After their lectures, Melton and Rosenthal joined Jonathan D. Moreno, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of HHMI's Bioethics Advisory Board, and Debra Mathews, a geneticist and bioethicist at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, for a spirited discussion in which they also invited questions from the audience.

The students had a lot on their minds. "Aristotle says that there is no substantial change between an acorn and an oak," one student observed. "Wouldn't that apply to an embryo and a human being too?"

"If we can save more lives by doing embryonic stem cell research, doesn't that justify it?" another student asked. "We should support stem cell research before our economic rivals in the world get ahead of us," suggested a third.

The panel responded to these and other questions with due scientific rigor, examining the difficult moral and ethical issues involved.

The audience expressed concern about possible deception and exploitation. One student wanted to know whether scientific frauds, such as the report that South Korean researchers had derived stem cells from a cloned human embryo, would impede legitimate stem cell research and applications. It could, agreed the panel. Fortunately, in this case, the paper was quickly retracted, and the peer-review process was strengthened as a result.

Fraudulent treatment claims are already becoming a problem. "Desperate people are spending thousands of dollars on stem cell treatments advertised to cure themselves or a loved one," Mathews warned. "There are no embryonic stem cell treatments now. We call them scam cell treatments."

"It's up to people like you," Moreno told the aspiring scientists, "to explain what is feasible and what is not, to help the public have confidence in replacing a child's heart valve with one from a pig or the possibility of regenerating an arm."

The 2006 Holiday Lectures on Science can be viewed at www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/lectures. Free DVDs of the lectures, with resources for teachers added, will be available through the HHMI catalog in spring 2007.

Photo: Paul Fetters

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