The FASEB Journal • Editorial
A Nobel Prize is Out of Order: “American Idol” vs. Hypatia of Alexandria
Jennifer Lopez (1969 –), American Idol judge 2010. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.
Portrait of Hypatia of Alexandria (c355– 415 BCE), “The first woman scientist.”
Robert Edwards wins 2010 Nobel Prize in Medicine for In-Vitro Fertilization. The Washington Post, October 4, 2010 (1)
Amid the fearful yelling of these barelegged and black-cowled fiends she is dragged from her chariot, and in the public street stripped naked. In her mortal terror she is haled into an adjacent church, and in that sacred edifice is killed by the club of Peter the Reader. They outraged the naked corpse, dismembered it, and, incredible to be said, finished their infernal crime by scraping the flesh from the bones with oyster-shells, and casting the remnants into the fire . . . The leaden mace of bigotry had struck and shivered the exquisitely tempered steel of Greek philosophy. John William Draper, The Death of Hypatia. In: A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, 1864 (4)
Without Edwards, there would not be a market on which millions of ovocytes are sold . . . In the best of cases they are transferred into a uterus but most probably they will end up abandoned or dead, which is a problem for which the Nobel Prize winner is responsible. Vatican spokesman Carrasco de Paula, October 5, 2010 (2) I Would Never Have In Vitro. . . . When it comes to family and relationships, I’m quite traditional. Just because of the way I was raised. And I also believe in God and I have a lot of faith in that, so I just felt like you don’t mess with things like that. Jennifer Lopez, Interview in Elle, 2010 (3) As Hypatia comes forth to her academy, she is assaulted by [Saint] Cyril’s mob—an Alexandrian mob of many monks. 0892-6638/10/0024-4627 © FASEB
A TRIFECTA FOR THE NOBELS Last fall, two announcements overlapped in the news. In late September, pop media broke the story that 4627
Jennifer Lopez had been appointed judge for the 20th season of “American Idol,” perhaps the highest-rated show in the history of television (5). A week later, the winners were announced of the 110th round of the Nobel Prizes, the highest-rated awards in the history of science, letters, and good works (1, 6, 7). Cheery delight greeted the news of J-Lo’s ascent to the throne of pop glory: “I’ll take my cues from you from now on” a fellow judge told the Bronx-born “triple threat actress” (3). Responses to the new Nobel laureates were far less sanguine: the cries of dissent set a record. While in years past, one or another of the Prizes, chiefly those for Literature and Peace, have aroused controversy, never have three of the awards met with such diverse displeasure. This year, a powerful American senator censured the Prize for Economics; the Chinese rulers waxed wroth over the Prize for Peace; and the Vatican lashed out at the Prize for Medicine and/or Physiology. To offend Washington, Peking, and Rome, the Scandinavians must have done something right! Commenting on the award of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Peter Diamond of MIT, Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama maintained that “while the Nobel Prize for Economics is a significant recognition, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences does not determine who is qualified to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System” (6). The Senator— best known to biologists as a staunch opponent of stem cell research— had single-handedly blocked Diamond’s appointment to the governing board of the Fed. He complained that the new laureate had an insufficient knowledge of macroeconomics. Reminded that Peter Diamond was a former teacher of the Fed’s present chairman, Ben Bernanke, the Senator insisted that Professor Diamond “would be learning on the job.” The Chinese government exceeded Senator Shelby in displays of pique. After the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a jailed dissident, Liu Xiaobo, the Peking Ministry of Foreign Affairs complained that “The Nobel Committee has completely violated the goals of, and has desecrated, the Peace Prize” (7). China’s official news agency blasted the dissident, accusing him of wanton eagerness “to ingratiate himself with and kowtow to his Western masters . . . The Nobel Peace Prize is a political ‘reward’ tossed to him by his Western masters.” The Chinese cancelled several cabinet-level meetings with the Oslo government and placed the laureate’s wife under house arrest (8). Displeasure in Rome completed the trifecta. The Vatican-based International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations was “dismayed” at the award of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and/or Medicine to Robert Edwards for in vitro fertilization (9). The head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, was even more acerb. He blamed Edwards for creating a market in embryos and failing to protect human life. The Vatican spokesman proclaimed “I find the choice of Robert Edwards completely out of order” (2). The Prize may be out of order, but it laid the 4628
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foundations for modern reproductive biology. Many considered it long overdue. The first test tube baby of 1978, Louise Brown, gave birth to her own daughter in 2009 and over 4 million other babies are alive today thanks to in vitro fertilization. Edward’s collaborator, Patrick Steptoe, the doctor whose technique of laparoscopy made IVF possible, died in 1988 and was ineligible for the prize. Edwards himself is 85, and will have to join this year’s Peace Prize recipient on the list of “Nobel No-Shows” (10). Liu is in jail and Edwards is frail. Be the Prize late or not, the discovery remains as seminal—in both senses—as when Edwards and Steptoe made it: I’ll never yet forget the day I looked down the microscope and saw something funny in the cultures. I looked down the microscope [c. 1965] and what I saw was a human blastocyst gazing up at me. I thought: “We’ve done it!” (11)
THE BACK-UP PLAN AND INFANTICIDE We can chalk up the long lag-time between the invention of IVF and that “out-of-order” Prize to systems of belief that antedate any microscope. In reference to her latest film “The Back-Up Plan” (12), Jennifer Lopez expressed a common attitude toward assisted reproduction of any kind: “IVF isn’t the way these things are supposed to happen,” the actress told Elle, “deep down I really felt like either this is not going to happen for me or it is. You know what I mean? And if it is, it will. And if it’s not, it’s not going to” (3). Right on J. Lo! Opposition to IVF is based on faith. Joseph Goldstein, chairman of the Lasker jury, presented Robert Edwards with a 2001 Lasker award, comparing his contribution to Darwin’s: As one might expect, when we challenge our conception of humanity, we arouse controversy. Indeed, The Origin of Species and the first test-tube baby ignited two of the most violent controversies in the history of biology and medicine. If the human species evolved by natural selection instead of by Divine creation, then the Bible cannot be literally true. If human beings can be conceived in test tubes by scientists, then the act of conception has lost much of its mystery (13). Like Darwin’s magnum opus, the work of Edwards and Steptoe shook the fans of natural law. While the Catholic Church became the chief opponent of IVF and related techniques of assisted reproduction, other objections – both lay and clerical - also delayed the path to public acceptance. In 1971, seven years before Louise Brown was born, bioethicist Leon R. Kass—later a strong opponent of human embryonic stem cell research—worried over risks to mother, child, and social values. Kass proclaimed in the New England Journal of Medicine that “One cannot ethically choose for a child the unknown haz-
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The Pharos of Alexandria: one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Pharos of Alexandria was a lighthouse built by Sostratus of Cnidus in 280 BCE on the island of Pharos in the bay of Alexandria, Egypt. (Anonymous, 18th century) Image courtesy Art Resource.
ards that he must face, and simultaneously choose to give him life in which to face them” (14). In the same year, DNA’s James Watson, warned Edwards that “You can only go ahead with your work if you accept the necessity of infanticide” (15). The recent flaps over the ethics and politics of human embryonic stem cell research—which relies in part on the use of embryos discarded in the course of IVF— have added other recruits to the ranks of zygote defense. An opponent both of IVF and stem cell research, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, told Reuters that “To argue that one human being is more developed and therefore in greater need in no way justifies the cannibalizing of another to benefit him” (16). A director of a Catholic bioethics institute in Britain, a group strongly opposed to human stem cell research of any sort, chimed in with the complaint that IVF “has led directly to the deliberate destruction of millions of human embryos” (16). Indeed. In fact, millions of children are alive because of Edwards and Steptoe. Spokesmen of other major religions, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists have urged “limits on test tube babies” (17, 18). But, the most articulate, well-reasoned opposition to IVF and related techniques has been mounted by the Catholic Church. Beginning with Pope Paul VI’s encyclical letter of July 1968, Humanae Vitae, the church has insisted on natural means of reproduction, therefore disallowing contraception, surrogate motherhood, and the like (19). This position was reinforced by the Church document. Donum Vitae (1987) signed by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and approved by Pope John Paul II. It urged regulation of new reproductive technology such as “test-tube” fertilization, surrogate motherhood, and artificial insemination because of possible EDITORIAL: “AMERICAN IDOL” VS. HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA
“unforeseeable and damaging consequences for civil society” (20). By 2008, the position was made more explicit. Dignitas Personae ruled that most forms of artificial fertilization were to be excluded on the grounds that they replaced the conjugal act as a means of reproduction (21).
DARWIN AND ST. CYRIL The Vatican’s consistent support of God-ordained, traditional reproduction in the face of every modern development in reproductive science has been linked to denial of Darwinian evolution (22). It’s a straight line from the first Popes—Pius IX and Leo XIII—who were faced with the “unproven theory” that man descended from monkey. In 1883 Leo XIII issued edicts that insisted on the literal interpretation of Adam as the only, single antecedent of man; and that a virgin gave birth. He then responded to the challenge of Victorian science with an appeal to the faithful in Adiutricem “because, if ever there was a time when love and veneration of the Blessed Virgin [must be] awakened, it is in these days so bitterly anti-religious” (23). The Church authority to whom Leo appealed in support of this encyclical was St. Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376 – 444), the chap who expelled the Jews from Alexandria, dismantled the Alexandrian library, and “brought down the mace of bigotry” on poor Hypatia in 415 (4, 24). This fall, while nay-sayers were completing their anti-Nobel trifecta, other mischief was afoot. Bewitched politicians twittered that “There is not enough evidence [for evolution] to make it a fact [because] the world began as the Bible says in Genesis, that God created the 4629
Earth in six days, six 24-hour periods. And there is just as much, if not more, evidence supporting that” (25). If—as the saying goes— history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, we might remember what happened the first time fundamentalist bigots took over a tolerant, diverse, polity: Alexandria.
HYPATIA Alexandria in the fifth century was a world hub of commerce and learning, that in the words of John William Draper, historian, and Darwinist: Alexandria. It could vie with the city of Constantinople itself. The city was full of noble edifices—the palace, the exchange, the Caesareum, the halls of justice. Among the temples, those of Pan and Neptune were conspicuous. The visitor passed countless theatres, churches, temples, synagogues . . . On a flight of a hundred marble steps stood the grand portico with its columns, its chequered corridor leading round a roofless hall, the adjoining porches of which contained the library, and from the midst of its area arose a lofty pillar visible afar off at sea (4). Hypatia (c. 355– 415) occupied a post of honor in the academy of the museum and vast library. According to her student, Synesius of Cyrene, she taught mathematics and philosophy: natural and theoretical, exact and Platonic. Hailed as the “first woman scientist,” she invented the hydrometer and an early version of the astrolabe. Hypatia’s legend is long, Voltaire and Gibbon celebrated her tale as a tableau of Greek reason eclipsed by the dark centuries to come (26, 27). Draper lists her among the first of the martyrs of science— along with Servetus, Bruno, and Galileo (4). She died at the hand of Cyril’s mob, both for what she represented and for supporting the secular ruler of the town, Orestes, in his opposition to the expulsion of the Jews by Cyril. A contemporary described the event: Cyril, accompanied by an immense crowd of people, going to their synagogues—for so they call their houses of worship—took them away from them, and drove the Jews out of the city, permitting the multitude to plunder their goods. Thus the Jews, who had inhabited the city from the time of Alexander the Macedonian were expelled from it, stripped of all they possessed and dispersed some in one direction and some in another (28).
reported among the Christian populace” that it was Hypatia who prevented Orestes from coming to terms with Cyril. Cyril’s mob, “carried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum.” The gruesome story was finished by Draper (above, ref. 4). It may seem farcical these days to compare martyrdom in Alexandria to today’s faith-based objections to the facts of Darwin or the discovery of Edwards and Steptoe. But there’s an apt quotation attributed to Hypatia: Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth often more so (27). No matter how innocent, sentiments such as “So I just felt like you don’t mess with things like that” remind one of what happens when the child mind accepts and believes. There’s a difference between pop culture and the facts of science: the bottom line is that the world is round, humans evolved from an extinct species and Elvis is dead.
Gerald Weissmann Editor-in Chief doi: 10.1096/fj.10-1201ufm
REFERENCES 1. 2. 3.
4. 5. 6.
Hypatia dissented, and her story, as told by Socrates Scholasticus (28), continues. Hypatia was held in honor “On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind; she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates.” The only woman at the academy, she was not shy when addressing an audience of men who by virtue of her extraordinary “dignity and virtue admired her the more.” Yet even she fell a victim to political jealousy. “It was calumniously 4630
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7. 8. 9.
Stein, R. (October 4, 2010) Robert Edwards wins 2010 Nobel Prize in Medicine for In-Vitro Fertizilation. Washington Post. p. 1 Smith R . (Oct 5, 2010) Father of IVF who gave hope to the childless wins Nobel; Vatican calls choice “out of order.” The Daily Telegraph, London. p. 1 Rainey, C. (January 5 2010) Jennnifer Lopez. Elle http:// www.elle.com/Pop-Culture/Cover-Shoots/Jennifer-Lopez/ Jennifer-Lopez-ELLE-Magazine-Interview-and-Photos-February2010. Accessed October 2010 Draper, J. W. (1864) A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe. Harper Bros., New York. p. 228 Starr, M. (September 30, 2010) Out of Order; JLo, Tyler: Simon Make It Look Easy. New York Post. p. 81 Irwin, N. (October 11, 2010) Nobel economics prize: Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen, Christopher Pissarides share award. The Washington Post. p. 1 Branigan, T. (October 9, 2010) Liu Xiaobo Nobel win prompts Chinese fury. The Guardian. p. 4 Anonymous (October 16, 2010) Chinese agency blasts Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel award. BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific Anonymous (October 5, 2010) Vatican health experts ’dismayed’ by Nobel prize for IVF co-discoverer. http:// www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/vatican-health-expertsdismayed-by-nobel-prize-for-ivf-co-developer/?utm_source⫽ feedburner&utm_medium⫽feed&utm_campaign⫽Feed%3A⫹ catholicnewsagency%2Fdailynews⫹%28CNA⫹Daily⫹News%29. Accessed October 2010
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10. Edelson, A. M. (2006) Nobel “no-shows.” FASEB J. 20, 3– 6 11. Jha, A. (October 4, 2010) A British IVF pioneer Robert Edwards wins Nobel prize for medicine. The Guardian. http://www. guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/04/ivf-pioneer-robert-edwardsnobel-prize-medicine. Accessed October 2010 12. Kois, D. (April 23, 2010) Aww, c’mon, J-Lo deserves a little love. The Washington Post 13. Goldstein, J. (2001) Presentation of 2001 Lasker Award. The Lasker Foundation http://www.laskerfoundation.org/awards/ 2001_c_presentation.htm. Accessed October 2010 14. Kass, L. R. (1975) Babies by means of in vitro fertilization: unethical experiments on the unborn? N. Engl. J. Med. 285, 1174 –1179 15. Andrews, L. B. (1999) The Clone Age. Henry Holt, New York. p. 12 16. Heneghan, T. (October 4, 2010) IVF discovery opened Pandora’s box of ethical issues. Reuters. http://www.reuters. com/article/idUSTRE6935GD20101004. Accessed October 2010 17. Anonymous. (April 6, 1989) AP: 4 religions put limits on test tube babies Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists oppose human embryo experiments. Toronto Star. p. A23 18. George, R. (May 11, 1979) ’Test Tube Babies’; Exploring Ethical Question The Jewish Press. P. 7
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Pope Paul VI (1968) Humanae Vitae. http://www.papalencyclicals. net/Paul06/p6humana.htm. Accessed October 2010 Franklin, J. L. (March 10, 1987) Vatican Raps New Methods of Procreation The Boston Globe. p. 1 Hooper, J. (Dec 13, 2008) Vatican condemns IVF in bio-ethics review. The Guardian. p. 25 Pope Pius XII (1950) Humani Generis. http://www.papalencyclicals. net/Pius12/P12HUMAN.HTM. Accessed October 2010 Pope Leo XIII (1895) Adiutricem http://www.papalencyclicals. net/Leo13/l13adiut.htm. Accessed October 2010 Chapman, J. Cyril of Alexandria. In: The Original Catholic Encyclopedia (online edition) http://oce.catholic.com/index.php? title⫽Cyril_of_Alexandria,_Saint. Accessed October 2010 Amira, D. (September 15, 2010) GOP’s Delaware Senate Nominee Christine O’Donnell Not a Big Fan of Evolution. New York Magazine (online edition) http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/09/the_ gops_delaware_senate_nomin.html. Accessed October 2010 Dzielska, M. (1996) Hypatia of Alexandria (F. Lyra, trans.) (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. p. 2 Hubbard, E. (1908) Hypatia. In: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers“, v.23, no. 4, The Roycrofters, East Aurora, New York. p. 82 ff Scholasticus, S. (489 CE) The Ecclesiastical History. Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, MT (2004). p. 280 ff
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