The Canadian government is planning to investigate allegations that Falun Gong members in Chinese prisons are being murdered and their organs sold to transplant patients. Former cabinet minister David Kilgour and a respected human rights lawyer, David Matas, spent two months investigating the startling claims and have documented them in a 60-page report. "The allegations, if true, would represent a grotesque form of evil which, despite all the depravations humanity has seen, would be new to this planet," they say. The Chinese government banned Falun Gong as a subversive sect in 1999 and has imprisoned large numbers of its supporters.
The two men acknowledge that they have no eyewitness evidence, but from interviews and careful analysis of publicly available information, they conclude that thousands of people have been murdered. China has very few voluntary organ donors and relies on harvesting organs from about 1600 prisoners executed each year. But since 1999 -- the year of the crack-down on the…
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Disgraced Korean stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk has admitted that he ordered subordinates to falsify his cloning research. But he has insisted at his trial for embezzlement and violation of bioethics laws that his colleagues should share the blame. Dr Hwang told his staff to make it appear that results were based on 11 embryonic stem cell lines, rather than the two he was actually working on. And it appears that even these two were faked by a junior researcher without his knowledge. They were stem cells from IVF embryos, not clones. "It was definitely wrong," Hwang testified about the faked scientific papers. "I have no intention to escape the overall responsibility, but I feel differently about the view that all responsibility should lie with me as one of over 30 authors".
The lessons of the Hwang case are bitterly disputed in the US, where many scientists are pressing for Federal restrictions on funding for human embryonic stem cell…
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Neurologists are thrilled at the chance to examine the brain of an American man who "woke up" after 19 unresponsive years in a state of minimal consciousness. An article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation features images of the brain of Terry Wallis, now 42, who skidded off a small bridge in a pick-up truck back in 1984 and woke up in 2003. Although he is still severely impaired, physically and mentally, he is clearly recovering. He recently told his family that he was "proud" to be alive. It appears that his brain is healing itself by forming new neural connections, although what actually spurred his brain into new activity is still a mystery.
Although his case sounds remarkably like Terri Schiavo's, doctors say that Mr Wallis's injuries were less severe. During his 19 years of darkness, he never spoke but he was occasionally responsive and appeared to be aware of the presence of other people. Now he is…
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Oregon and California are developing "business clusters for surrogacy" which attract clients from other American states and Canada and other countries because pregnancy for profit is legal there. California, with 50 fertility clinics and the world's oldest surrogacy agency, is a global leader, but Oregon is also an attractive venue for people who come from states or countries where surrogacy is illegal. According to an article in The Oregonian, about 25,000 children have been born to surrogates in the US over the past 30 years, with about a quarter of these in the past five years. High-profile surrogacies for actress Angela Bassett and for TV host Joan Lunden have helped to spark demand. It is expensive: the cost of having a child with a surrogate mother can be as much as US$70,000 -- and most couples have already spent another $70,000 on unsuccessful IVF treatment.
This has been a bumper week for stories about the unintended effects of artificial reproduction -- mostly from the UK, where, because of a high degree of government regulation, exceptional cases surface more often in the media.
Louise Brown a mother: The world's test-tube baby, Louise Brown, is expecting a child of her own, according to reports in the UK media. Ms Brown was born in 1978 and since then more than 3 million babies have been born around the world with artificial reproductive technologies.
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Artificial sperm: Researchers in the UK have produced functional sperm from mouse embryonic stem cells. Seven mice were born as a result, of which six survived to adulthood. Three had serious abnormalities. The lead researcher, Professor Karim Nayernia, says that the development will help scientists to understand how sperm develop and to explore what causes male infertility. Theoretically the procedure could be used to create a baby without a male.
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Last week there was no issue of BioEdge. Our apologies.
The Editor was felled by the flu.
DOLLY'S CLONER BACKS DESIGNER BABIES
A book on the cloning debate by the world's most prominent spokesman for therapeutic cloning is being launched this week. Ian Wilmut's After Dolly: The Uses and Misuses of Human Cloning", written with the science editor of the London Telegraph, reviews current scientific and social policy.
In an interview with the London Times, Dr Wilmut contends that it might be immoral not to use cloning in order to produce disease-free babies. "We shouldn't be so frightened of these technologies," he says. Although he thinks that it is unlikely that qualities like intelligence can be modified, he is not opposed to it in theory. "If in the future people were confident enough I think it would deserve serious consideration," he muses.
Last year the British Medical Association abandoned a decades-old policy of opposition to assisted suicide and euthanasia in a controversial vote at its annual meeting. But its fling with neutrality ended abruptly last week. Members at this year's meeting voted to reverse the decision by a margin of nearly 2 to 1.
Dr Michael Wilks, the chairman of the BMA ethics committee, and a supporter of euthanasia, glumly attributed the change of heart to ballots carried out by three major doctors' associations which showed that a clear majority opposed changing the law on euthanasia in Britain. The result was a triumph by the lobby group Care Not Killing, an alliance of church, palliative care and disability groups. Its campaign director, Dr Peter Saunders, commented that "If good palliative care is provided, requests for euthanasia are extremely rare. We should be doing all we can to make sure that this care is made more widely available."
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Lie detectors which scan the brain and not trembling hands and racing pulses are a new challenge for bioethics, and especially its newer sub-speciality, neuroethics. Two American companies have been launched to market the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in identifying deceit. The companies, No Lie MRI and Cephos, say that their goal is to exonerate the innocent and to replace the widely discredited polygraph machine. Their machines detect lies about 90% of the time, they claim.
Despite far more sophisticated technology and promising experimental work, there are reservations. Statisticians complain that interpretations of brain scans may be questionable or yield results which are statistically insignificant. Ethicists have even more gripes. Detecting laboratory lies, they point out, is quite different from real-life lies. A technical failure could send someone to death row.
When do politicians lose the right to medical privacy? For Israelis, this is hardly a theoretical question. When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon collapsed with a stroke in January, the nation was almost paralysed while he lay unconscious. A senior neurologist at Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem, Professor Avi Reches, contended at a recent seminar that the public's right to know about a leader's health is more important than his or her right to privacy. He proposed that a statutory body of physicians should be created to decide if a prime minister is capable of continuing at the tiller.
How doctors dealt with another PM was the centre of different debate. Dr Ofer Grosbard, a clinical psychologist, has just written a book alleging that the late Menachem Begin suffered from manic depression. He criticised Begin's colleagues for failing to disclose his weakness even though it had impaired his ability to do his job.
