A medical geneticist's view.

• Author: Billings, Paul R.
• Position: The Risks of the Rush - Limiting genetic research - Brief Article

Unexpected outcomes, chance and serendipity have always been significant in scientific progress. Science is such a hopeful enterprise partly because we cannot know or control everything beforehand. Something new or surprising may emerge from any investigation.

As a physician-scientist, I confront each day the limits of our current knowledge and depend on the work of biomedical scientists to give me new remedies for my patients. For those already suffering, or who worry about suffering in the future, I often have only the work of researchers to offer as treatment. Those researchers are the producers of hope.

So it is difficult to think about limiting what scientists do. How can we close out the possibility of the unexpected benefit? If we want scientists to be creative, how can we limit their freedom to do certain experiments or try particular applications?

We can because we must. Just as we prohibit moviemakers or graphic artists from killing animals or people in the pursuit of creative expression, so too we must set generous but clear guidelines for scientists. Even desperately ill people seeking new therapies must be protected from harmful experimentation. And as we approach a time when we can create new life forms, combine animal and human parts, or insert novel genes into human embryos, strict...