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"Almost Human - And Patentable Too!"

Dr. Newman earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1970 at the University of Chicago. His post-doc studies included work at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, United Kingdom. He teaches in the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy at New York Medical College, in Valhalla New York.

Dr. Newman co-founded the Council on Responsible Genetics, which is based in Washington D.C. He is also known for his application for a patent on a method for making creatures that are part human and part animal.  He did this in order to raise a debate about the morality of patenting life forms and engineering human beings, which he considers unethical and immoral.  Dr. Newman terms such creatures as animal-human "chimeras". This name refers to the beast in Greek mythology that had a lion's head, goat's body and serpent's tail.

For the latest developments in this lawsuit, see Science News, "Patently Unpatentable"

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"You and I Are Obsolete" (not available)

Dr. Richard Seed has three degrees from Harvard, including a Ph.D. He is a former professor and physicist. He has expertise in developing treatments for infertility. Dr. Seed supports the use of human cloning research and practices to develop human tissue and organs for medical treatment purposes and to provide families with children. 

According to a news account in the Guardian, Dr. Seed has raised $15 million dollars in human cloning funds and bought land in Hokkaido, an island in Northern Japan.  The human cloning group's Tokyo consultant, James Ryan, says the facilities will open in August 1999 for infertile couples. They expect around 500 baby human clones a year. Dr. Seed said of human cloning earlier this year: "God made man in his own image. God intended man to become one with God. Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA are the first serious steps in becoming God" - Guardian 2 December 1998.

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"Bio-Piracy, Environment and Culture"

DR. AZAIRAH  holds a Ph.D. in Zoology and is Head of the Department of Zoology at the University of Madras, India. Dr. Azariah has taught on the subjects of zoology, environmental and bioethics for over 30 years. In 1991, he received the Ray Lankester Investigatorship of the Plymouth Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom. 

Dr. Jayapaul Azariah is co-founder of the All Indian Bioethics Association in 1992 and Editor of AIBA Newslink. Under his direction the first International Workshop and Seminar on Bioethics in India was held at the University of Madras during January 1997. In November of 1999, Dr. Azariah will be presenting at the Fifth International Tsukuba Bioethics Roundtable and Intensive Cross-Cultural Bioethics Courts, entitled Bioethics in and from Asia.

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"Women, Genes and Equality"

Professor in the College, the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and the Committee on Genetics at the University of Chicago, where she is involved in cases raising ethical questions. Trained in philosophy, Dr. Mahowald taught in the philosophy departments of Villanova University and Indian University at Indianapolis for 12 years. Since 1982, she moved to a medical school/hospital setting.  An author of numerous articles in health care and philosophical journals, she has also had grants or fellowships from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her most recent books are Women and Children in Health Care: An Unequal Majority; Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy. The third edition of her Philosophy of Woman: Classical to Current Concepts  appeared in 1994. Her latest book, entitled Genes, Women, Equality, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press in October 1999.

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"Protection of the Genetically-Challenged"

Mr. Kent earned his B.A. with Honors in Natural Sciences from Cambridge as well as his M.A. in 1977. In addition he earned his Masters in Philosophy from Hatfield Polytechnic. He has headed a number of national health interest organizations throughout his career and currently is Director of The Genetic Interest Group. The European Alliance of Genetic Support Groups is headed by Mr. Kent, and he is an active member of the Association of British Insurers Genetics Advisory Committee, the British Medical Association's Ethics and Genetics Working Party, the European Federation of Biotechnology, Task Group on the Public Perceptions of Biotechnology, and the Royal College of Physicians Clinical Genetics Committee.

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Paper
"The Transition To Agricultural Sustainability"

Dr. Ruttan is Regents' Professor in the Department of Economic and Applied Economics and an Adjunct Professor in the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.  He served as a staff member of the President's Council of Economic Advisors during the period 1961-1963 and as President of the Agricultural Development Council between 1973-1978. He has authored Agricultural Research Policy, Agricultural Development: An International Perspective; Agriculture, Environment, and Health: Sustainable Development in the 21st Century; United States Development Assistance Policy: The Domestic Politics of Foreign Economic Aid. He is currently completing a book, Technology, Growth and Development to be published by Oxford University Press.

Dr. Ruttan has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1976),  the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1986), and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1990).

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Paper
"Research on Prenatal Life"

Dr. Tauer earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963. After serving as a professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics at the College of St. Catherine, she received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown University in 1982, with a specialty in biomedical ethics. In 1978 Dr. Tauer instituted a course in Biomedical Ethics at the College of St. Catherine. She acts as an Ethics Consultant for a number of Twin Cities local hospitals. In 1994, she was appointed to the National Institutes of Health Human Embryo Research Panel. This Panel was charged to recommend ethical guidelines for Federal funding of research on infertility and early embryonic development. In 1999, she was again appointed to an NIH panel, the Working Group of the ACD to Develop Guidelines and Oversight for Pluripontetial Stem Cell Research.

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Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician-geneticist and the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH. In that role he oversees a fifteen year project aimed at mapping and sequencing all of the human DNA by the year 2005.

He obtained his undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of Virginia, and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Yale University. Recognizing that a revolution was beginning in molecular biology and genetics, he changed fields and enrolled in medical school at the University of North Carolina, where he encountered the field of medical genetics and knew he had found his dream. After a residency and chief residency in internal medicine in Chapel Hill, he returned to Yale for a fellowship in human genetics, where he worked on methods of crossing large stretches of DNA to identify disease genes.

Together with Lap-Chee Tsui and Jack Riordan of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, his research team identified the gene for cystic fibrosis using this strategy in 1989. That was followed by his group's identification of the neurofibromatosis gene in 1990, and a successful collaborative effort to identify the gene for Huntington disease in 1993. That same year, Collins accepted an invitation to become the second director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, following in the footsteps of James Watson. In that role, Collins has overseen the successful completion of several of the Genome Project's goals, and now the full ramp-up of the sequencing component is underway.

In addition, Collins founded a new NIH intramural research program in genome research, which has now grown to become one of the premier research units in human genetics in the country.

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Harold Varmus was born in Oceanside, New York. He began his academic career studying Elizabethan poetry at Amherst College. He went on to earn a postgraduate degree in English at Harvard before deciding that he wanted to pursue a career in medicine. He distinguished himself as quickly in this new field as he had in his other academic pursuits, receiving his MD in 1966 from Columbia University in New York.

He began his career as a surgeon in the U.S. Public Health Service, then moved to San Francisco, where he joined the University of California Medical Center.

His work revolved around the study of Oncogenes. Oncogenes are normal genes that control growth in every living cell, but which under certain conditions can turn renegade and cancerous. Varmus and Bishop's work - along with the work of a number of other research scientists - stemmed from the hypothesis that the growth of cancerous cells is not the result of an invasion from outside the cell, but rather a misuse of a normal gene by a retrovirus, as a result of exposure to some aggravating carcinogen, such as radiation or smoke.

This research, conducted under the supervision of Varmus and Bishop at the University of California at San Francisco in the mid-seventies, has led to great strides in the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of a variety of cancers. Over 50 oncogenes have been identified, some of which cause cancer by being turned on or activated at the wrong time, while others, referred to as "anti-oncogenes" do the opposite - causing cancer by failing to shut off growth at the right time. Varmus and Bishop were celebrated by the Nobel committee in 1989 for the research they had done on oncogenes.

Instead of basking in the glow of his Nobel Prize, Harold Varmus took on enormous new challenges. He became the first Nobel Laureate to be appointed head of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Varmus headed the NIH for 6 years, retiring in 2000. During that time, the NIH invested money in the Human Genome Project and coordinated the project with dozens of other health research institutes around the world. He hopes to completely map the human genome by 2003. "We also want to capitalize on the application of genome research to diseases like cancer, where we've got new knowledge about how genes control the behavior of tumors," Dr. Varmus said.

In January 2000, Dr. Varmus became President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

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