Democracy in Vitro in Research Universities Until After the Sec- Ond World War

COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS the exception of the Morrill Land- BIOETHICS Grant Act of 1862 — which gave land to states, enabling them to finance public agricultural and technical colleges — the US government was relatively uninvolved Democracy in vitro in research universities until after the Sec- ond World War. Public universities have Insoo Hyun weighs up a treatise exploring the ethical dominated in the US Midwest, West and deliberations surrounding embryo research. South, although these regions also have exceptional private research universities. Public universities have been more ne of the most celebrated paint- democratic about admissions, have had ings in Ohio’s Cleveland Museum more students (graduate and undergrad- of Art is Twilight in the Wilderness. uate) and have been more vocationally OFrederic Edwin Church’s panorama depicts oriented. To a greater extent than in Ger- a blazing sunset over shadowy mountains many, many US professors have become and a crimson lake. It signals a reverence for academic entrepreneurs — teaching what nature, but the blood reds hint at something they wish, developing their own research darker. Church completed his landscape in programmes, moving from discipline to 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War, discipline, obtaining large research grants and many believe that the fiery sky symbol- that permit establishment of small firms izes the nation’s expected conflagration. and securing patents. Experiments in Democracy reminds me of After the Second World War, the US this painting, in both its ambitious scope and federal government became a major its sense of unease. Science historian Benja- source of research funding, through the min Hurlbut offers a wide-angle history of National Institutes of Health, the National US attempts at democratic deliberation on Science Foundation and the departments the ethics of human-embryo research. Pains- of defence, energy, agriculture and educa- takingly researched and spanning more than tion. This influenced the research agendas four decades — from the advent of in vitro of universities — facilitating both basic fertilization in the 1970s to contemporary and applied research — and the number developments such as germline editing — the of researchers. US universities have also book draws attention to an intricate interplay long had more funding from private foun- between science and democracy. More than 40 years of controversy surrounds dations than have German institutions. Mediating this interplay are government- research on human-embryo cells such as these. By the end of the twentieth century, sponsored bioethics bodies such as the Eth- many US public research universities had, ics Advisory Board of the US Department of considerations. Although these institutions unlike Germany’s, become huge, bureau- Health, Education, and Welfare in the 1970s helped to pave the way for human embryonic /SPL cratic, self-organizing and vastly complex. and the National Institutes of Health Human stem-cell research and widespread acceptance Some have numerous vice-chancellors, Embryo Research Panel in the 1990s. These of in vitro fertilization, Hurlbut argues that provosts and vice-provosts; more than serve as “experiments in democracy” wherein they also narrowed the “repertoire of demo- BIOL. REPROD. half a dozen colleges (each with deans, social imaginings of science, democracy, and cratic imagination” necessary to guide our associate deans and assistant deans); col- the correct relationship between them are ‘co- march towards a shared technological future. leges with multiple departments (some produced’. Building on the terminology and Regret and lost opportunities are a leit- with as many as 90 highly specialized fac- work of other scholars at the nexus of science, motif in the book. Yet, like Church’s hidden NIKAS/ YORGOS ulty members); sprawling hospitals; and technology and society, notably Sheila brushstrokes — which lessen the painter’s huge athletic programmes. Some have also Jasanoff, Hurlbut laments that ethical delib- presence in his luminist landscape — Hurl- managed large federal laboratories. And eration around embryo research has always but’s repeated use of the passive voice at today, US universities seem to be in exis- been too focused on key moments makes it difficult to discern tential flux, questioning their size, func- the moral status of who the agents were for these historical tion, structure, nature, philosophical bases the embryo, with sci- developments. In writing about scientific and monumental student fees. ence supplying ‘facts’ knowledge, for example, Hurlbut says that The Rise of the Research University and bioethics bodies scientists’ claims are privileged because they charts how unpredictable and unstable providing ‘correct’ “are treated as de facto reasonable”. But, he university systems have been on both reasoning. notes, “those views that are marked as sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It reveals that Standing in for depending upon moral pictures of the world academic soul-searching about the role of the public, these bio that are not accessible to others are de facto research universities is as prevalent now as ethics bodies uncriti- excluded as nonpublic reasons” — that is, it was 150 years ago. But it also shows how cally accepted science Experiments as too doctrinaire and subjective to ground important these bodies remain, in both as an extra-political in Democracy: public policy. But who is doing this treating, the United States and Europe, in advanc- authority and used it Human Embryo marking, excluding and privileging? Is it the ing understanding of the world. ■ to delimit the range Research and secular members of bioethics bodies? Is it of appropriate public the Politics of the government sponsors who draft commit- Bioethics Rogers Hollingsworth is emeritus reasons. That crowded J. BENJAMIN tee agendas and statements of task? Hurlbut professor of history and sociology at the out other legitimate HURLBUT obscures responsibility for these outcomes University of Wisconsin–Madison. perspectives, such Columbia University and offers no clear alternative account of e-mail: [email protected] as social-justice Press: 2017. how the social imaginings of science and 462 | NATURE | VOL 541 | 26 JANUARY©2017 2017Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT democracy should have been co-produced. Without any alternative positive account, one may wonder at the end of Experiments in Books in brief Democracy what the prospects are for future deliberations on human-embryo research. Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation With fortuitous timing, the book arrives Alan Burdick SIMON & SCHUsTER (2017) just as the administration of Donald Trump Few concepts are as slippery as time, but science writer Alan Burdick enters Washington DC, with two ideological takes on that wrestling match with verve. On his journey through the opponents of embryonic stem-cell research concept’s science and psychology, he interfuses multiple storylines, in tow: vice-president Mike Pence and Tom from the intricate synchronization of Coordinated Universal Time Price, nominee for health secretary. Many to the stretch and snap of time as felt by infants and the elderly. He fear a revival of the ‘embryo wars’ of President does a free fall for neuroscientist David Eagleman’s research, delves George W. Bush’s tenure, and the restrictive into geologist Michel Siffre’s underground studies on circadian federal research policies introduced in 2001 rhythms and explores freshwater biology in the perpetual daylight of (or worse). Both stunted progress in US stem- an Arctic summer. Wonderfully rich and utterly beguiling. cell research, introduced great uncertainty among early-career scientists and biotechnol- ogy investors, and upended state funding pri- Amazing Stories of the Space Age orities. How might we apply Hurlbut’s insights Rod Pyle PROMETHEUs (2017) to the battles to come? Seasoned space writer Rod Pyle returns to orbit with this cavalcade To be fair, it is not Hurlbut’s intent to issue of oddball missions, many only recently declassified. We learn how ethical prescriptions for the future. His only the Nazis planned to reduce Manhattan to radioactive rubble with normative commitment in this book is to Silbervogel — a huge rocket bomber that never materialized, yet the question of how we should understand spawned key spaceflight technologies. And in 1952, rocket scientist democratic science, not what we should do Wernher von Braun devised an inflatable solar-powered space politically. He wants us to interrogate the idea station. There is plenty more, from analyses of near-failures such as of “right public reason” and widen the field NASA’s Apollo 8 mission to a capsule history of a late, lamented ‘thrill of potential participants. In my view, how- ride’: the US X-15 hypersonic rocketplane, which last flew in 1968. ever, our greatest collective challenge is not constructing a more inclusive ideal of public reasoning. Rather, it lies in finding cause to Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes believe that, given human nature, divisive Michael Sims BlOOMsBURY (2017) social inequities and the current political How did Scottish physician Arthur Conan Doyle conceive of Sherlock climate, US citizens are capable of realizing Holmes — hyper-logician, forensic genius, maverick? Michael Sims such an ideal. Sadly, social media and the reveals a complicated birth. Holmes’s real-life model was Doyle’s

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