The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, Gwen Ifill and Jan Crawford Greenburg look at the Supreme Court's reaffirmation of the Miranda ruling; Susan Dentzer, a science writer, and a scientist explore the significance of mapping the genetic code; Betty Ann Bowser reports on the Green Party's weekend nominating convention; and Elizabeth Farnsworth talks about privacy with writer Jeffrey Rosen. It all follows our summary of the news this Monday.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The U.S. Supreme Court today upheld the Miranda ruling. In a 7-2 vote, the Justices said police will have to continue informing suspects of their right to remain silent, or risk having confessions tossed out. In other action, the Justices threw out California's blanket primary system. It allowed voters to cast ballots for any candidate, regardless of political affiliation. The court said that violated state political parties' constitutional rights. We'll have more on the court's day right after this News Summary. Scientists have finished a rough map of the human genetic code, or genome. Public and private research teams announced that jointly today. They said the breakthrough will transform medicine, allowing doctors to predict the risk of certain diseases and treat them with highly specialized drugs. The head of the federal government's effort spoke at the White House.

SPOKESMAN: Perhaps in another 15 or 20 years, you will see a complete transformation in therapeutic medicine, because every pharmaceutical company is investing and every biotech company is also contributing to the development of new targets for drug therapy based upon the genome. And the therapies that we use 15 or 20 years from now will be directed much more precisely toward the molecular problem in things like cancer or mental illness, than anything that we currently have available.

JIM LEHRER: British scientists also contributed to the public project. We'll have more on this story later in the program tonight. President Clinton today announced a new projected budget surplus, more than $1 trillion over the next ten years. That is about double the estimate of four months ago. Mr. Clinton said that will allow the U.S. to pay off the national debt by 2012, a year sooner than expected.

President Clinton By paying down the debt we can keep interest rates lower and free up more capital for private sector investment, creating more jobs and economic growth for years to come. We can eliminate the burden of paying interest on the debt, which today takes up 12 cents of every federal tax dollar. We can use part of this savings, as I have suggested, to extend the solvency of Social Security to 2057, and of Medicare to 2030.

JIM LEHRER: The President also said he'd agreed to a ten-year, $250 billion cut in the so-called marriage penalty, if Congress goes along with his $250 billion prescription drug plan for seniors. Elian Gonzalez's Miami relatives formally appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court today. They asked it to block the boy's return to Cuba. He could go back as early as Wednesday, unless the Justices intervene in the family's favor. He is living with his father in Washington. A lower court said Friday it would not hear the case again. In Zimbabwe today, opponents of President Mugabe scored victories in early parliamentary election results. The government said a huge turnout was slowing the final ballot count. We have a report from Tim Ewart of Independent Television News. (Shouting, cheering, and whistling)

TIM EWART: The opposition was celebrating even before the first results were announced. In the capital, Harare, this candidate was carried shoulder- high in a sea of supporters waving the red card, their symbolic message to President Mugabe's Zanu-P.F. Party. Ballot boxes were guarded by police officers overnight. There has been a genuine effort to dispel fears of vote-rigging. The count followed two days of voting that passed peacefully, certainly by recent standards here, but foreign observers said that wasn't enough to declare the elections free and fair.

SPOKESMAN: There were, you can say, perhaps, overall free and fair access to the polls, but the level of violence and intimidation in the pre-election phase makes that term not valid, I think.

TIM EWART: And the violence does continue. These injured opposition supporters were taken to hospital this morning. The police have assumed a high profile-- they searched cars at roadblocks today-- but emotions here are running high.

JIM LEHRER: In Washington, White House Spokesman Joe Lockhart said the Clinton administration is concerned about acts of intimidation preceding the vote. Japan's ruling coalition won a narrow victory in yesterday's parliamentary election. Prime Minister Mori's Liberal Democratic Party lost its majority in the lower House, but will continue to govern, with the support of two other parties. It has run the country for most of the post-World War II period. The new parliament will vote July 4 on whether Mori will stay in office. Independent inspectors said today they've checked hidden arsenals of the Irish Republican Army for the first time. They said they're satisfied the weapons housed in Northern Ireland cannot be used without detection. A former Finnish president and a South African official carried out the work as part of a May agreement. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the Supreme Court, the genetic code, the Green Party of Ralph Nader, and a conversation about privacy.

FOCUS - SUPREME COURT WATCH

JIM LEHRER: Gwen Ifill has the court story.

GWEN IFILL: Two major decisions at the court today: The Justices upheld the Constitutionality of the landmark 1966 Miranda ruling, and they threw out California's primary system. For more on these two rulings, we're joined by NewsHour regular Jan Crawford Greenberg, national legal affairs correspondent for the "Chicago Tribune."

Jan, the court decided to uphold this landmark ruling by a surprising 7-2 margin. What went into that?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Well, that's right. Going into this case I think the opponent of Miranda had hoped of course that they would win, but they certainly didn't think they would lose by such a wide margin. And in an opinion that was written by the chief justice, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Rehnquist was one of the early critics of Miranda, and in fact in a 1974 case, he doubted that it was Constitutionally required, and that provided a lot of ammunition for Miranda opponents. Then today we have the Chief Justice affirming Miranda. And for one of the most anxiously awaited cases of the term, Rehnquist really provided high drama. He announced in the courtroom today that he was going to explain the outcome of this case. And then in very strong terms he recited the four warnings before explaining what the ruling would be. He said, you know, you have a right to remain silent, anything you say can be used against you, you have a right to an attorney, and one will be appointed for you if you cannot afford un. It was very dramatic, and then he with a went on to explain why the Miranda ruling was required by the Constitution, why Congress couldn't overrule it, and why this court would not do so.

GWEN IFILL: Remind us again of how this case came to court.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Well, in many ways the court had to get involved because a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia said that Congress had a effectively overruled Miranda when it passed a 1968 law that said judges didn't have to decide whether or not police had given Miranda warnings when deciding whether to admit confessions into evidence. But instead could go back to the old way of evaluating confessions and see if those confessions were made voluntarily. Now, that was the ruling by the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, and that came about in the case from Virginia involving an accused bank robber named Charles Dickerson. A federal judge in 1997 suppressed statements that Mr. Dickerson had made. The federal judge found that he was never given his Miranda warnings. Local prosecutors said, ah, but wait a minute, those Miranda warnings aren't required, they pointed to that 1968 law, dusted off the books, it had never really been followed, over 30 years old. And the Fourth Circuit, like I said, bought that argument that the '68 law should prevail, sending this issue then directly to the Supreme Court.

GWEN IFILL: But the key question, which was being, the court had to decide today was whether the Miranda ruling itself is protected by the Constitution.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: That's right. Whether or not it was required by the Constitution so that it, and whether or not those warnings were required to protect --

whether they were required to protect a suspect's right against self incrimination or whether instead the warnings were this kind of procedural safe guard that Congress could modify. But in its opinion today, the 7-2 ruling, the court very strongly emphasized that Miranda clearly was required by the Constitution. And that Congress could not overrule it by going back to the old way of doing things.

GWEN IFILL: Justice Scalia wrote the dissent, and he brought up what you just brought up, which was that the court in the past had suggested that maybe it thought Miranda was not Constitutionally protected.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Yeah, he right off the bat in his dissent, which we very critical of the majority, said the Chief Justice and Justices Kennedy and O'Connor have all suggested in the past that Miranda was kind of a procedural rule and, as you said, the words certainly aren't in the Constitution, and he accused the majority, joined by Justice Thomas, of vast judicial overreaching and judicial arrogance. It was quite a strong dissent. But let me go back to the majority. The majority was equally strong, and they said Miranda itself was clear, it was clear the Constitution required it. Miranda, for example, always applied in state courts, and federal courts just can't dictate to states how they're going to do their business, unless the Constitution says so. And that the Miranda court itself obviously thought it was a constitutional rule that it was announcing.

GWEN IFILL: In the court's decision today, was it ever able to speak to the whole question of whether guilty criminals go free because of technicalities caused by the reading or not the reading of Miranda rights?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: It got into that when it was discussing whether or not it was going to overrule Miranda, and in doing that it said we're going to rely on what's called stare decisis, let the old decision stand, it's such a part of our national culture. Then it turned to looking at Miranda, it acknowledged that maybe Miranda had raised the prospect that guilty suspects may go free. But the old way of doing things certainly was no better, the old voluntariness test, it was unclear and fuzzy and judges were relying on different standards to admit confessions.

GWEN IFILL: The second decision today, the court threw out California's way of conducting its primary, saying the blanket primaries violate the rights of political parties. What's the difference between a blanket primary, which I understand is three states in addition having to California, and an open primary, where people can cross party lines.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: The blanket primary that California has and Washington and Alaska, allows people to go into the ballot box and just pick and choose, go into the ballot booth and just pick and choose among candidates from different parties. In an open primary, you can kind of pick the party's ballot as you're going into the booth, but you can't just skip all over and vote for a person regardless of which party.

GWEN IFILL: They're so similar, though, the courts argument is that parties have to protect the right to stand for what they stand for, and voters vote for what they believe. How can you make a distinction, or did the court bother to make a distinction between open primaries and blanket primaries?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: It didn't really make that distinction today. The dissent --- Justice John Paul Stevens - wrote a dissent joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg saying that those primaries certainly were open to debate now, whether or not they too were legal. But the decision focused on this kind of unique blanket primary and said that essentially it allowed voters to highjack a party's message and that it would handicap the party's ability to get its message across at a critical juncture when it was electing candidates. Instead people with no party affiliation could go into the booth and dictate what the party's message would be.

GWEN IFILL: It should be said that 60% of Californians who voted cast a vote in favor of this blanket primary not very long ago. There have only been like three elections where this has been applied. So what happens to their constitutional right to have an election the way they choose?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Well, it wouldn't even come up in this situation. Justice Stevens in his dissent said we should honor the way the state wants to conduct its elections and that this is a terrible infringement on state election law. But the majority focused on the rights of political parties, the first amendment rights of political parties to associate with who ever they want and to choose the message they want to get out there.

GWEN IFILL: Jan Crawford Greenburg, thank you very much.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Thank you.

FOCUS - BREAKING THE CODE

JIM LEHRER: Breaking the genetic code. Susan Dentzer of our health unit begins. The unit is a partnership with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

SUSAN DENTZER: At today's joint U.S. and British news conference, President Clinton, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the assembled scientists heralded the event as an unparalleled breakthrough.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. Without a doubt this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.

SUSAN DENTZER: By satellite, Prime Minister Blair called it the start of a new era when scientists could begin to fight human disease at its most basic genetic roots.

TONY BLAIR: Let us be in no doubt about what we are witnessing today, a revolution in medical science whose implications far surpass even the discovery of antibiotics; the first great technological triumph of the 21st century.

SUSAN DENTZER: The President then laid out where that revolution might lead, now and in the decades to come.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: With this profound new knowledge, humankind is on the verge of gaining immense new power to heal. Genome science will have a real impact on all our lives and even more on the lives of our children. It will revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases. In coming years, doctors increasingly will be able to cure diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes, and cancer by attacking their genetic roots.

SUSAN DENTZER: Flanking the President were representatives of the two groups that produced the two separate blueprints of the genome. One was Dr. Francis Collins, who heads the international public and private research consortium known as the Human Genome Project. Today it announced a working draft of the genome that was roughly 85% complete. The other was J. Craig Venter, President of the private U.S. firm Celera Genomics. It announced last April that it had decoded the entire genome and reported today that final assembly of its version was complete. The presence of both men marked an important symbolic truce in a long-running rivalry between the two groups to sequence the genome first. Collins spoke glowingly of Venter's contributions.

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: I congratulate him and his team on the work done at Celera, which uses an elegant and innovative strategy that is highly complementary to the approach taken by the public project. Much will be learned from a comparison of the two. I'm happy that today the only race we are talking about is the human race.

SUSAN DENTZER: In turn, Venter was equally complimentary of his former rivals, and of massive public investments in research that the private sector had built on.

J. CRAIG VENTER: The completion of the human genetic blueprint would not have been possible without the continued investment of the U.S. Government in basic research. I applaud the President's efforts and the work of Congress during the last several years in producing the largest funding increases to fuel the engines of basic science. At the same time, we could not overlook the investment of the private sector in research in America.

SUSAN DENTZER: Just what does it mean to have sequenced the genome? Most of us know that humans have 80,000 or more genes distributed along 23 pairs of chromosomes like these. We probably learned in school that these genes determine man of our features, such as whether our eyes are blue or brown. But what we may not have mastered is how genes produce these attributes or determine the body's other functions. Here's how that works. Our genes, copies of which are in most of our cells, are made up of DNA. As diagrammed by scientists, in its chemical structure DNA looks like a twisted ladder, or a double helix. The rungs of the DNA ladder are made up of four chemicals, whose names begin with the initials "a," "t," "g," and "c." These chemicals, or letters, pair up, and a total of 3.2 billion pairs make up our DNA. We don't know, at least yet, what the vast percentage of the DNA. But we do know that a small portion of our genes function like tiny factories. In a complicated way, the "a," "t," "g," and "c" chemicals in the DNA copy themselves many times over to produce the proteins that carry out most of the body's vital work. So when we talk about sequencing the entire human genome, we mean figuring out exactly how all three billion pairs of these letters are arrayed, in large part to make this protein-manufacturing process possible. Francis Collins says a whole new world of genetic research began to open up in the 1980's.

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Some visionary folks-- some people called them dreamers, some people called them nuts-- began to contemplate the idea that we might, in an organized fashion, actually try to map and sequence all of the human DNA, not 50 or 100 years from now, but in an organized effort maybe over the course of 15 or 20 years. That was very hotly debated.

SUSAN DENTZER: For one thing, these were the days before much of the labor- saving technology used to sequence the genome was even available, such as robots or very high-speed supercomputers. Stanford geneticist David Botstein says the costs seemed likely to reach billions of dollars before the job was done.

DAVID BOTSTEIN: Many scientists, including me, had real doubts. But at the same time, even the most dedicated opponents understood that actually knowing the whole genome was going to be in itself a very valuable, potentially revolutionary thing in biology.

SUSAN DENTZER: Botstein was among those eventually appointed to a scientific panel that drew up a plan to tackle the project. First, to gain more knowledge and skill, scientists would decode the genomes of simpler organisms, like the fruit fly, that still had plenty in common with humans' genetic makeup. Botstein headed a project to sequence the genome of one organism, the yeast.

DAVID BOTSTEIN: The idea was to take advantage of the fact that evolution has been very slow, relatively, and to sequence a few simple organisms with very small genomes where the genes are much better understood.

SUSAN DENTZER: In the meantime, the hope was that the technology to carry out gene sequencing would improve and costs would drop. After the plan was hammered out, the human genome project was officially launched. That's an international consortium of academic and other researchers led by the United States and Britain. Collins says the group's first task was to draw up a so-called map of the human genome.

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: If the genome is sort of like the United States, and each chromosome is a different state, it was to try to lay out where in fact are the major landmarks, the mountain ranges, the major cities, a few of the small towns.

SUSAN DENTZER: Literally that meant breaking all of human DNA up into sections that were roughly 35,000 letters long, then trying to figure out how these chunks were distributed along our chromosomes. With that job accomplished, Collins says the group turned to the tougher task of gene sequencing, or figuring out how each of the more-than three billion pairs of letters was arranged.

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: That is in many ways, you might imagine, a mind-numbing experience, and it is done primarily by automated instruments.

SUSAN DENTZER: In fact, by this point technology was advancing fast enough to make this sequencing possible. And it was about to take an even greater leap forward.

SPOKESMAN: So we basically, per day here, sequence 100,000 to 200,000 samples, each one giving us about 600 letters of genetic code, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

SUSAN DENTZER: Craig Venter, formerly a biochemist at the National Institutes of Health, was running a private genomics research institute in the mid- 1990's. One day he got a call out of the blue from a private company.

J. CRAIG VENTER: They had an exciting new technology, and they wanted me to see it, and they were also thinking of putting up all the money to sequence the genome, the human genome, and was I interested?

GWEN IFILL: With a combination of lasers and other high-tech tools, the machines could actually distinguish samples of DNA letter by letter, producing a sequence as long as several thousand letters in a three-hour run.

J. CRAIG VENTER: We spent a day looking at the prototype machines they had. By the end of that day, we had a plan to sequence thehuman genome within a two-year period.

GWEN IFILL: In effect, Venter and his backers had dreamed up a shortcut to sequencing the genome with the aid of automatic sequencers, supercomputers, and mathematical tools. The company they founded to do that was Celera Genomics.

J. CRAIG VENTER: We reasoned that we could take the chromosome, break it up into small pieces, sequence the 500 to 600 letters at a time, and then use the computer to basically solve a jigsaw puzzle.

GWEN IFILL: In 1998, Venter's group approached Francis Collins and offered to bring the new technology and tactics to work on the Human Genome Project. At the time, the consortium's own sequencing efforts seemed likely to take another ten years. But in the end, Venter and his colleagues were rebuffed. So Venter and his new company, Celera Genomics, went their own way. That culminated in Celera's announcement last April. The company had met its own two- year deadline and arguably stood to win the sequencing race.

SPOKESMAN: I think you'll find most people in this field will honestly tell you that would have been ten years away if it wasn't for Celera.

GWEN IFILL: How much the two versions of the genome differ will only be clear once the two are published in a scientific journal later this year. Collins and Venter said today that they'll also hold a historic joint conference, possibly next fall, at which scientists from all over the world will be invited to pore over both versions and attempt the critical work of identifying actual human genes. And both sides will also post their entire versions of the genome on the Internet. Researchers around the world are losing no time putting the new genomics knowledge to work. An especially fruitful area of research is looking for misspellings in genetic letters that can help cause disease. In fact, according to some estimates, 10,000 or more new drugs derived from genetic discoveries could be on the market in coming years. Even as scientists saluted that prospect today, they also raised concerns that the benefits of our growing genetic knowledge could be denied to some. And Collins warned that it could serve as a basis for denying health insurance coverage or other forms of discrimination.

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Maybe a couple of years ago you could say it was still up the track there and we could take our time. But it's bearing down on us and we ought to do the right thing here and pass those kinds of protections so that people will not be afraid to have genetic information that could be of enormous value to them a determinant for fear that it might be used against them.

GWEN IFILL: President Clinton agreed, underscoring how much the genome reflected our similarities more than our differences.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the Human Genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9% the same. What that means is that modern science has confirmed what we first learned from ancient fates: The most important fact of life on this earth is our common humanity.

JIM LEHRER: More now on the meaning of today's announcement from Dr. Rick Lifton, chairman of the genetics department at Yale University, and John Rennie, editor-in-chief of "Scientific American Magazine."

Mr. Rennie, how would you describe the importance of today's announcement?

JOHN RENNIE: This is certainly one of the greatest announcements of science in any of our life times, easily comparable to landing on the Moon, to the Manhattan Project. It's acolossal achievement of science and...

JIM LEHRER: We have -- can you hear me, Mr. Rennie? We can't hear you, at least I can't hear you. Let me go to Dr. Lifton and we'll come back to you, I promise. Dr. Lifton, you heard what I asked Mr. Rennie just now. What words would you use to describe the significance of this?

DR. RICHARD LIFTON: This is really a remarkable achievement. This promises to transform the way we think not just about medicine but about the very nature of who we are as human beings.

JIM LEHRER: Explain that. How does this change what we are as human beings and how could this do that?

DR. RICHARD LIFTON: Well, so we now, we used to think about ourselves in rather vague terms. Now that we have the dawn of the entire human genome sequence, much of the mystery will be removed. And from that perspective, the opportunity to understand why we have the particular features that we do, ranging from our height and weight to our susceptibility to different diseases will now become very possible. Moreover, the opportunity to understand why we are different from other species, why do we have opposable thumbs or why do we think the way we do and why is that different from even closely related species will become possible to understand.

JIM LEHRER: Well, make the connection in simple terms, if you could, doctor. Between all of those letters and that Susan Dentzer just showed us and what you just said, how do you get from those letters to that kind of information?

DR. RICHARD LIFTON: Well, unfortunately we can't do that today. But what we've been provided is the blue print. So if I could make an analogy, perhaps where we've been up until today in understanding human biology is much like where Christopher Columbus was when he set off to the new word. We didn't know how big the world -- we didn't how many continents there were, we didn't know what their shape was or how they were distributed. But once we knew what the overall map looked like we could chart in detail how to get from one place to another, and we understood that it was in fact a bounded problem, that figuring out that the world was really focused on one single map. Well, that's what we've achieved today with the sequencing of the human genome is we now understand what all of the pieces are. And what remains is a tremendous amount of work for the future, which will require us to figure out in precise detail how those subtle differences in the a's, g's, t's and c's, lead to differences as profound as giving us opposable thumbs or brains that are capable of consciousness.

JIM LEHRER: And will Rennie, you're back now.

JOHN RENNIE: Yes, thank you.

JIM LEHRER: So carry on from what Dr. Lifton was just say,, as to why that is significant to know all these things. How does that lead to great practical breakthroughs in medicine and elsewhere?

JOHN RENNIE: Well, the essence of what the genome project has done is, it's literally spelled out the genetic information of how to make a human being. Francis Collins has sometimes described the genome as basically being the instruction book for human being. And that's really what we have here. We now have a much better idea of how to make up the basic components of our cells and our whole bodies. Our genes are what give us the traits that we have, as the doctor was saying, our height, our weight in some ways, our coloration. But also some of our more interesting features of what make us healthy or what make us sick. So now that we have a more detailed genetic information about this, we also maybe have a much better understanding of how to manipulate those factors.

JIM LEHRER: Manipulate them for good. I mean the assumption is that all the that my us will be for good, is that right?

JOHN RENNIE: That's what we have to hope is the case. Naturally everybody will be against the evil manipulations of this. The tricky thing moving forward is going to be the ethical challenge of how to use this genomic information. Everybody worries about eugenics, nobody wants to live in a world where everybody looks the same.

JIM LEHRER: That's what eugenics is.

JOHN RENNIE: That's right.

JIM LEHRER: You want everybody blue eyed or whatever, you can have a child made to order kind of thing, right?

JOHN RENNIE: Exactly. Exactly. And of course the most horrific specter of eugenics was of course what we think of with the Nazis. So of course as we're moving into a sort of new genomic era, there's always the potential for making similar kinds of horrifying decisions. But it may well be that we don't have to worry so much about what the governments may be imposing on people, but actually what kinds of decisions we may be making at a consumer level. And let me actually be a tougher set of ethical dilemmas to solve.

JIM LEHRER: In other words, it's a society problem and eventually a political problem as much as it's going to be a scientific problem?

JOHN RENNIE: Exactly. That's why the sorts of legislation that are being discussed for genetic prejudices - it's good that that's being considered again.

JIM LEHRER: Dr. Lifton, would you agree that suddenly as of today that science is way ahead of the rest of society in knowing what to do about all this?

DR. RICHARD LIFTON: Well, I think it raises a critical issue. We are certainly going to have a flood of information that is going to have tremendous capacity to improve the health of our species. On the other hand, the critical element in information is how is it used. And unless we solve these issues of how is this information going to be used and to ensure that it's not used to the detriment of individuals, people could be put at risk. I'm much more optimistic, as I find it unfathomable, and I can't believe that as a society we won't solve these problems because the opportunity to improve health care is really quite remarkable.

JIM LEHRER: Doctor, let me go back just to one specific from a scientific area. Cancer, that awful word, that awful disease has been thrown around rather loosely since this genetic genome project began, that this might provide an answer to cancer. Explain how that might be possible.

DR. RICHARD LIFTON: Yes. Virtually every human disease including cancer has an inherited susceptibility, and we can recognize that simply from looking at our own families and seeing the particular diseases such as cancer or heart disease, run in families. So what we mean by that is that there's an inherited susceptibility that ultimately must be encoded in those a's, g's, c's and t's. We know that, as President Clinton said, the DNA sequence between any two individuals is 99.9% identical to one another. So out of the 3 billion base pairs, there are only about 3 million common variants that would distinguish the entire genomes of any two individuals. So we recognize that the inherited susceptibility to disease must lie in those relatively subtle variations in genes. So having this overall blueprint of the human genome, we will in short order be able to identify what all of the genes are within that DNA, within our genomes, and from that we'll be able to identify what the common variants are. And then it will really be like putting together a puzzle, figuring out which of these variants contribute to the inherited component of every disease. This is going to have a remarkable impact on every field of medicine.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Rennie, is that work already begun, are there researchers now going through his letters? And saying that may be the gene that says cancer is lying ahead?

JOHN RENNIE: Absolutely. This sort of work has been going on for quite some time. The emphasis on the idea of completing this portion of the genome project has in some ways overshadowed the fact that people have been working with the genetic information over years, and developing some understanding of let's say the rude its of the genetic basis of disease. So we've already seen quite a bit of work going on in developing new sorts of tests and narrowing down the types of new drugs that we could develop. We're just going to see a huge acceleration in all that work moving forward.

JIM LEHRER: Back to the potential versus the potential bad, I read somewhere today that somebody said think of this in terms of the atomic bomb in a way. It caused terrible tragedy of course when it was used, but the whole thing of nuclear power that came out of that, it's the same kind of dilemma?

JOHN RENNIE: I think that's a very fair comparison to make. We have so much potential for good that we can do with this genetic information. We really can change the nature of how sick people are, we can change the opportunities that are available for people. This can create whole new industries. And yet at the same time we have to watch out that we're not accidentally fallen prey to our own worst instincts.

JIM LEHRER: Dr. Lifton, what would you use in terms of past history to compare this with?

DR. RICHARD LIFTON: Well, I would characterize this as quite similar, the feeling is similar to when I had as a young boy watching the first Moon landing. This is really a remarkable event and I think great cause for scientific celebration.

JIM LEHRER: All right. Dr. Lifton and Mr. Rennie, thank you both very much.

FOCUS - GREEN POLITICS

JIM LEHRER: Now presidential politics-- the Green Party held its nominating convention in Denver this weekend. Betty Ann Bowser has our report.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: In the staging of their three-day convention, the greens pulled many of their moves right out of the playbooks of the two major political parties. There were speeches...

SPOKESMAN: And in this election, it is surely the Green Party that is going to be entitled to wear the label of the true reform party in this country. (Cheers)

BETTY ANN BOWSER: ...And a slickly produced video about their presidential candidate.

SPOKESMAN: The only thing that's ever going to clean up government is an aroused, informed, and dynamic public.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: There was a roll call of the states...

SPOKESMAN: Hawaii casts its four votes for the next President of the United States, one man who we can't thank enough for what he's done for all of us, Ralph Nader. (Cheers)

BETTY ANN BOWSER: ...And of course a balloon drop. But officials at the association of state Green Parties want any similarities to Republicans and Democrats to end there. Medea Benjamin is a Green Party candidate for the U.S. Senate in California.

MEDEA BENJAMIN: We're showing that you don't have to be a corporate party. We put on a great convention with no corporate money. And the Republicans and Democrats, they're taking million-dollar donations for their conventions.

SINGER: We want peace on earth -- healthy earth.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Frustration with the two major political parties is what has brought this diverse assortment of people together. Organizers say they include Republicans, Libertarians, Labor and Reform Party folks. But overwhelmingly the delegates here used to be Democrats. Dan Hamburg ran for governor of California two years ago on the Green Party ticket. But eight years ago he was elected to the U.S. Congress as a Democrat.

DAN HAMBURG: I was a flag-waving member, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Party, and I was proud to be part of the largest freshman class in the history of Congress, and proud to be part of the new administration that was going to bring in universal healthcare, was going to cut the military budget, was going to mean a better deal for working Americans, was going to reinvest in the cities. But it didn't happen. The last eight years have been a betrayal, and many of us feel not that we've left the Democrats, but that the Democratic Party has left us.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Tony Affigne is another former Democrat. He's a Latino delegate from Rhode Island, and is quick to correct what he says is a common misconception, that the greens are a one-issue party.

TONY AFFIGNE: There's a misunderstanding, there's a perception and I think fostered by the Democratic party-- and the Republican-- that Greens only care about the environment. The reality is the Green Party is the most progressive party on environmental questions, but the Green Party also is the most progressive of the major parties in terms of labor politics, in terms of civil rights, in terms of the political equality and social equality of people of color.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Ken Mathenia is a union worker at General Motors in Flint, Michigan. He and his wife, Jan, were at the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle last November, along with hundreds of other Green Party activists. They were protesting what they call unfair trade agreements that hurt workers in the United States and nations all around the world. (Applause) This weekend the Mathenias lodged their complaints by marking their ballots for Nader.

KEN MATHENIA: The Democrats at the upper levels of this country have become pretty much committed to the same policies as Republicans as far as the money goes, and I think they're both corrupted by the money right now at the top. It just seems like every time we turn around, the Democrats give labor another kick, you know, and labor another kick, and expect us to go along with the corporate line.

DEMONSTRATORS (Chanting): This is what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!

BETTY ANN BOWSER: If there is one thing that unified all of the delegates, it is their distrust and disgust with corporate America. About 200 people marched through downtown Denver on Saturday, protesting what they call economic injustice.

PROTESTOR: We're not here in protest against trade; we're here in protest against greed.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Jim Hightower is an author, radio talk show host, and former agriculture secretary from Texas.

JIM HIGHTOWER: This fervor in the countryside among working people who are being downsized, among people concerned about human rights around the world, among folks like family farmers who are being squeezed out by this global monopolistic power, people are in rebellion against this effort to enthrone corporate power as our sovereigns, and Ralph Nader has a unique ability to communicate that issue and to touch people, not only intellectually, but also in their gut and in their heart.

RALPH NADER: Thank you very much. (Cheers and applause)

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Consumer advocate Ralph Nader won the Green Party's nomination overwhelmingly yesterday, with just token opposition from two other candidates. Hamburg says Nader is a perfect fit for the Green Party.

HAMBURG: Ralph is kind of the anti- politician person. He's not a politician. He's been standing up for clean air, for clean water, for auto safety, for air safety, for clean food, for all the issues that have affected the lives of millions of Americans.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Four years ago, Nader also ran for President on the Green ticket.

SPOKESMAN: And here is Ralph! (Cheers and applause)

BETTY ANN BOWSER: But back then, he made few campaign appearances and raised just $5,000 in contributions. On election day he garnered less than 1% of the vote. This time things are different. He's campaigned in all 50 states, and has raised nearly a million dollars. A recent "Wall Street Journal" poll showed him with about 5% support nationwide, and 11% in the Midwest. With more and more union members supporting Nader in those key Midwestern states, some analysts are saying Nader could be a spoiler for Gore's chances for the White House. It's a notion that doesn't trouble either Nader or his supporters.

SPOKESMAN: Why don't you ask al gore, are you worried about defeating Ralph Nader?

SPOKESMAN: Well, they've taken to labeling Nader a spoiler. Well, yeah, he's a spoiler-- he's spoiling their little cozy game of business as usual. The powers that be are not worried that Ralph Nader is a spoiler; they're worried that he's a winner. (Cheers and applause)

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Hightower's optimism notwithstanding, most delegates to the convention admit there is very little chance Mr. Nader will win in November, and they say a major reason is because he has been excluded from the television debates. It's an issue that Nader himself raises again and again.

RALPH NADER: The debates have now become a central part of the election process, for better or for worse. Millions of voters apparently make up their minds on what they hear in these debates. To shut out legitimate third- party candidates from these debates is to limit the competitive Democratic process on which the American electoral system is supposed to be built.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Ballot access is another issue. Nader hopes to make it on at least 48 state ballots, but he currently has only qualified in 20 states and the District of Columbia. And finally, the decentralized Greens have no national organizational structure to help support the candidate, but Hightower says that doesn't matter. He says Nader's candidacy is catching fire with grassroots America.

JIM HIGHTOWER: 'Cause we're going to have the lowest turnout probably in American history if it's just Al Gore and George W. Bush. It's a money-soaked, made-for- television, corporate-driven, issue-avoiding snoozer of an election, but here comes the big surprise, someone like Ralph Nader who is going to suddenly turn the campaign hotter than high school love.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Immediately after accepting the Green Party nomination, Nader headed out to California to try and turn up the heat, where polls show he has about 7% of the vote.

JIM LEHRER: We're planning a Newsmaker interview with Ralph Nader on Friday.

CONVERSATION

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, more of our continuing coverage of the privacy issue. Elizabeth Farnsworth talks with the author of a new book on the subject.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Jeffery Rosen has been warning about current threats to privacy in a series of articles and in a new book, "The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America." Rosen is Associate Professor at the George Washington University Law School, and legal affairs editor of "The New Republic." Thanks for being with us.

JEFFREY ROSEN: Thank you so much for having me.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Is privacy more at risk now than in the past?

JEFFREY ROSEN: As thinking and writing and reading and gossip and sex and health care increasingly take place in cyberspace, there's a growing danger that intimate bits of personal information, originally disclosed in one context, may be monitored and recorded and taken out of context in the future. So, for example, if I spend a decade gossiping in a chat group, I might find that a decade of my former postings may be misinterpreted years later, and I might be comfortable joking about intimate information with my virtual friends...

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Let me interrupt you right here. How would that happen? If you're in a chat room and it's on the Internet, you mean it's there forever and ever.

JEFFREY ROSEN: So this is the story of James Rutt, the Internet executive who tried to erase his own past. He'd spent a decade gossiping in the well, and all of a sudden he's appointed head of Netscape Solutions, and he realizes that a decade of his dirty jokes and foolish musings about his weight problem may be used by his business competitors. Now, fortunately for Rutt, he uses technology called scribble that allowed him to go back and erase a decade of his own past. And one of my goals in the book is to try to think through technological and legal and political solutions that allow us to reconstruct in cyberspace the kind of privacy, anonymity, and pseudonymity and opacity that all of us take for granted in real space.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay, we'll get to solutions in a minute, but first, the nature of the problem. So... Chat rooms. What else on the Internet is a problem?

JEFFREY ROSEN: Privacy protects us against the indignity of being judged out of context. So in a world where all of my reading habits, for example, can be monitored-- not only the magazines that I read, but the amount of time that I spend skimming them can be monitored by all-seeing advertising networks; where my email can be resurrected from employers even after it's deleted-- people are learning that the "delete" button doesn't make it go away, it just lurks there and can be retrieved years later; where my quickstream data can be resurrected: All of us can be misjudged on the basis of isolated bits of personal information, and I make a case that there's a difference between information and knowledge. If all you know about me is the latest book that I read or the latest music that I downloaded on the Internet, you might think I'm one kind of person, whereas in fact I assure you I'm much more complicated and interesting in all my wondrous dimensions, and, you know, my friends know this and my students know this and my family knows this. They all know me in different contexts. I present different parts of myself to each of these people. But we've just met, and you wouldn't be able to e me whole. Privacy protects us from the danger of confusing information with knowledge.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Now there are other problems that you see, other threats to privacy right now. What are some of those other threats?

JEFFREY ROSEN: I was struck by the fact, in writing this book, that the part of the Starr investigation that Monica Lewinsky was most upset about was the retrieval of her unsent love letters from her home computer. She said, "What a violation. I felt like I wasn't a citizen of this country." 200 years ago, if you asked the framers of the Bill of Rights what was the paradigm case of an unreasonable search or seizure forbidden by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, they would've pointed to the example of private diaries. Indeed, there was a famous case in the 18th century where John Wilkes, the great British rogue and Bob Packwood-like character who published an 18th-century "Drudge Report," had his diary seized by Lord Halifax, the Ken Starr figure, who broke into his desk drawers and seized his diaries, and he objected, "my most intimate thoughts have been exposed." He sued in trespass, and he won 1,000 in damages, a ruinous amount in its day, and his case was galvanizing to the colonists. So I tried to trace in my book the slow, sad, almost imperceptible eroding of these precious constitutional protections, so that private papers, which once had the highest degree of protection, are now vulnerable to involuntary exposure.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You know, I can tell here, and it was very clear in the book, this is really important to you. You... This is... Privacy is tremendously important to you, isn't it?

JEFFREY ROSEN: I feel very passionate about this subject in a way that I haven't with other legal subjects, partly because it's so rich intellectually to understand this evolution, but also I know how important it is to me personally to express myself and even to write a book. In the process of writing the book, I was reminded about how important it is to have backstage areas, spaces where we can let down our hair, share rough drafts with friends, have half-baked arguments talked out of ourselves, and basically allow ourselves to refine the arguments that are necessary for more public presentation. Without these backstage areas in the workplace and at home, why, creativity, individuality, eccentricity, even love are impossible. If I can't disclose parts of myself to my most intimate friends that I withhold from the rest of the world, I won't disclose those confidences to begin with. There's nothing more important than privacy for leading fully self-actualized lives.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The title of the book is so interesting, and it's part of your concern here. What does the "Unwanted Gaze" come from?

JEFFREY ROSEN: The "Unwanted Gaze": It comes from a beautiful doctrine in Jewish law called Hezzekh Reah, which means "the injury caused by seeing," and this arises in the law governing what happens when your neighbor puts up a window overlooking you in a common courtyard. According to medieval authorities, you not only have the right to order that the window be removed, but also that your neighbor not gaze upon you, because Jewish law recognizes that it's uncertainty about whether or not we're being observed that causes us to lead more constricted lives in private places. Even the smallest intrusion by the unwanted gaze causes damage, said Jewish authorities, because the injury caused by seeing cannot be measured.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What do you say about the argument that if I have nothing to hide, I don't mind that people know what I'm doing?

JEFFREY ROSEN: I want to argue against this with every passion that I have in my being. Privacy is not primarily about secrecy; it's about opacity. It's about the ability to protect parts of ourselves in different contexts. I would be... even if I read the most innocent books imaginable, if all you know about me is that I've just listened to the music of Richard Strauss, for example, whichI like, and it's a little weird, you'll think I'm that kind of person. I'm really not; there's much more going on to me than that; and that's why it's very wrong to say that the answer to misjudgment is just more information, because information is no substitute for the genuine knowledge that can only emerge slowly over time.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So what can be done about this? I know there are lots of... This could take some time, but technical solutions, for example, talking about the Internet.

JEFFREY ROSEN: There are technological solutions. There's been a range of programs with "Austin Powers"-like names-- ziplip, zero knowledge, disappearing ink-- that can enable me to cover my electronic tracks, send anonymous email, and browse the web anonymously. Even more importantly, they allow us to express ourselves pseudonymously, so I can reveal part of myself. I can tell one website that I'm over 18 or I have green eyes, and not tell them my actual identity. The problem with these technologies-- and they're very helpful, and they're exploding every day-- is that they have a kind of "spy versus spy"-like mentality. Right now it's not really socially acceptable to act like Maxwell Smart every time you take to the web. So although it's important to inform ourselves, I think technology is only one of the many options.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What other options? Legal options?

JEFFREY ROSEN: There are legal options. Congress could pass laws prohibiting information gathered for one purpose from being disclosed from another without the consent of the individual concerned. Double Click, the nation's largest advertising broker, got into tremendous trouble when it tried to link our actual identities with our online and offline browsing habits because people in America don't want to leave like citizens in East Germany, where we have, you know, dossiers of all of our most intimate activities. But my belief, in the end, is it's a range of options that necessary, is that one of the most important is politics. People have to be persuaded about why privacy is important and they have to care about it. It was politics that persuaded Double Click to stop compiling its dossiers. It was politics that persuaded Real Networks, the largest music purveyor and jukebox on the net, to stop collecting unique identification numbers that linked my actual identity with my music preferences or gave it that potential. It was politics that forced Intel to remove the unique chips from its word processors that made it possible to link every document that I type with my actual identity. As long as people care about privacy, we can stop the surveillors in their tracks.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, Jeffery Rosen, thank you very much.

JEFFREY ROSEN: Thank you so much for having me.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: And, again, the major stories of this Monday. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Miranda ruling, and threw out California's blanket primary system. And scientists said they have finished a rough map of the human genetic code, or genome. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.