That's correct.

Well, they could do it, but I'd argue it would be a mistake.

I like when the senator talks moratorium.

I'm nervous when he talks about moving that house language right now, and I'll tell you why.

Advanced cell technology did two things.

They made an embryo, and while some of us might believe, hey, that's the road to creating a person.

Once you've got an embryo, you've got a person.

Do you think this is about cloning or about stem cells, Arthur?

What's going on? Why do you think it's happening? And tell us a little bit about, uh, this letter and the response.

Well, really the key person pushing the Fauci as a almost traitor, uh, thesis is Rand Paul, the senator from, uh, Kentucky.

He has been after Fauci since the pandemic.

He believes that Fauci mishandled the pandemic, but more to the point, he believes that Fauci caused the pandemic.

How did-- how would that be? Well, the years, uh, research has been funded on what's called gain-of-function research.

Well, that, that just means trying to figure out how to make a virus or a bacteria more powerful.

How do you add functions to it, make it more resistant to antibiotics, make it more infective so that it could attack people? Why would you do this? Well, partly it's to understand, uh, what genes and what, uh, pathways are involved in transmission of the virus so that you could come up with an antidote more quickly.

Like, how should pu- ethically, how should public health officials balance truth-telling with the potential ramifications?

Big picture, have we ever seen anything like this before?

Well, believe it or not, Pamela, fights about surrogacy have been going on for 40 years.

Case just like this, 40 years ago, New Jersey, Mary Beth Whitehead, surrogate, got into a dispute with a couple that commissioned a baby, ran from New Jersey to Florida, set off a two-year court process.

We have never figured out how to regulate surrogacy, so many of these issues, are contracts binding, uh, do surrogates actually understand what they're getting into, can people change their minds, and what can somebody be forced to do, required to do under contract, including abortion if they're a surrogate? Still unsettled literally after four decades.

And so, Dr. Caplan, I wonder where you stand on this, um, and whether, uh, she, Wes did the right thing by going ahead to ha- in having this baby.

Well, look, there may be outlier cases, but they show weaknesses and big problems with respect to surrogacy.

Look, things vary state to state.

Some states don't even allow surrogacy.

And so I don't know, how do you think about this autonomy versus appeal to authority?

Well, first of all, I think it's really important and I'm glad you flagged it because it's got nothing to do with science, it's got to do with ethics.

So we've seen three ethics shifts that are leading to more people saying, I'm going to think about some self-experimentation.

One is the history of research was full of abuses, people being lied to, people being killed in the experiment, people being put through surgery with no anesthesia, Black people, Native Americans, people in orphanages, people, kids who were mentally impaired, thrown into experiments where I'm just going to say they were abused.

That led to a caution about getting into research.

I mean, really, it was like, oh, I used to say you have to be inane or insane to sign up for a research protocol in the 50s and 60s.

It was like, yeah, yeah.

What's your view on the ethics of organ donation?

So I should say it's more of a marker of some of the other things that are deeply problematic and less of a very clear justifiable line in the sand.

So just to add a little amendment there, I think one of the things we're thinking about is, yes, reproductive autonomy, very important, but it's not the be-all and end-all, and those in the field have some duty to look out for the best interests of kids that are created in unusual, different, or medically assisted ways.

I mean, uh, it's access to the technology in a sense that we're arguing about.

If someone wanted to go out and have affairs or make arrangements with people and make multiple kids, uh, you know, just by sexual means, if they weren't infertile, we, we haven't banned that.

We haven't said you can't do that sort of thing.

There are polyamory situations.

There are definitely groups that have multiple spouses for someone and could easily create, uh, pregnancies at the same time.

And I agree, it's a lot to rest that upon one psychologist for the practice.

But tell me a little bit about the MAID law, the Medical Assistance in Dying law.

Well, here's the way the world looks.

The U.S. has 10 states that permit doctors to write a prescription for a terminally ill patient defined as someone six months or less to live who voluntarily requests the medicine.

The person has to take it themselves.

They have to be competent enough, by the way, to make the request.

If you have Alzheimer's, or some other cognitive impairment.

You can't use the law in any of the 10 states.

And then I say to myself, well, wait a minute, Michael, if you believe that, then why aren't you similarly saying a person suffering from mental illness who makes that decision should also be afforded the right? And I'm not there.