Law School creates Center for Law and the Biosciences.

The same technology that allows couples to screen for genetic disorders now allows them to choose the sex of their unborn child with close to 100 percent certainty. Already parents are choosing to have so-called “savior sibs,” babies whose umbilical cord blood provides matched stem cells to transplant into desperately ill siblings. And experts say it is only a matter of time before prospective parents should be able to select traits like height and eye color. 

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis, as this technology is known, is just one of many breakthrough advances in medical science that not only are increasing our ability to predict, prevent, and treat disease, but also are allowing us to tinker with other genetically linked traits. How society handles these new powers and the complex issues they raise involves not only ethical and moral questions, but political and legal ones as well. That is why the Law School established the Center for Law and the Biosciences. 

“I want the center to cover a wide range of areas where advances in the biosciences affect the law,” said Hank Greely (BA ’74), the inaugural Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law and founding Director of the new center. “The science is happening; human societies and their legal systems have no choice but to adapt to it.” 

The center was launched in February with a conference titled “Unnatural Selection: Should California Regulate Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis?” The conference was cosponsored by Affymetrix and the law firm Paul Hastings. More than 100 conference attendees examined the ethics of selecting human embryos—created by in vitro fertilization for implantation—based on their genetic makeup.

 “I suspect nine people out of ten would say that’s science fiction,” said Greely of the technology. “They’d say, ‘They can’t do that,’ but it’s been done for 15 years. And it’s being applied to an increasing number of genetically linked traits.” 

Besides courses on the legal issues of the biosciences, Greely’s plans for the center include annual conferences— some dealing with issues of immediate interest to lawyers and others focusing on broader policy questions—quarterly evening lectures, and frequent lunchtime speakers. If the center receives enough funding, Greely hopes to host visiting faculty and create a fellows program.

Stanford University has long been a leader in bioscience research. Today’s biotechnology industry largely derives from work done at Stanford—by Paul Berg, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1980 for his pioneering work in recombinant DNA, and by Stanley Cohen, who, with Herb Boyer from UCSF, developed the technology that is the basis for much of the industry. Stanford’s leading role has been enhanced by the recent creation of the Bio-X program—a multidisciplinary research center that brings computer science, engineering, physics, and chemistry to the fields of biology and medicine. For more than a decade the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, whose steering committee Greely chairs, has explored some of the ethical consequences of these technologies; now the Center for Law and the Biosciences will focus on how the law and these technologies affect each other. 

Greely, a 19-year veteran of the Law School, notes that the time is ripe to start a center on the biosciences. “Genetics, assisted reproduction, and, increasingly, neuroscience are producing more challenges, at deeper levels, for our legal system and our society,” he said. “We need to encourage research and thought on how to respond to today’s challenges. Perhaps more importantly, we need to train lawyers who can deal well with tomorrow’s challenges.”