Latest / Health Ethics Podcast / Of Scapegoats & Monday Morning Quarterbacks: Art Caplan on Science, Politics and Dr. Anthony Fauci

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Of Scapegoats & Monday Morning Quarterbacks: Art Caplan on Science, Politics and Dr. Anthony Fauci · Health Ethics Podcast

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Health Ethics, a series of conversations with leading
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: experts about ethical considerations associated with health and healthcare, both
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  Speaker 1: locally and globally. I am Brian Pilkington, Professor of Bioethics
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: in the Department of Medical Sciences at the Hackensack Meridian
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: School of Medicine. This series, like its predecessor, which focused
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  Speaker 1: on the COVID-19 pandemic, relies on the idea that challenging
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  Speaker 1: ethical issues are best addressed by folks from diverse backgrounds
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: practically reasoning together. and complements the Health Ethics Series with
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: its panel of leading experts from medicine, nursing, politics, economics, philosophy,
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  Speaker 1: and the law. Thank you, and enjoy the episode.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the Health Ethics Podcast.
• 1:00
  Speaker 3: I'm Brian Pilkington, and it's my great pleasure to be
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  Speaker 3: speaking with Professor Art Kaplan.
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  Speaker 2: Art Kaplan, PhD, is the Drs. William F.
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  Speaker 3: And Virginia Conley-Mitty Professor and Founding Head of the Division
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  Speaker 3: of Medical Ethics at New York University Grossman School of
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  Speaker 3: Medicine in New York City. He was previously Director of
• 1:17
  Speaker 3: the Bioethics Program at the University of Minnesota and the
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  Speaker 3: University of Pennsylvania. Professor Kaplan's areas of expertise include ethics
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  Speaker 3: of research, organ donation and transplant, reproductive technologies, genetics, health policy,
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  Speaker 3: and a wide range of other bioethics topics.
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  Speaker 2: Art, thanks for the time today.
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  Speaker 4: Thanks for having me.
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  Speaker 3: So you recently led an effort to defend Dr. Anthony
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  Speaker 3: Fauci from what many have described as an unjust public persecution.
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  Speaker 3: And so let's sort of just get the description on
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  Speaker 3: the table before we assess it.
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  Speaker 2: What's going on? Why do you think it's happening? And
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  Speaker 2: tell us a.
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  Speaker 5: Well, really, the key person pushing the Fauci as almost
• 2:02
  Speaker 5: traitor thesis is Rand Paul, a senator from Kentucky. He
• 2:09
  Speaker 5: has been after Fauci since the pandemic. He believes that
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  Speaker 5: Fauci mishandled the pandemic. But more to the point, he
• 2:18
  Speaker 5: believes that Fauci caused the pandemic. How would that be?
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  Speaker 4: Well, the years.
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  Speaker 5: Research has been funded on what's called gain-of-function research. That
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  Speaker 5: just means trying to figure out how to make a
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  Speaker 5: virus or bacteria more powerful. How do you add functions
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  Speaker 5: to it, make it more resistant to antibiotics, make it
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  Speaker 5: more infective so that it could attack people?
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  Speaker 4: Why would you do this?
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  Speaker 5: Well, partly it's to understand what genes and what proteins
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  Speaker 5: Pathways are involved in transmission of the virus so that
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  Speaker 5: you could come up with an antidote more quickly. The
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  Speaker 5: other is weapons, biological weapons. You might try to design these,
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  Speaker 5: and this.
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  Speaker 4: Is not theoretical.
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  Speaker 5: I think there are many countries around the world working
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  Speaker 5: on that. So Paul's accusation against Fauci is that he
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  Speaker 5: sponsored this research with China. It got out of control.
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  Speaker 5: It was kind of funded off the books and under
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  Speaker 5: the table. And that's where the COVID-19 virus enhanced came from.
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  Speaker 5: It broke out of the Wuhan laboratory where he says
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  Speaker 5: Fauci was conducting this dangerous research. Fauci says he's crazy
• 3:41
  Speaker 5: that nothing like this ever happened. I kind of come
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  Speaker 5: down on Fauci's side for sure with the biological weapons thing.
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  Speaker 5: escape theory of COVID. The reason is most of the
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  Speaker 5: experts who know something about how diseases break out all
• 4:00
  Speaker 5: point toward animal transmission to humans. And we know there
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  Speaker 5: were a lot of wet markets in Wuhan, China, where
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  Speaker 5: the COVID epidemic broke out. And some weird species of
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  Speaker 5: things like raccoon dogs that Chinese people eat, but we
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  Speaker 5: don't in the West. But in any event, When you
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  Speaker 5: have a live market slaughter of animals out in a
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  Speaker 5: public place, a lot of contact with animal secretions and
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  Speaker 5: animal corpses, you get transmission, which, by the way, is
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  Speaker 5: what's going on a little bit with Ebola. It goes
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  Speaker 5: by touch, contact, first from animals, then human to human.
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  Speaker 5: The notion that we would be building COVID as a
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  Speaker 5: weapon is crazy. And I say that because Obviously, it's
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  Speaker 5: hard to control its spread. You don't want to make
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  Speaker 5: weapons that kill your own people, kill your own army,
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  Speaker 5: kill your own soldiers. I don't think Fauci had any
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  Speaker 5: particular reason to be making bioweapons with China. That doesn't
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  Speaker 5: sound like a project that he would want to be
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  Speaker 5: sponsoring in any way. But more to the point, even
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  Speaker 5: for secret research, Congress has a committee that knows about this.
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  Speaker 4: Have to fund it. And if it was going on.
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  Speaker 5: Somebody would know and come forward and say, yep, we
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  Speaker 5: did fund that research in China, whether that was the
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  Speaker 5: origin of COVID or not. They would fess up.
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  Speaker 4: And I haven't heard anybody do that.
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  Speaker 5: So I think Fauci is completely innocent of this claim
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  Speaker 5: to have caused COVID. He makes a nice whipping boy.
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  Speaker 5: He makes a nice person to blame. You don't have
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  Speaker 5: to worry about crummy anti-vaccine based policies that led to
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  Speaker 5: delays with COVID vaccination. You don't have to say we
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  Speaker 5: needed mask mandates. We didn't have to close schools. We
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  Speaker 5: didn't have to quarantine.
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  Speaker 4: It's all Fauci's fault.
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  Speaker 5: If he hadn't been mucking around with these viruses, then
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  Speaker 5: none of that would have happened.
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  Speaker 4: Let me add one last thing to this speech.
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  Speaker 5: If Did Fauci handle everything well during COVID as one
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  Speaker 5: of the chief health officers?
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  Speaker 4: No. He made mistakes.
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  Speaker 5: For example, initially he told us that there wasn't evidence
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  Speaker 5: that COVID virus was airborne. It seemed to be a
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  Speaker 5: contact virus. Remember the days when we were wiping down
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  Speaker 5: packages and sort of cleaning stuff when it got delivered.
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  Speaker 4: To our houses?
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  Speaker 5: Well, it's airborne all right, and it was established pretty
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  Speaker 5: quickly that it was, but initially he Fauci said, you
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  Speaker 5: don't need a mask because if it's not airborne, there's
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  Speaker 5: no point in wearing a mask. Then later he said,
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  Speaker 5: we all need masks. And that kind of inconsistency wasn't
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  Speaker 5: well explained as to why the shift. Similarly, Fauci and
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  Speaker 5: others said, take the vaccine, you won't die. But people
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  Speaker 5: were done. But they didn't explain either that's because people
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  Speaker 5: didn't take a booster or or because the virus itself
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  Speaker 5: mutated into something different and the vaccine wasn't as effective
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  Speaker 5: against it. And you can find other mistakes, I believe,
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  Speaker 5: that Fauci made. I could even argue that they were
• 7:31
  Speaker 5: too tough on the school closings. They could have had
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  Speaker 5: a more refined policy, meaning in some parts of the country,
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  Speaker 5: you didn't have to close schools. People could meet outdoors
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  Speaker 5: and could do it year-round and You didn't have to
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  Speaker 5: close their school. In other places, they needed ventilation. You
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  Speaker 5: didn't have to close the school. You might have put
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  Speaker 5: in fans or made sure the windows were open, that
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  Speaker 5: sort of thing.
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  Speaker 4: Filters were needed.
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  Speaker 5: The school closings really caused havoc. I think he and
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  Speaker 5: others didn't handle those as well as in retrospect.
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  Speaker 4: They might have.
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  Speaker 2: A helpful assessment.
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  Speaker 3: So we have two maybe different things going on here.
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  Speaker 3: One is the, let's put the first to the side.
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  Speaker 3: So the fallacious claims that Fauci was experimenting on things
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  Speaker 3: in China.
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  Speaker 2: That's a whole conversation.
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  Speaker 3: How should we think about someone who's leading the effort
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  Speaker 3: to respond to a pandemic and the mistakes that they make?
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  Speaker 2: Everybody makes mistakes.
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  Speaker 3: I make many, many mistakes every day. And you've pointed
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  Speaker 3: out a couple, and they've been sort of prominent in
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  Speaker 3: some of the conversations. Concerns about mask mandates in the original, hey,
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  Speaker 3: it it doesn't seem like we need this.
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  Speaker 2: Now we do. It may be a mistake.
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  Speaker 3: And surely there's a ton of communication mistakes, but, Do
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  Speaker 3: you think that the public's understanding about science progression or
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  Speaker 3: lack thereof causes an issue for assessing someone who's leading
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  Speaker 3: a pandemic?
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  Speaker 2: I mean, when the N is.
• 9:00
  Speaker 3: Small enough, masks, you know, yeah, there's the airborne mistake,
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  Speaker 3: but maybe, you know, maybe it's not as effective. We've
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  Speaker 3: now done three more studies and it turns out masks,
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  Speaker 3: if they're this kind, really are effective. I mean, is
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  Speaker 3: the public's facility with scientific knowledge, do you think it's
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  Speaker 3: contributing to the sort of scapegoating and polarizing and all
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  Speaker 3: of that?
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  Speaker 4: Yes, I do.
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  Speaker 5: I think there's this idea around, I don't know where
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  Speaker 5: it comes from exactly, that scientific truth and facts are immutable.
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  Speaker 5: They don't change. They're whatever they are. And, you know,
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  Speaker 5: the moon is a certain distance from the Earth. And
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  Speaker 5: we know that certain chemical bonds are very strong and
• 9:37
  Speaker 5: others are very weak. And we've known that. Well, actually,
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  Speaker 5: everything is up for grabs. While it is true that
• 9:44
  Speaker 5: measuring distances around the universe is They're pretty accurate. They're
• 9:51
  Speaker 5: not 100%. Better instruments produce even better measurements. It may
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  Speaker 5: be inches, not miles, but everything is subject to change.
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  Speaker 5: And I think the public has this idea that to
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  Speaker 5: be a scientist and make scientific claims, you find irrefutable truth,
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  Speaker 5: truth for eternities.
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  Speaker 4: I'll tell you a funny story. I had a science
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  Speaker 4: friend of mine named.
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  Speaker 5: Joe Weisbaum, computer scientist at MIT long before AI and
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  Speaker 5: all that, just developing computers. And we were talking, he
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  Speaker 5: said to me, no, I learned something. He said, let
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  Speaker 5: me tell you what I learned. He said, how many,
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  Speaker 5: what do you think, Art? Do you think that 100
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  Speaker 5: years from now, people will think that the speed of
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  Speaker 5: light is 186,000 miles per second?
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  Speaker 4: I said, I don't know, maybe it might be refined more.
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  Speaker 5: He said, a hundred years from now, do you think
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  Speaker 5: people will believe that the road to hell is paved
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  Speaker 5: with good intentions?
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  Speaker 4: Yes.
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  Speaker 5: So there's more truth in ethics than there is in
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  Speaker 5: science in the sense of irrefutable truths. By the way,
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  Speaker 5: that's his story, not mine. And it stuck with me
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  Speaker 5: because I think that is a perception that scientists don't
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  Speaker 5: do a good job correcting. One thing, and this was
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  Speaker 5: true during COVID, You don't just make pronouncements. You have
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  Speaker 5: to tell them on the basis of what evidence or
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  Speaker 5: what is the, as we say in philosophy, warrant for
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  Speaker 5: your belief. What is it that makes you advance this claim?
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  Speaker 5: You have a lot of studies. You have a few studies.
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  Speaker 5: You only have one study, but you think erring on
• 11:32
  Speaker 5: the side of caution is the better path forward. The
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  Speaker 5: other is, in addition to saying what it is that
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  Speaker 5: supports any claim you make, you should always... qualify it
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  Speaker 5: by saying, but more evidence could lead us to change
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  Speaker 5: our recommendation. And that's just how it is. We live
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  Speaker 5: in a world where people are fallible and more data
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  Speaker 5: comes in and viruses evolve and things change. And that's
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  Speaker 5: just the nature of the world. And I think, you know,
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  Speaker 5: where are things irrefutable and true forever? Religion, maybe ideologies,
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  Speaker 5: but not science.
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  Speaker 2: This is good.
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  Speaker 3: When my students have their next exam, I'm going to
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: make sure that they know that the ethics questions are
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  Speaker 3: more admitting of true and false than their basic science ones.
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  Speaker 2: This is really helpful.
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  Speaker 3: And there are a number of questions that came out
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  Speaker 3: of COVID and generally involving sort of work in science
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  Speaker 3: and medical sciences that helps us live healthier lives. But
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  Speaker 3: there's some kind of either communication disconnect or a lack
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: of understanding. And there's a bunch of examples from the
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  Speaker 3: COVID pandemic, some of which have been thrown at or
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  Speaker 3: attributed to Fauci. In the background, though, where my mind goes,
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  Speaker 3: and you mentioned philosophy, so sorry, everyone listening, you opened
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  Speaker 3: the door. I'm thinking about Bernard Williams' term, government house utilitarianism, right?
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  Speaker 2: And the deception that might be involved.
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  Speaker 3: So sure, we're going to tell lots of folks that
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  Speaker 3: this is the move, and we're doing it for these reasons.
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  Speaker 3: But actually, a few of us up in the government
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  Speaker 3: house know what's really going on in the With that
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  Speaker 3: in mind, maybe a real challenge that public health officials, Dr. Fauci,
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  Speaker 3: others may have faced, because if you come out with
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: a pronouncement that, well, you might need one jab with
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: the COVID vaccine, you might need two, or you might
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: need three. You really think it's three, but you say
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  Speaker 3: one because you don't think lots of folks are going
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: to take it if it's more. Ethically, how should public
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: health officials balance truth-telling with the potential ramifications.
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  Speaker 5: Yeah, I think they do have a problem, a challenge,
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  Speaker 5: which is you can't put out too many finely nuanced
• 13:52
  Speaker 5: policies because it gets tough to enforce them. So there
• 13:55
  Speaker 5: were people who would say, I want to go to
• 13:59
  Speaker 5: a sporting event during COVID, but it's outdoors and I'm
• 14:01
  Speaker 5: not going to sit in there with anybody. And so
• 14:04
  Speaker 5: I think we should still hold this baseball game or
• 14:06
  Speaker 5: whatever the sport was. And I think the government attitude
• 14:09
  Speaker 5: was we can't put exceptions in because pretty soon they're
• 14:13
  Speaker 5: going to be indoors at basketball and hockey games and
• 14:15
  Speaker 5: wrestling matches. And it's just impossible. It's got to be
• 14:19
  Speaker 5: all or none. Even though we know up in the,
• 14:22
  Speaker 5: you know, airy, lofty world of top policymakers, that isn't
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  Speaker 5: quite true. Similarly, as I put it out with the schools,
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  Speaker 5: they probably put in close schools in the state of
• 14:34
  Speaker 5: New Jersey and just because that was easier to enforce
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  Speaker 5: than saying, well, close the schools unless you're a private
• 14:41
  Speaker 5: school and you can meet outside and you have well-ventilated
• 14:44
  Speaker 5: classrooms and the teacher workforce is younger and so they're
• 14:49
  Speaker 5: not going to get... I mean, I could make a
• 14:51
  Speaker 5: list under which I would have argued it's safe to
• 14:55
  Speaker 5: keep a few schools open, but it probably isn't enforceable.
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  Speaker 5: People are going to start to deviate and give up
• 15:03
  Speaker 5: on the policy if they think, you know, well, they're
• 15:06
  Speaker 5: doing it over there, so I'm going to do it
• 15:07
  Speaker 5: over here. And I know that led to craziness. I
• 15:10
  Speaker 5: remember people were jogging outside wearing masks, right? Just like
• 15:15
  Speaker 5: not near anybody, outdoors in a park. You'd say, what
• 15:20
  Speaker 5: the hell are they doing? They're not even close to
• 15:22
  Speaker 5: anybody here. You don't have to wear a mask. But
• 15:25
  Speaker 5: that was the, if you will, the other end of
• 15:29
  Speaker 5: the need, if you will, to have one-size-fits-all policies for
• 15:34
  Speaker 5: ease of enforcement and maybe for cost cheaper.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, the consistency of a policy is helpful, right?
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: And in the background, right, we have issues with trust,
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: both in medicine, though lots of polls will say docs
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: and nurses are the most trusted, but there's generally a
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: lack of trust with health institutions, especially now during COVID, right?
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: There's deep disagreement among different collectives.
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  Speaker 5: In fact, I'll give you one just that's not from COVID.
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  Speaker 5: There's a big fight going on now among those who
• 16:07
  Speaker 5: deal with addiction to alcohol and can alcoholics drink a
• 16:11
  Speaker 5: little bit once they get sober? And Alcoholics Anonymous and
• 16:15
  Speaker 5: many experts say, absolutely not. If you're an alcoholic, you
• 16:19
  Speaker 5: can't ever go back. As soon as you achieve sobriety,
• 16:23
  Speaker 5: defined as a year without drinking or.
• 16:26
  Speaker 4: Something, that's it, you're done.
• 16:28
  Speaker 5: And other people say, no, I achieved sobriety and now
• 16:31
  Speaker 5: I can sort of regulate my drinking better and I
• 16:36
  Speaker 5: can occasionally drink. And I'm not sure which is true,
• 16:39
  Speaker 5: but there's a big fight there, one side saying it's
• 16:43
  Speaker 5: got to be a uniform policy and the best and
• 16:45
  Speaker 5: safest thing, a value judgment, is just don't drink ever again.
• 16:48
  Speaker 4: That's the safest route.
• 16:51
  Speaker 5: And others saying, well, you know, maybe once in a while,
• 16:54
  Speaker 5: a special event or something.
• 16:56
  Speaker 4: Then I could.
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  Speaker 3: That's a really nice example because the implications, if someone,
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: what's the phrase, falls off the wagon? I think that's
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: the phrase that you, right? It doesn't just impact that person,
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: impacts a lot of folks, right? And that's what pushes
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: or raises one of the tensions in the pandemic or
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: any kind of vaccination.
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: Case is if I tell.
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: You something that I know isn't true in order to
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: get you to take a vaccine, but it helps or
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: helps to benefit so many other people.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: I mean, there's a tension.
• 17:24
  Speaker 4: I'm not.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: advocating, you know, lying.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: And I, I, I mean, I, I live out.
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: On dead end street. I still don't let my.
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: My two year old walk across and I say, Oh,
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: the cars might come. The cars might come. The cars
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: occasionally do come and then I go. So, but you know,
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: there's a, yeah, there's a difference maybe between honesty and truth.
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: So let me loop back to the letter and then
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: I'll get you out on a question or two. So
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: the letter that you wrote with Matt winning a dominant assistant,
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: Sisti and Lainey Ross appears in Bioethics Today, a great
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: blog for anyone interested in bioethics, edited by Keisha Ray.
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: If things go well, what do you hope to accomplish
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: with the letter in a line or two?
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: What's the goal?
• 18:05
  Speaker 5: So we did get over 130 signatures on that letter
• 18:09
  Speaker 5: very quickly. And then I checked down the signatures. We
• 18:12
  Speaker 5: could have gotten many more. The bioethics community, I thought,
• 18:15
  Speaker 5: should speak up. as a value issue, one of what
• 18:19
  Speaker 5: do you do if you think a scientist has caused
• 18:22
  Speaker 5: a problem? And our argument in that letter was you
• 18:25
  Speaker 5: don't put them on a show trial. You don't subpoena
• 18:29
  Speaker 5: them and demand that they answer sort of random questions from,
• 18:35
  Speaker 5: I'm going to say, ill-informed Senate committee members. You have
• 18:40
  Speaker 5: some kind of a, I mean, my idea would be
• 18:44
  Speaker 5: Form a commission, make it bipartisan, let them look at
• 18:48
  Speaker 5: whatever testimony and facts they want to collect for many
• 18:51
  Speaker 5: people and tell us what the conclusion is. We did
• 18:54
  Speaker 5: that for things like assassinations and, you know, natural disasters,
• 18:59
  Speaker 5: and we should be doing it.
• 19:00
  Speaker 4: For COVID overall.
• 19:03
  Speaker 5: The format to torture Fauci looked to me like a
• 19:06
  Speaker 5: McCarthy 1950s show trial where they were dragging in alleged
• 19:12
  Speaker 5: communists to repent. That's not science. That's not going to
• 19:15
  Speaker 5: lead to an answer. And I should add one other thing.
• 19:19
  Speaker 5: We wrote that because I'm not sure there will be
• 19:22
  Speaker 5: an answer to the origins of COVID because part of
• 19:24
  Speaker 5: the answer lies with the Chinese. And if they don't
• 19:27
  Speaker 5: want to play ball with us, then we're not going
• 19:29
  Speaker 5: to know the answer.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: It's helpful.
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: And I'll say that most of the folks that I've
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: talked to about this and even about the letter have
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: been colleagues who are scientists themselves. And I think the
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: show trial notion scares me a bit. I mean, we
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: already have scientific creativity being reduced, right? There's a paper
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: out in I think it was Nature.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: I should check. I'll stick it in the show notes.
• 19:52
  Speaker 3: But how given, you know, bench scientists' use of AI,
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: there's so many more papers out. But if you look
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: at what they're written on, right, it's shrunk by, I think, 4%. Now,
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: if there are on top of this, right, concerns about
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: that scientists have that they're going to end up, like,
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: I would like for the best scientists to be the
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: most creative and come up with whatever we need in
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: the future so that my kids and their kids and
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: all that and other folks live healthier lives. I mean,
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: the scare tactics are just, I mean, there are a
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: variety of consequences.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: They are negative. And I'm glad that you and others
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: have led this charge through bioethics.
• 20:27
  Speaker 5: Well, you know, once you see politics driving what the
• 20:30
  Speaker 5: answer will be to a scientific question, we're in pretty
• 20:34
  Speaker 5: dangerous situations.
• 20:35
  Speaker 4: Turf.
• 20:36
  Speaker 5: Science is best left alone. I'm not saying completely alone. Heck,
• 20:41
  Speaker 5: bioethicists spend half their lives trying to regulate research that
• 20:45
  Speaker 5: scientists do to make sure they don't harm anybody. But overall,
• 20:51
  Speaker 5: the direction of science, what gets done What gets published,
• 20:55
  Speaker 5: I think, is best left in the hands of scientists.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: I'm with you.
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: I'm a big fan of expertise in general.
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: All right, this is great.
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: Before I let you go, for folks who enjoyed the conversation,
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: anything in particular you're giving a talk at, a new
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: paper coming out, anything that people are interested in hearing
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: more from you they should check out?
• 21:16
  Speaker 5: Well, got a bunch of articles out soon on this
• 21:20
  Speaker 5: whole area of surrogate motherhood, big case in Texas.
• 21:24
  Speaker 4: Generating lots of controversy.
• 21:26
  Speaker 5: A woman hired from Alaska by a couple in California
• 21:31
  Speaker 5: ran away to Texas because the California couple wanted her
• 21:34
  Speaker 5: to get an abortion and insisted on it when the
• 21:37
  Speaker 5: fetal testing detected an anomaly, heart defect in the fetus.
• 21:42
  Speaker 5: This has led to all kinds of controversy, and I
• 21:45
  Speaker 5: weigh in kind of defending the idea that nobody should
• 21:49
  Speaker 5: be forcing anybody who's a surrogate, to do anything during
• 21:54
  Speaker 5: their pregnancy, they still retain control over their body in person.
• 21:59
  Speaker 5: So surrogate motherhood is under a lot of attack. It's
• 22:01
  Speaker 5: an interesting area within infertility. Probably 10% of all infertility
• 22:06
  Speaker 5: treatments use it. And it'd be interesting to see. I
• 22:09
  Speaker 5: think it's under-regulated, but in any event, that area. And
• 22:13
  Speaker 5: one that's fun, de-extincting species. I've got something coming out
• 22:16
  Speaker 5: on that soon. Been writing about it a bit already.
• 22:20
  Speaker 5: A couple of companies are in the business of saying
• 22:21
  Speaker 5: they want to bring back extinct species, mammoths, dire wolves,
• 22:27
  Speaker 5: dodo birds. I don't think that's a great idea only
• 22:31
  Speaker 5: because we don't know what these animals ate or the
• 22:34
  Speaker 5: environment they lived in and whatever it is, it's not
• 22:36
  Speaker 5: here anymore. So I'm not sure where they're going, even
• 22:39
  Speaker 5: if we, well, they're going in a zoo, I guess.
• 22:42
  Speaker 5: But the other problem is getting back to viruses. We
• 22:46
  Speaker 5: don't know what viruses they had that might kill us.
• 22:49
  Speaker 5: And we don't know which ones are around now that
• 22:51
  Speaker 5: would kill them. And the time gap matters. So I'm
• 22:55
  Speaker 5: not a fan. But in any event, it's an interesting
• 22:57
  Speaker 5: debate about trying to use infertility treatments and new genetic
• 23:03
  Speaker 5: knowledge to recreate extinct species.
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: Rich and interesting topics. A ton of philosophical questions on
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: the first.
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: And I'll follow up and make sure I have links
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: to the articles in the show page. And my daughters
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: love dinosaurs. But still, I mean, I grew up in
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: the Michael Crichton Jurassic Park generation. So I've I'm sold
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: on that one.
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: The T-Rex looks good from afar. Anyway, Art, thanks so
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: much for the time. I really appreciate it.
• 23:27
  Speaker 4: Thank you for having me.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: Have a good one.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: This series is a production of the Health Ethics Lab,
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: and I am grateful to colleagues in the Department of
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: Medical Sciences, the IHS Library, and the Hackensack Meridian School
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: of Medicine for making this collaboration possible. To learn more
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: about our work or to engage with the series' content,
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: reach out to me, Brian Pilkington, at brian.pilkington at hmh.com.
• 23:49
  Speaker 4: N.org.