Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 197 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Gregory Pence.

He teaches bioethics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham,

and he's also the author of the book,

Who's Afraid of Human Cloning?

In 2000, he was the only bioethicist to testify before Congress

against a bill that would have criminalized human cloning.

He's also written over 60 op-eds, which have appeared in places like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek.

And his new book is called What We Talk About When We Talk About Clon Club, Bioethics and philosophy in Orphan Black.

And this will involve spoilers for season 3 of Orphan Black, so just be aware of that.

And now here's our interview with Gregory Pence.

All right, so we're here with Gregory Pence.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Okay, so first of all, just tell us about how you got interested in bioethics.

Oh, that's a good question. Tell us about how you got interested in bioethics.

Oh, that's a good question. So it was 1975 and I needed a job in philosophy and I was teaching up in New York City and a job became available in

Birmingham, Alabama but it wasn't a permanent job.

But the Karen Quinlan case occurred up in New Jersey where she was in a coma but probably never going to come out and the medical dean said I think we need to create a new position in you know in bioethics to teach medical students about these issues and

if you, maybe you should apply for it.

And at the time, I actually was a little reluctant to apply foror because I wanted a nice safe job in philosophy, but I went forward and I didn't know that I was probably getting into one of the most exciting fields in academia.

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