From left: John Paris, SJ (standing), Michael Moreland MA ’97, Michele Goodwin JD ’97, Gareth Cook. Photograph: Justin Knight

Certain age-old questions have new urgency in the era of stem cell research and cloning: What should be the role of science in society? Should the quest for knowledge be constrained by ethical considerations? Whose moral values would determine such constraints? From October 5 to 15, 2006, the Boston College community and the public had the opportunity to take part in an interdisciplinary inquiry, “An Unknown Future: The Body, Biotechnology, and Human Nature,” consisting of panels, discussions, and film screenings devoted to these questions. Anchoring the series was a Robsham Theater production of Shelagh Stephenson’s play An Experiment with an Air Pump (1998). The events were sponsored jointly by the Carroll School of Management’s new Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics and the theater department.

The idea for the project grew out of a workshop that Andrew Boynton, CSOM dean, ran for the production crew of Dario Fo’s We Won’t Pay, We Won’t Pay (1974), directed by Theater Professor John Houchin last February. Boynton brought his DeepDive approach to team-building and problem solving (developed with a former colleague and sold this year to Deloitte Consulting LLP) to the challenge of developing a unifying vision for the BC production.

With the Winston Center’s mandate, in part, being to serve as a catalyst for collaborations among the University’s schools and departments, Boynton asked Houchin if there were any plays under consideration for the fall 2006 season that probed the quandaries of ethical decision-making. Adjunct Assistant Professor of Acting Patricia Riggin was planning to direct Stephenson’s An Experiment with an Air Pump, which premiered in England and opened in New York in 1999. The drama focuses on tensions between science and morality, as well as class and gender roles, across two centuries, and Riggin proposed it as a compelling vehicle for debate.

The play weaves two stories, one set at the end of the 1700s, the other at the end of the 1900s, both taking place in the same house in the handsome Georgian northern English city of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.

In the Fenwick household of 1799, two young doctors, Thomas Armstrong and Peter Mark Roget—he of Thesaurus fame—argue about the morality of stealing bodies for anatomical research. Armstrong claims never to have had a moral qualm in his life, while Roget is more alert to the extra-rational forces that move people, and is repelled by Armstrong’s single-minded pursuit of knowledge.

Armstrong woos the Fenwicks’ servant, Isobel, solely because he wishes to examine her humpback. He flatters the lonely girl into believing that he loves her, and when she discovers the deception, she hangs herself. She is cut down, barely alive, and while Armstrong is alone with her, he suffocates her. Roget predicts that she will not rest in her grave for five minutes before Armstrong has her body on the dissecting table, and in this he proves correct: Her bones, missing some of the upper vertebrae, are found 200 years later by the play’s 20th-century protagonists.

In the modern-day plot, Ellen, a geneticist, wrestles with the question of whether to accept a high-paying job at a biotech firm run by Kate, a young colleague. Kate’s research into genetic abnormalities in fetuses unsettles Ellen’s husband, Tom, a redundant English professor, who worries that the firm’s commercial prospects will override ethical considerations. Ellen, whose moral qualms ultimately yield to her sheer passion for discovery, tells him: “All you have is moral principles, Tom. You don’t have any solutions.” “I know,” replies Tom. “I’m just saying you don’t either.”

The lively panel discussion that followed the matinee performance on Saturday, October 15, was also notable for generating more questions than solutions. That is how it should be, said moderator John Paris, SJ, holder of the Walsh Chair in Bioethics and a nationally recognized authority on the intersecting areas of law, ethics, and medicine. “Plays disturb, they get people to think,” said Paris in a telephone interview; Stephenson’s play, he said, captures “the thickness of reality.” Taken together, said Paris, the student panel on bioethics on October 11 and the public discussion on October 15 reached over 300 people.

The first speaker on Saturday, Gareth Cook of the Boston Globe, described how his 2005 Pulitzer Prize–winning series of articles on stem cell research originated in his reporting of a concrete dilemma. A woman who had conceived two children through in vitro fertilization was told by her clinic that insurance would no longer pay to keep the extra embryos frozen in storage, and she had to decide what to do with them—whether to discard them, try for another pregnancy, or donate them for embryonic stem cell research.

In the current and often strident public debate, in which one side holds that such embryos are “just a ball of cells,” and the other that “these are human lives” and nothing can justify killing them, the conventional divide seemed “absurd” to this reasonable and thoughtful woman, said Cook. Without the balls of cells, she would not have her children, and yet she had experienced firsthand the immense gulf separating the embryos sitting in a freezer and the children running round the kitchen table.

“Any time you’re involving the topics of sex and death, people get very angry,” said Cook, noting the vitriolic e-mails generated by his articles. Paris agreed. As a highly visible commentator in the media at the time of the Terri Schiavo case in March 2005, during which he supported Schiavo’s moral and legal right to die, he received an e-mail reviling him as “a pus-filled cyst on the colon of the mystical body of Christ.” Civil discussion is made all the more difficult, said Cook, by the fact that even on the most basic questions—for instance, what constitutes a stem cell—scientists themselves disagree.

Whether it’s Armstrong and Roget arguing about where bodies for science should come from, or debates about the destruction of embryos, “much of this is about precious commodities,” said Michele Goodwin JD ’95, a former research assistant to Paris, now the Wicklander Professor of Ethics and a professor of law at DePaul College of Law, Chicago.

Don’t imagine that body snatching came to an end in the 18th century, Goodwin told the audience, taking them on a ghoulish tour from the pillaging of black slave graves to the recent sale of Alistair Cooke’s bones to a tissue bank by rogue New York morticians, as documented in her book, Black Markets (2006), an analysis of the international underground market in organs and body tissue.

A former advisor to President George W. Bush on bioethics and associate director for domestic policy at the White House, Villanova law professor and one-time theology student Michael Moreland MA ’97 identified five dimensions of the debate: moral, political, economic, scientific, and technological. It is unhelpful, he said, that the restriction of federal funding to research on already established stem cell lines has been interpreted as a ban. Like Cook, Moreland emphasized the importance of “not ascribing bad faith to people on the other side,” then used the term “fetal farming” to describe the development of embryos for research purposes. Cook objected to the term as precisely the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that derails objective debate.

From the Greek tragedies onward, said theater historian and professor Stuart Hecht, who was in the audience, theater has served as a springboard for the exploration of pressing contemporary issues. The Winston Center’s effort to bring together thoughtful specialists from different disciplines to further public dialogue prompted by a dramatic representation is, he said, “exactly what the liberal arts experience is all about.”

Read more by Jane Whitehead