Former BBC producer Ray Gosling made the dramatic claim earlier this year that he had euthanased one of his numerous gay lovers more than 20 years ago. “I killed someone once. He was a young chap, he had been my lover and he got AIDS… I picked up the pillow and smothered him until he was dead. The doctor came back and I said ‘He's gone’. Nothing more was ever said.”

There was a great hoo-haa in the media over his teary reminiscences and the police immediately interrogated him. It turns out that probably Mr Gosling did no such thing and he will be charged, not with murder, but with wasting police time. A Crown Prosecution Service spokeswoman said there is “sufficient evidence” to prove he was lying. The Police are said to be furious that the BBC did not check out the story. ~ Daily Mail, Aug 20

An 84-year-old retired Scottish doctor will not be prosecuted for assisting a suicide. Dr Libby Wilson, a member of Friends At The End (FATE), was arrested last September after multiple sclerosis sufferer Cari Loder, took her own life using a helium cylinder and a hood. Police indicated that Dr Wilson did give the woman some advice but that it was not significant in carrying out the suicide. Dr Wilson was “unrepentant” and jeered, “What jury would have convicted me?” ~ Scotsman, Aug 17

A new right-to-die society has sprung up in the UK. The Society for Old Age Rational Suicide (SOARS) wants to press the case for assisted suicide for people who are not terminally ill. “After eight or nine decades, many people rightly decide that their lives have been fully lived, and now they have a life which, for them, has finally become too long,” its website declares.

The leader of the group is 79-year-old Michael Irwin, who is now being dubbed “Dr Death” by the British media. He is a controversial figure who was deregistered as a doctor after he helped a friend to die in 2005. He admits having helped several people to commit suicide. ~ London Telegraph, Aug 16

However, the Dutch have decided to actively discourage circumcision rather than to ban it, as that could drive the procedure underground. About 15,000 boys are circumcised each year.

On the other hand African countries are actively encouraging circumcision because trials in 2007 in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa showed that it dramatically reduced the risk of infection with HIV/AIDS. According to a report in the BMJ, 14 countries in southern Africa are promoting circumcision with radio and television campaigns.

In Swaziland, where HIV prevalence is 45%. circumcision is even regarded as “crucial to the survival of the state”. Botswana plans to circumcise all boys by 2012. Even Rwanda, where HIV prevalence is only 3%, is promoting it as a cost-saving public health measure.

However, the Dutch doctors are sceptical of the African data. They believe that while it might delay infection, it will not prevent it. They also say that there are some complications which cannot be ethically justified for a “medically futile” procedure.

In the UK, Australia and the US, the trend is away from circumcision. The Australasian Association of Paediatric Surgeons,  for instance, describes circumcision as "inappropriate and unnecessary" but allowable in children over 6 months old when parents "hold a very strong opinion.” ~ BMJ, Aug 17  

“Equality is an ideal born of the vice, or one of the seven deadly sins, of envy. It has no intrinsic value but panders to our vicious nature to be envious of others…

“Equality has no intrinsic value. Our commitment should be to the lives of individual people not to human ideals like equality.

“Equality is a dominant moral ideal in contemporary society. Egalitarianism is the stated principle for the [National Health Service}: equal treatment for equal need. Equality might be a good rule of thumb but it should not be a final regulative ideal. “ ~ Julian Savulescu’s blog, June 17

Heeding his summons, Eran Klein, of Oregon Health and Sciences University, has published an article in the journal Neuroethics entitled “Is There a Need for Clinical Neuroskepticism?”

“It is far from clear that a future world in which everyone wears neurospectacles is the best one available to us. Neuroscience has changed the way we understand ourselves and no doubt will continue to do so, often for the better. But it provides just one way to encounter the world. Enveloping ourselves in a discourse of the ‘neuro’ — though perhaps seductive at times — can also crowd out other valuable ways of talking about and understanding ourselves and our place in the world. Sometimes talk of neurons, synapses, and circuits must give way to talk of open futures, distributive justice, and perfectionism. A healthy dose of neuroskepticism may be just what’s needed for medicine to travel along neurotechnology’s golden road.” ~ Neuroethics, Aug 17

The German medical community’s considerable efforts to come to terms with the Nazi past make this omission incomprehensible, say 81 signatories to an open letter.

The editor countered that a previous short article had mentioned Sewering’s Nazi past. He also said the German Medical Association and the Deutsches Ärzteblatt had tried hard to shed light on the Nazi period by  commissioning independent research projects.

Professor Sewering was a member of both the Nazi Party and the SS. He began work in a lung hospital for disabled children near Munich in 1942. Between June 1943 and February 1945 he sent at least nine children to another hospital known for euthanasia. Five of them died there from malnutrition. However, witnesses accused him of involvement in the intentional starvation and drugging of over 900 mentally and physically disabled patients.

After the war, he became an official in the German and Bavarian Medical Associations and was president of the German Medical Association from 1973 to 1978. His Nazi past emerged in 1993 when he sought to become president of the World Medical Association. He failed but remained an honoured member of the national association and received many distinctions. ~ BMJ, Aug 16

University authorities cited “problems involving data acquisition, data analysis, data retention, and the reporting of research methodologies and results” but gave few details. However, one of his research assistants told the Cronicle of Higher Education that “the professor was reporting bogus data and … aggressively pushed back against those who questioned his findings or asked for verification”.

Apparently his colleagues complained to the Universtiy when they noticed that Professor Hauser fabricated responses made by rhesus monkeys when he tested whether they could recognise speech patterns.

Professor Hauser told The New York Times, “I acknowledge that I made some significant mistakes”. He said that he was “deeply sorry for the problems this case had caused to my students, my colleagues and my university.” ~ New York Times, Aug 20  

“The loss associated with being donor conceived is something that I will carry for the rest of my life, and that to deliberately create a human being with that loss is unethical,” Ms Greenwalt wrote recently on her blog, Confessions of a Cryokid.

All she knows about her father is that he is 49, attended college, and has brown hair and greenish eyes. She knows a few medical details, thanks to a recent update sent by her father to the Xytex sperm bank in Augusta, Georgia. “He knows I'm looking for him — and he doesn't want to make contact,” Greenawalt said.

Ms Clark found her father fairly quickly. However, their communication “has been pretty much nonexistent”, and they have not met face-to-face. "I still wonder about him," she added. "There's so much about him I still don't know."

US sperm banks are increasingly offering identity-release policies, in which donors agree to allow their offspring to contact them once they reach age 18. However, many donors still choose to remain anonymous. A past president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies, Dr Jamie Grifo of New York University's Fertility Center, told AP that it is not a good idea. "It may not be a popular point of view, but when these decisions are made by donor and a parent, the child doesn't have a say," he said. "If the contract is for it to be anonymous, it should remain anonymous, and the child just has to deal with that." ~ AP, Aug 16

Mark Schlissel, dean of biological sciences, said he disagreed with the department’s ruling that advance approval for testing was required from physicians, and that the testing should be done in clinical labs with special licences rather than by university technicians. He also argued that the project should be exempted from the state rules because it was an educational exercise.

Privacy advocates and ethicists had criticised the test as a disturbing use of genetic data. Some students felt that they were being quietly coerced into participating, and that their saliva samples and resulting personal information would not be sufficiently protected. ~ LA Times, Aug 13

Christopher Centeno, the medical director of the company, is ready for a fight. He disputes the FDA’s jurisdiction. Since the company uses a patient’s own cells, as IVF clinics do, it is none of the FDA’s business.

Both sides realise that the case could be a landmark decision. Conventional stem cell researchers are wary of shady operators who claim therapeutic benefits for stem cells without much research. Douglas Sipp, of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, worries about what will happen if Centeno’s company wins in the courts. "Companies would likely feel empowered to ignore requirements for demonstrable safety and efficacy of autologous medicinal products, creating an 'anything goes' atmosphere," he told Nature.

And Centeno agrees: "If we win, the entire regulatory structure for autologous cell processing, with or without culture, will be rewritten such that any physician using good practices and treating patients responsibly can use stem cells as part of his or her medical practice," he says. ~ Nature, Aug 17

Incentives such as gifts, discounts or loans would be banned together with advertising using “before and after” shots of breast enlargements, nose jobs and tummy tucks.

The Australian Health Ministers' Advisory Council says there is a “disturbing trend” in young people seeking cosmetic surgery and treatments such as Botox, liposuction and laser therapy. “Demand for such procedures is fuelled by lifestyle choices to enhance physical appearance and boost confidence, rather than medical need,” the report states.

At the moment, any registered doctor can advertise as a cosmetic surgeon. The report recommends that only doctors formally trained in plastic surgery be allowed to describe themselves as cosmetic surgeons. ~ Sydney Morning Herald, Aug 15

According to the New York Times, until now the presence of the disease could only be confirmed after an autopsy, although it begins ten or more years before symptoms appear. But a simple spinal tap could predict whether someone has the progressive and incurable brain disease and identify them as potential subjects for research into cures. “This is what everyone is looking for, the bull’s-eye of perfect predictive accuracy,” said Dr Steven DeKosky, dean of the University of Virginia medical school.

The news was widely reported in the media and shot to the top of the most-read articles in the Times. The conumdrums of a screening test for Alzheimer’s were clear to everyone. Would healthy people want to know that they have a disease for which there is no cure? How would they react?

For researchers, the benefits are obvious. It would be far more efficient to test potential treatments on people in the initial stage of the disease. In an accompanying editorial, two experts declared that spinal taps may become a routine “screening test to identify clinically healthy individuals at risk”. This would be helpful in developing “early application of treatments to delay onset of symptoms or slow progression of cognitive impairments”.

Bioethicist Jonathan Moreno, of the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out in The New Republic that the existence of an accurate and relatively simple test creates many policy problems. As many as 5.1 million Americans may have Alzheimer’s. How will that affect their health insurance? How will it affect families? Will it lead to suicide or will it encourage people to put their affairs in order? ~ New York Times, Aug 9

Harvard professor Marc D. Hauser has persuasively argued that no action is inherently wrong. "We generally do not commit wrong acts because we recognize that they are wrong and because we do not want to pay the emotional price of doing something we perceive as wrong," he says. As an evolutionary biologist, he is fascinated by the idea of evil and thinks that his research can shed light on its origin and its attraction. “I believe that science, and scientists, have an important role to play in shaping the moral agenda. We have an obligation to use facts and reason to guide what we ought to do,” he contended forcefully in a recent essay on The Edge.

Unfortunately, Professor Hauser has just taken a year-long leave after Harvard found evidence of faked results in some of his research. What sparked the investigation was a 2002 paper in the journal Cognition on whether monkeys learn rules. It is now being formally retracted because the data do not support the findings.

This is not the only paper under a cloud. Last month the prestigious British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B published a correction to one of Hauser’s papers and now Science is looking at a 2007 paper.

“This retraction creates a quandary for those of us in the field about whether other results are to be trusted as well, especially since there are other papers currently being reconsidered by other journals as well,” Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told the Boston Globe.  “If scientists can’t trust published papers, the whole process breaks down.”

Professor Hauser has been one of Harvard’s most popular teachers and is currently working on a new book with the provisional title, “Evilicious: Explaining Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.’ ~ Boston Globe, Aug 10

She said that while her childhood was not normal, her life now is. “I had a normal conception and pregnancy despite my abnormal childhood. And early yesterday, my husband and I had a baby boy ‘the normal way,’ proving (I hope) that I’m just like everyone else,” she said.

Comeau, a journalist for the Boston Globe, said she wrote about her story to help others learn about IVF - at the risk of her own privacy. “I follow the same principle my parents did: If my story helps couples or families learn about in-vitro fertilization, then the loss of privacy is worthwhile. People who have fertility issues deserve to know they can have healthy, normal babies,” she wrote. ~ Boston Globe, Aug 6

At the ceremony in July the university’s president Lazare Poamé, a chief proponent of studies in bioethics in the mid-1990s, described the installation as “one of the greatest intellectual events in the history of this university”. ~ University World News, Aug 8

The study, sponsored by San Diego’s United States Naval Medical Centre, was designed to test whether a drug designed for treating Tylenol overdoses could also be used to reduce the harmful effects of traumatic brain injury, such as brain function problems and balance loss. It is not clear whether anyone was hurt as a result of administration of the drug. The US Navy is also conducting an inquiry into both alleged research misconduct and potential violations to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. All research has been frozen for the time being.

The delay has incensed Congressman Patrick Kennedy, a Rhode Island Democrat, who has been briefed privately on the study. He said the preliminary results suggest the treatment could be helpful. “The irony is that the safeguards [to protect human test subjects] are blocking, it seems to me, the quick implementation of an intervention that could help mitigate the disabilities that result from the signature wound of the war,’’ said Kennedy. Kennedy is urging the Department of Defense to release the study or arrange for its review by a panel of neuroscientists who can judge whether the findings warrant further investigation. ~ Boston Globe, Aug 3