Hi there,

Before I forget, there will be no BioEdge next week, as its staff are on holiday. Back on October 16!

Bioethics stories seem to come in waves. Sometimes it’s stem cells, then euthanasia, then organ donation. This week, it’s institutional abuse and lack of informed consent.

From Bulgaria comes a report on homes for mentally disabled children. It makes harrowing reading. In a country which is a member of the EU, mentally-disabled children have been allowed to starve to death in orphanages. And then from Denmark comes a report about lobotomies. These were banned there in the 1980s, but not before 300 mentally disabled children had the discredited operation.

But the most shameful of these stories comes from Guatemala. In the 1940s American public health officials deliberately infected nearly 700 men and women with syphilis without their consent. Worst of all, those overseeing the project were fully aware that this breached ethical standards. An American researcher uncovered the experiments in some dusty archives.

President Obama has been on the phone to his counterpart in Guatemala apologising for these violations of human rights. So he should.

Cheers,
Michael Cook
Editor

 

Hi there,

Some time ago I reviewed a book by David Benatar, a South African utilitarian, whose view of life was so bleak that the headline was “the ultimate miserabilist”. The theme of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, is that we all would be better off had we never existed. As the old Jewish joke goes, "Life is so terrible, it would have been better never to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand!"

It turns out that the same utilitarian argument can be applied to animals. Jeff McMahan recently argued in the New York Times (see below) that carnivores cause such dire suffering in the animal world that we (homo sapiens) should organise their extinction as soon as possible.

I highlight this only to suggest that the “felicific calculus” of utilitarianism can produce peculiar answers. The ultimate utilitarian, Peter Singer, has become the guiding light of the animal rights movement because he wants to decrease suffering in chicken farms and laboratories. However, the same principle also leads to McMahan’s extinction idea.

It seems to me that utilitarian thinking, however compassionate it may sound, has a dark side. Taken to its logical extreme, the best way to eliminate the suffering of living beings is to eliminate the living beings. Does this say something about utilitarian arguments for euthanasia? Should we look elsewhere for an answer to the perennial problem of pain?

Cheers,
Michael Cook
Editor

Hi there,

Journalists are amateur bioethicists. Not just yours truly, but all of us who supply the news. And sometimes journalists have their own agenda. Another instance of this came to the fore this week in the UK. Ray Gosling, a veteran broadcaster and gay rights activist, was found guilty of wasting police time by fabricating a cock-and-bull on-air confession about mercy-killing a lover with AIDS some time ago.

It turns out that the story – which cost British taxpayers a pretty penny to investigate – was a complete fabrication. The 71-year-old told the court that “I would have done it. I would have, the tenses were wrong.”

As the judge pointed out, a bit more than the tenses were wrong: “You know the power of television celebrity and the trust the public and television producers have in you. You have to match this with the responsibility of identifying and telling the truth to the public.”

But, to my mind, the real scoundrels in this fantasy were the BBC producers whom Gosling told about the “murder” and did nothing. For them it was just an appealingly sensational yarn. They did not shrink from collaborating with Gosling’s aggressive promotion of euthanasia. Isn’t that evidence of unabashed prejudice on the part of the BBC, Britain’s premier source of news?

Any comments from the UK?

Cheers,

Michael Cook
Editor

Hi there,

Occasionally we present a special issue. This week it is an interview with Roberto Abadie, the author of The Professional Guinea Pig: Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human Subjects. Apparently there is a subculture of Americans who make their living by swallowing pills and opening their veins for drug researchers. It’s risky and you can’t get rich, but it pays the bills.

I found it a bit disturbing. Tell us what you think.

Cheers,
Michael Cook
Editor

PS – the regular BioEdge newsletter will appear later this week, as usual.

Hi there,

Some time ago, I recall writing an article about a loopy proposal to licence parents. There were too many incompetent parents around, ran the argument. Bringing a child into the world was a privilege, not a right, and the government ought to issue licences to people interested in having a family.

I see that the idea has surfaced again. A British sociologist recently contended on the BBC that unfit parents should be sterilised (see below). "Perpetrators should be prevented from producing any more children and from multiplying their victims," he said.

And the grumpy old professor isn’t alone. A German and British academic have just written a paper (see below) in which they argue that if gay and lesbian reproduction is regulated because it makes use of technology, how about natural reproduction? There are too many fecund and feckless females out there. They need to be regulated and indoctrinated with compulsory parenting classes.

Such proposals seem mostly daft, in my view, but they have a grain of sense. Children are best cared for within a stable marriage. Once that breaks down, as it has, inevitably there will be calls for the government to step in. The notion that the state can’t regulate personal morality evolves into the feeling that the state has to regulate morality if the person won’t.

Any ideas?

Michael Cook
Editor

Hi there,

Have you heard the one about the two doctors who started a fist fight while their patient was going into labour? Unhappily, it is not a joke. Two doctors in a hospital in Sicily went at it hammer and tongs recently, forgetting that they had to care for a woman who was giving birth. The gynaecologist punched his hand through a window after another doctor grabbed his collar.

The baby may have suffered heart and brain damage as a result. The doctors and the hospital deny that the infant’s problems have anything to do with their disagreement, but the Italian health minister was so upset that he paid a visit to the mother in her hospital bed.

An inconsequential story? In some ways, yes. It hardly represents the Italian health system, which has one of the world's lowest rates of maternal mortality. But it does remind us that doctors, like the rest of us, are human. They have passions like anger, greed, and ambition. Some of them lie, cheat and plagiarise. Very few of them, to be sure, but some. Stories like these are a salutary reminder that the public should never give into a “white coat syndrome” and blindly assume the good faith, ethical integrity and objectivity of doctors and scientists. Laws should not be drafted on the assumption that doctors will almost never abuse their privileged position or will not allow financial gain to trump ethics. 

Cheers,

Michael Cook
Editor

Hi there,

Just when you thought that it was safe to relax, stem cells are back. Not in the best of company, mind you. No one like lawyers, and settling a passionate debate about ethics in a courtroom seems unfair and underhanded. Isn’t that the job of Congress?

Well, actually that was US District Judge Royce Lamberth’s opinion, too, when he granted an injunction banning Federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research.

Every year without fail since 1996 the US Congress has passed the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which forbids funding for destructive embryo research. Human embryonic stem cell research is conducted on destroyed embryos, said Judge Lamberth. Ergo, it must be illegal.

It’s the argument of a black-letter lawyer who believes that it is his job to interpret statutes, not impose morality.

Both President Bush and President Obama wiggled around the Dickey-Wicker Amendment by saying: as long as you don’t kill embryos, we will fund research on your embryonic stem cells.

To be honest, this has always sounded dodgy to me and I said so back in 2001 when President Bush set down his policy: “Ethically, it enshrines the principle that it is wrong to benefit from experiments on someone you have killed, but right if someone else has done it for you.”

If the Obama Administration loses its appeal against Judge Lamberth’s injunction, Federally-funded research on human embryonic stem cells will stop. However, there is a way to get it moving again: drop the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. Whether the Obama Administration has the energy to push this through Congress before the mid-term elections in November is doubtful. And afterwards it may lose its majority in one or both houses, making it even more doubtful.

It may be time for scientist working on Federally-funded human embryonic stem cells to stock up on boxes of tissues.

Cheers,
Michael Cook
Editor

Hi there,

Just one month ago, the Edge Foundation sponsored a fascinating seminar on “the new science of morality”. The big names of neuro-morality attended, including Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Roy Baumeister, Paul Bloom, and Marc Hauser. Reporters from leading newspapers came as well and spread the word.

One of these luminaries, Marc Hauser, led a symposium on how thinking about morality as an evolved system of neurological rules could be used to make the world a better place, make governments work better, improve corporate governance, law, the internet, and so on.

Unfortunately, as we report below, Marc Hauser is now caught up in his own moral conundrum. His employer, Harvard University, has admitted that he was guilty of eight instances of academic misconduct. The nature of these offences is not altogether clear, but they seem to involve faking data for his work on animal cognition.

Speaking personally, I have always had reservations about neuro-morality. Reducing ethics to genetics and neurology eliminates free will and radically changes the nature of what it means to be human.

Academic misconduct is not exactly a hanging offence. However, if Hauser’s new science is true, rational morality consists of following arbitrary social conventions. It is a bit unsettling to learn that a prophet of an ethical revolution has been ignoring the fairly basic conventions of academic research. It will be interesting to see how the new science of morality develops from here.

Cheers,

Michael Cook
Editor

Hi there,

Earlier this week researchers announced in the Archives of Neurology that a spinal fluid test can provide an Alzheimer’s prognosis which is 100% accurate. The reputation of spinal taps is only marginally better than appendicectomies without anaesthetic, but experts say that they are safe and not especially painful. In fact, when drugs are developed to slow or cure Alzheimer’s they foresee that brain scans or spinal taps will be as routine as colonoscopies or mammograms.

I wonder how ageing baby boomers will react to this news when they’ve had a chance to absorb it? They are certainly interested. I noticed that the New York Times report rocketed to the top of the “most read” articles on its site.

Will people with a positive diagnosis feel pressured to take an early flight into the Great Beyond before they become too burdensome for their families? Fanciful? I don’t think so. At the moment, well over 90% of pregnant women who test positive for Down syndrome terminate their child. If they fear that life with a disabled child will be purgatory, what about life with a parent disabled by Alzheimer’s?

Is a new era about to begin? Leave your comments.

Cheers,

Michael Cook
Editor

Hi there,

Way down at the bottom of the newsletter is a brief article from Australia. It’s a YouTube clip from “The Gruen Transfer”, a popular TV show about the world of advertising agencies. One of its features is “The Pitch” in which two agencies compete to create ad for unsellable products. In the past these have included whale meat, tourism in Baghdad, an invasion of New Zealand, bottled urine, child labour, housing built in the shadow of a nuclear reactor and so on. You get the idea: good taste and deference to conventional pieties are not high on the producers’ shopping list.

Recently “The Pitch” featured two advertisements for compulsory euthanasia. The agencies came up with two slogans: “Compulsory euthanasia at 80. The issue is very much alive” and “Australasia for euthanasia: let’s all go by 80”. The amazing thing was how persuasive they were. They pulled at the heartstrings and just for a moment made me feel that popping a Peaceful Pill was the decent thing to do.

Check them out.

Cheers,
Michael Cook
Editor