Dr. Jeffrey Way is a Senior Staff Scientist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biological Inspired Engineering. Dr. Way facilitates research on the development of protein based drugs, and he is particularly inspired by systems within nature and genetic engineering. He has published on the synthesis of biological drugs and holds several patents in the field.

On May 10, 2016, Dr. Way participated in a closed door meeting at Harvard Medical School to discuss the synthesis of a human genome. I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Way, who shared his thoughts on the closed door meeting and the role of transparency and innovation in scientific and medical research today.

C: What inspired you to become a researcher?

Dr. Way: I was always interested in science and started learning about biology and chemistry in grade school. When I was in fourth grade, my doctor gave me a plastic model of the heart and I started learning where all the atriums and ventricles were as well as the aorta and vessels of the heart. I had this memorized by the time I was in the fifth grade, and I remember having to give a presentation at my new school. And I talked about how the heart works and how blood flows through the heart.

C: This past May, you and many other researchers participated in a closed door meeting. What was purpose of this secret meeting?

Dr. Way: The idea of the meeting was to organize a group of people who would be interested in synthesizing the human genome. This project is analogous to the Human Genome Project in that in order to conceptualize and achieve it, new technology development would have to be involved. For this project we hope to first remake the DNA of a bacterium cell and prevent the cell from evolving and from developing pathogenic sequences. So most of the meeting was about how technically can we achieve this goal and what would be interesting to do with this technology.

C: What was your first impression when you heard that the meeting was going to be closed off to the public?

Dr. Way: My reaction was that it was fine because it was a planning meeting. There was an outcry to the effect that it should have been open to the public because it is obviously a big project and people should be able to comment on it. But realistically, most of the meeting was about science and I think the ethics are obvious. We are not aiming to make synthetic humans. There are always worries when new technology is being developed and these ethical discussions have an effect of delaying basic scientific advancements that have the potential to aid a large majority of people. If there is too much hindering by ethical debates it results in delays and that does more harm than good. All of the ethical discussion can occur in parallel with the technology development. But society has to be very cautious about slowing these processes down, because at the end of the day we are not trying to do evil things—we are trying to cure diseases.

C: How did having a closed door meeting affect the way in which the meeting was conducted and the ideas that were shared during the meeting?

Dr. Way: The reason for having the meeting closed off was to get the raw ideas together and then announce them to the public when it was done. To avoid public discussion was not the aim, it was just that we wanted to get our ideas organized before we presented them to the public and the meeting was a mostly brainstorming. We wanted this brainstorming to go on in a closed environment where you know the people are sympathetic to you and where you don’t have the pressures of the public questioning your ideas. Of course objections have to be addressed and that is part of the discussion of ethics. But there has to be a period of time where thoughts can be organized before presenting them to the public.

C: Having attended the meeting, now do you believe the closed door policy is necessary for only big research projects or all research projects in order to maintain the aspects of integrity and innovation within a research project?

Dr. Way: It depends on the goal of the project. For big projects, there will have to be a public element because someone will have to ask the government for money, so there has to be a significant level of public review of ethical aspects. There is also a legal right that people have to assemble which can be interpreted into the right to have private meetings. So we do have a right to do this. However, if you are too secretive about it no one will want to fund your project. So there is a balance that needs to be established from a practical point of view.

C: Where do you see this project going in the future?

Dr. Way: The project timeline for planning and fundraising was a year, and we are about six months in. The optimistic plan is that in 10 years this project would be executed. There has to be a lot of thinking on the application side. For this project, we already know the sequence and now we are looking at what it enables us to do that we haven’t been able to do before. We may come to a point where we have to ask ourselves: what is the payoff? We can always say that it might cure diseases but is this the only way in which we can accomplish this goal? There may be a cheaper more efficient way to achieve this.

C: If there is a cheaper more efficient way, what might be the motive of some researchers to pursue such a complex project?

Dr. Way: Many projects today are launched for the purpose of furthering careers and a huge amount of tax payer dollars are wasted because of this. Within science funding, there are many situations in which people propose projects that will not go anywhere or are not even useful for the point of basic research. My own ethical question about this project is, since it may be driven by the self-promoting motives of researchers—who may not get a monetary payoff but will get a payoff in terms of self-promotion—and will still use taxpayer money in the process, will the taxpayers get a return on such a large investment?