I can’t make that last statement. A corporation has patented that fact, and demands a royalty for its use. Anyone who makes the fact public and encourages doctors to test for the condition and treat it can be sued for royalty fees. Any doctor who reads a patient’s test results and even thinks of vitamin deficiency infringes the patent. A federal circuit court held that mere thinking violates the patent.

All this may sound absurd, but it is the heart of a case that will be argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday. In 1986 researchers filed a patent application for a method of testing the levels of homocysteine, an amino acid, in the blood. They went one step further and asked for a patent on the basic biological relationship between homocysteine and vitamin deficiency. A patent was granted that covered both the test and the scientific fact. Eventually, a company called Metabolite took over the license for the patent.

Although Metabolite does not have a monopoly on test methods-other companies make homocysteine tests, too-they assert licensing rights on the correlation of elevated homocysteine with vitamin deficiency. A company called LabCorp used a different test but published an article mentioning the patented fact. Metabolite sued on a number of grounds, and has won in court so far.

But what the Supreme Court will focus on is the nature of the claimed correlation. On the one hand, courts have repeatedly held that basic bodily processes and “products of nature” are not patentable. That’s why no one owns gravity, or the speed of light. But at the same time, courts have granted so-called correlation patents for many years. Powerful forces are arrayed on both sides of the issue.

In addition, there is the rather bizarre question of whether simply thinking about a patented fact infringes the patent. The idea smacks of thought control, to say nothing of unenforceability. It seems like something out of a novel by Philip K. Dick-or Kafka. But it highlights the uncomfortable truth that the Patent Office and the courts have in recent decades ruled themselves into a corner from which they must somehow extricate themselves.

For example, the human genome exists in every one of us, and is therefore our shared heritage and an undoubted fact of nature. Nevertheless 20 percent of the genome is now privately owned. The gene for diabetes is owned, and its owner has something to say about any research you do, and what it will cost you. The entire genome of the hepatitis C virus is owned by a biotech company. Royalty costs now influence the direction of research in basic diseases, and often even the testing for diseases. Such barriers to medical testing and research are not in the public interest. Do you want to be told by your doctor, “Oh, nobody studies your disease any more because the owner of the gene/enzyme/correlation has made it too expensive to do research?”

The question of whether basic truths of nature can be owned ought not to be confused with concerns about how we pay for biotech development, whether we will have drugs in the future, and so on. If you invent a new test, you may patent it and sell it for as much as you can, if that’s your goal. Companies can certainly own a test they have invented. But they should not own the disease itself, or the gene that causes the disease, or essential underlying facts about the disease. The distinction is not difficult, even though patent lawyers attempt to blur it. And even if correlation patents have been granted, the overwhelming majority of medical correlations, including those listed above, are not owned. And shouldn’t be.

Unfortunately for the public, the Metabolite case is only one example of a much broader patent problem in this country. We grant patents at a level of abstraction that is unwise, and it’s gotten us into trouble in the past. Some years back, doctors were allowed to patent surgical procedures and sue other doctors who used their methods without paying a fee. A blizzard of lawsuits followed. This unhealthy circumstance was halted in 1996 by the American Medical Association and Congress, which decided that doctors couldn’t sue other doctors for using patented surgical procedures. But the beat goes on.

Companies have patented their method of hiring, and real estate agents have patented the way they sell houses. Lawyers now advise athletes to patent their sports moves, and screenwriters to patent their movie plots. (My screenplay for “Jurassic Park” was cited as a good candidate.)

Where does all this lead? It means that if a real estate agent lists a house for sale, he can be sued because an existing patent for selling houses includes item No. 7, “List the house.” It means that Kobe Bryant may serve as an inspiration but not a model, because nobody can imitate him without fines. It means nobody can write a dinosaur story because my patent includes 257 items covering all aspects of behavior, like item No. 13, “Dinosaurs attack humans and other dinosaurs.”

Such a situation is idiotic, of course. Yet elements of it already exist. And unless we begin to turn this around, there will be worse to come.

I wanted to end this essay by telling a story about how current rulings hurt us, but the patent for “ending an essay with an anecdote” is owned. So I thought to end with a quotation from a famous person, but that strategy is patented, too. I then decided to end abruptly, but “abrupt ending for dramatic effect” is also patented. Finally, I decided to pay the “end with summary” patent fee, since it was the least expensive.

The Supreme Court should rule against Metabolite, and the Patent Office should begin to reverse its strategy of patenting strategies. Basic truths of nature can’t be owned.

Oh, and by the way: I own the patent for “essay or letter criticizing a previous publication.” So anyone who criticizes what I have said here had better pay a royalty first, or I’ll see you in court.

The New York Times

OP-ED Section

Sunday, March 19, 2006 Author’s Note

At the end of my research for this book, I arrived at the following conclusions:

1. Stop patenting genes. Gene patents might have looked reasonable twenty years ago, but the field has changed in ways nobody could have predicted. Today we have plenty of evidence that gene patents are unnecessary, unwise, and harmful.

There is great confusion about gene patents. Many observers conflate a call to end gene patents with anticapitalist and anti-private property sentiments. It is nothing of the sort. It is perfectly reasonable for industry to seek a mechanism that will ensure a profit on productive investment. Such a mechanism implies a restriction on competition involving a created product. However, such protection does not imply that genes themselves should be patented. On the contrary, gene patents contradict long-established traditions of intellectual property protection.

First, genes are facts of nature. Like gravity, sunlight, and leaves on trees, genes exist in the natural world. Facts of nature can’t be owned. You can own a test for a gene, or a drug that affects a gene, but not the gene itself. You can own a treatment for a disease, but not the disease itself. Gene patents break that fundamental rule. Of course one can argue about what’s a fact of nature, and there are people paid to do that. But here’s a simple test. If something exists for millions of years before the arrival of Homo sapiens on earth, it’s a fact of nature. To argue that a gene is in any way a human invention is absurd. To grant a gene patent is like granting a patent on iron or carbon.

Because it’s a patent on a fact of nature, a gene patent becomes an undeserved monopoly. Ordinarily, patent protection enables me to protect my invention but encourages others to make their own versions. My iPod doesn’t prevent you from making a digital audio player. My patented mousetrap is wood, but your titanium mousetrap is allowed.

This is not what happens with gene patents. The patent consists of pure information already existing in nature. Because there has been no invention, no one can innovate any other use of the patent without violating the patent itself, so further innovation is closed. It’s like allowing somebody to patent noses. You couldn’t make eyeglasses, Kleenex, nasal sprays, masks, makeup, or perfume because they all rely on some aspect of noses. You could put suntan lotion on your body, but not on your nose, because any modification of your nose would violate the patent on noses. Chefs could be sued for making fragrant dishes unless they paid the nose royalty. And so on. Of course, we would all agree that a patent on noses is absurd. If everyone has one, how can anyone own it? Gene patents are absurd for the same reason.

It takes little imagination to see that monopolistic patenting inhibits creation and productivity. If the creator of Auguste Dupin could own all fictional detectives, we would never have had Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Miss Marple, Inspector Maigret, Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot, Mike Hammer, or J. J. Gittes, to name just a few. This rich heritage of invention would be denied us by a patenting error. Yet that is exactly the error in patenting genes.

Gene patents are bad public policy. We have ample evidence that they hurt patient care and suppress research. When Myriad patented two breast cancer genes, they charged nearly three thousand dollars for the test, even though the cost to create a gene test is nothing like the cost to develop a drug. Not surprisingly, the European patent office revoked that patent on a technicality. The Canadian government announced that it would conduct gene tests without paying for the patent. Some years ago, the owner of the gene for Canavan disease refused to make the test widely available, even though families who had suffered with the disease had contributed time, money, and tissues to get the gene identified. Now those same families could not afford the test.

That is an outrage, but it is far from the most dangerous consequence of gene patents. In its heyday, research on SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was inhibited because scientists were unsure who owned the genome-three simultaneous patent claims had been filed. As a result, research on SARS wasn’t as vigorous as it might have been. That should scare every sensible person. Here was a contagious disease with a 10 percent death rate that had spread to two dozen countries around the world. Yet scientific research to combat the disease was inhibited-because of patent fears.

At the moment, hepatitis C, HIV, hemophilus influenza, and various diabetes genes are all owned by some entity. They shouldn’t be. Nobody should own a disease.

If gene patents are ended, we can expect screams of outrage and threats that business will abandon research, that companies will go bankrupt, that health care will suffer and the public will die. But it is more likely that an end to gene patents will be phenomenally liberating to everyone, and will result in a burst of new products for the public.

2. Establish clear guidelines for the use of human tissues. Human tissue collections are increasingly important to medical research, and increasingly valuable. Appropriate federal regulations to manage tissue banks already exist, but courts have ignored federal rules. Historically, the courts have decided questions about human tissues based on existing property law. In general, they have ruled that once your tissue leaves your body, you no longer maintain any rights to it. They analogize tissues to, say, the donation of a book to a library. But people have a strong feeling of ownership about their bodies, and that feeling will never be abrogated by a mere legal technicality. Therefore we need new, clear, emphatic legislation.

Why do we need legislation? Consider a recent court ruling on the case of Dr. William Catalona. This eminent prostate cancer physician assembled a collection of tissue samples from his patients so he could work on the disease. When Dr. Catalona moved to another university, he tried to take the tissues with him. Washington University refused, saying that it owned the tissues; the judge upheld the university, citing such trivial facts as some of the releases’ being printed on Washington University stationery. Patients are now understandably outraged. They believed they were giving their tissues to a beloved doctor, not a shadowy university lurking in the background; they thought they were giving tissues specifically for prostate cancer research, not for any use, which the university now claims the right to do.

The notion that once you part with your tissue you no longer have any rights is absurd. Consider this: Under present law, if somebody takes my picture, I have rights forever in the use of that photo. Twenty years later, if somebody publishes it or puts it in an advertisement, I still have rights. But if somebody takes my tissue-part of my physical body-I have no rights. This means I have more rights over my image than I have over the actual tissues of my body.

The required legislation should ensure that patients have control over their tissues. I donate my tissues for a purpose, and that purpose only. If, later, someone wants to use them for another purpose, they need my permission again. If they can’t get permission, they can’t use my tissues.

Such a rule fulfills an important emotional need. But it also acknowledges that there may be significant legal and religious reasons why I do not want my tissue used for another purpose.

We should not fear that such regulations will inhibit research. After all, the National Institutes of Health seems to be able to conduct research while following these guidelines. Nor should we accept the argument that these rules impose an onerous burden. If a magazine can notify you that your subscription has run out, a university can notify you if they want to use your tissues for a new purpose.

3. Pass laws to ensure that data about gene testing is made public. New legislation is needed if the FDA is to publish adverse results from gene therapy trials. At the moment, it cannot do so. In the past, some researchers have tried to prevent the reporting of patient deaths, claiming that such deaths were a trade secret.

The public is increasingly aware of defects in the systems we use to report medical data. Research data has not been made available for other scientists to inspect; full disclosure has not been required; genuinely independent verification of findings is rare. The result is a public exposed to untold unknown hazards. Bias in published studies has become a bad joke. Psychiatrist John Davis looked at the trials funded by pharmaceutical companies in competition for the most effective of five different antipsychotic drugs. He found that 90 percent of the time, the drug manufactured by the company sponsoring (paying for) the study was judged superior to the others. Whoever paid for the study had the best drug.

This should not be news. Review studies conducted by those who have a financial or other interest in the outcome are not reliable because they are inherently biased. That fact should be addressed by an information system that does not permit biased testing, and takes steps to ensure that it does not occur. Yet gross bias remains far too common in medicine, and in certain other areas of high-stakes science as well.

Government should take action. In the long run there is no constituency for bad information. In the short run, all sorts of groups want to bend the facts their way. And they do not hesitate to call their senators, Democratic or Republican. This will continue until the public demands a change.

4. Avoid bans on research. Various groups of different political persuasions want to ban some aspect of genetic research. I agree that certain research ought not to be pursued, at least not now. But as a practical matter, I oppose bans on research and technology.

Bans can’t be enforced. I don’t know why we have not learned this lesson. From Prohibition to the war on drugs, we repeatedly indulge the fantasy that behavior can be banned. Invariably we fail. And in a global economy, bans take on other meanings: even if you stop research in one country, it still goes on in Shanghai. So what have you accomplished?

Of course, hope springs eternal, and fantasies never die: various groups imagine they can negotiate a global ban on certain research. But to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a successful global ban on anything. Genetic research is unlikely to be the first.

5. Rescind the Bayh-Dole Act. In 1980, Congress decided that the discoveries made within universities were not being made widely available, to benefit the public. To move things along, it passed a law permitting university researchers to sell their discoveries for their own profit, even when that research had been funded by taxpayer money.

As a result of this legislation, most science professors now have corporate ties-either to companies they have started or to other biotech companies. Thirty years ago, there was a distinct difference in approach between university research and that of private industry. Today the distinction is blurred, or absent. Thirty years ago, disinterested scientists were available to discuss any subject affecting the public. Now, scientists have personal interests that influence their judgment.

Academic institutions have changed in unexpected ways: The original Bayh-Dole legislation recognized that universities were not commercial entities, and encouraged them to make their research available to organizations that were. But today, universities attempt to maximize profits by conducting more and more commercial work themselves, thus making their products more valuable to them when they are finally licensed. For example, if universities think they have a new drug, they will do the FDA testing themselves, and so on. Thus Bayh-Dole has, paradoxically, increased the commercial focus of the university. Many observers judge the effect of this legislation to be corrupting and destructive to universities as institutions of learning.

Bayh-Dole was always of uncertain benefit to the American taxpayers, who became, through their government, uniquely generous investors. Taxpayers finance research, but when it bears fruit, the researchers sell it for their own institutional and personal gain, after which the drug is sold back to the taxpayers. Consumers thus pay top dollar for a drug they helped finance.

Ordinarily, when a venture capitalist invests in research, he or she expects a significant return on investment. The American taxpayer gets no return at all. The Bayh-Dole legislation anticipated that the public would receive a flood of marvelous life-saving therapies such that the investment strategy would be justified. But that hasn’t happened.

Instead, the drawbacks far outweigh the benefits. Secrecy now pervades research, and hampers medical progress. Universities that once provided a scholarly haven from the world are now commercialized-the haven is gone. Scientists who once felt a humanitarian calling have become businessmen concerned with profit and loss. The life of the mind is a notion as quaint as the whalebone corset.

All these trends were perfectly clear to observers fifteen years ago; no one paid much attention back then. Now the problems are becoming clear to everyone. A good first step toward restoring the balance between academia and corporations will be to repeal Bayh-Dole legislation.