Police raids, TV exposes, media debates, placard-waving demonstrators... Assisted reproduction wasn't meant to be like this in the land of the world's first IVF baby. But the patience of the UK's fertility watchdog finally ran out with the country's most successful IVF doctor.
Early last week, accompanied by police, officials from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority raided two clinics run by Dr Mohammed Taranissi. The head of the HFEA, Angela McNabb, said the authority was unable to get required information about his clinics in any other way. The raids took place just in time to be screened in a BBC expose of Taranissi's clinics that evening. The HFEA was soundly criticised by Taranissi and other fertility doctors for apparently colluding with tawdry media sensationalism -- a charge which it denied.
Following this unprecedented event, Dr Taranissi's clinics were dissected in the British media. The statistics show that he has helped produce 2,300 babies over the past seven years. He runs two clinics. The Assisted Reproduction and Gynaecology Centre, in London, has the highest success rates in the UK. However, it rates second to the bottom in terms of compliance to government regulation, which the HFEA has found quite exasperating. The other clinic, the Reproductive Genetics Institute, has technically been operating illegally, because its licence expired in 2005. This is disputed by Dr Taranissi and his lawyers.
The most controversial figure in British IVF, Dr Taranissi was an obvious target for investigative reporting. Using undercover reporters posing as potential IVF patients, the BBC claimed that some of his patients were being told to take controversial, useless or over-priced treatment. After watching some of BBC's footage, the UK's fertility doyen, Lord Robert Winston, said: "It makes you weep for the medical profession. It's a failure of regulation." Although it is not known why Dr Taranissi's clinics had been ranked so poorly in terms of compliance, a HFEA report scored clinics on accidents (loss of embryos, eggs and sperm and so on), staff competence and arrangements for donor selection.
Dr Taranissi has many vocal supporters amongst his patients. About 30 families organised a protest against the "witch hunt" outside his clinic on Sunday. Dr Taranissi insists that he has cooperated fully with the HFEA. ~
BBC, Jan 16, Jan 17;
London Telegraph, Jan 12
THE SHINING LIGHTS OF ALTRUISM
Altruism can be detected with brain scans, claim researchers from Duke University in North Carolina. In an article in Nature Neuroscience, they report that they put 45 college students into a functional magnet resonance imaging scanner, gave them games to play, and told them that they could either keep the cash rewards or give them to charity. The scans lit up differently depending on which option they chose.
Lead researcher Scott Huettel said that "Although understanding the function of this brain region may not necessarily identify what drives people like Mother Theresa, it may give clues to the origins of important social behaviors like altruism." His scans correlated strongly with the students' own description of how altruistic they were. He acknowledged that it is very difficult to measure altruism, but said that religious explanations were insufficient, as there were many altruists amongst atheists and various animal species as well. ~
Reuters, Jan 21
NEW YORK GOVERNOR SEEKS STEM CELL BOND ISSUE
The new governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, has called for a US$2 billion 10-year bond issue for research and development in the state -- half of it to be spent on stem cell research. Advocates of embryonic stem cell research claim that the initiative could make New York the leading state in the field.
The passage of the bill is far from assured. Governor Spitzer is attempting to sell it to depressed cities in the north of the state as part of his economic development agenda. But New York voters are notoriously resistant to referenda on "soft-focused" bond issues -- and the state is already heavily burdened with debt.
It will face ethical hurdles, too, although the bill will outlaw reproductive cloning and establish a "stem cell commission" to ensure that all embryonic research in New York would be "legal, vital and ethical". Kathleen Gallagher, a spokeswoman for the state's Catholic bishops, was sceptical. "We recognise that they say they will ban cloning," she said. "But what they're talking about is banning the cloning of live born babies, but funding the cloning of human embryos that will be destroyed for research." ~
New York Times, Jan 16
THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF NEUROETHICS
The legal and moral quandaries of the burgeoning new field of neuroethics "threaten to proliferate into every part of our lives", according to a feature in Time magazine. With rapid advances in pharmacology and in brain imaging, it will soon be possible to monitor and control impulses and behaviour. Amongst the uses to which this new technology could be put are:
- scanning police cadets to detect potential racists. Apparently racists show heightened activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that corresponds to emotional arousal.
- reliable lie detection for police and intelligence agencies.
- testing for the compatibility of spouses
- quizzing teenagers about sex and drugs
- a "neuro-correctional system" which dampens criminal urges
According to Time, scientists need to dialogue with the public. "We need to keep this discussion rational," says Alan Leshner, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, "so that science can advance and society can benefit from the tremendous potential of being able to look into the brain of a living, breathing, behaving individual and watch the mind in action". ~
Time, Jan 19
EMBRYO DEFENCE PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK TIMES
The New York Times has published a concise defence of the Bush policy on stem cells by the former executive director of the President's Council on Bioethics. Yuval Levin attempts to bring precision to a debate which is often dismally foggy about what is really at stake. He points out that no one disputes that human life begins at conception -- this is "a simple and uncontroversial biological fact". The real dispute is over whether an embryo is a person, with a right to life.
"And surely we would not deny those who have lost some mental faculties the right to be regarded with respect and protected from harm. Why should we deny it to those whose faculties are still developing?
"At its heart, then, when the biology and politics have been stipulated away, the stem cell debate is not about when human life begins but about whether every human life is equal. The circumstances of the embryo outside the body of a mother put that question in perhaps the most exaggerated form imaginable, but they do not change the question.
"America's birth charter, the Declaration of Independence, asserts a positive answer to the question, and in lieu of an argument offers another assertion: that our equality is self-evident. But it is not. Indeed, the evidence of nature sometimes makes it very hard to believe that all human beings are equal. It takes a profound moral case to defend the proposition that the youngest and the oldest, the weakest and the strongest, all of us, simply by virtue of our common humanity, are in some basic and inalienable way equals.
"Our faith in that essential liberal proposition is under attack by our own humanitarian impulses in the stem cell debate, and it will be under further attack as biotechnology progresses. But the stem cell debate, our first real test, should also be the easiest. We do not, at least in this instance, face a choice between science and the liberal society. We face the challenge of championing both." ~
New York Times, Jan 19
IS BUSH THE BEST FRIEND OF EMBRYO RESEARCH?
Writing in the libertarian magazine Reason, Ronald Bailey asks whether Federal restrictions have helped, rather than hindered, embryonic stem cell research. Because the Bush Administration set limits on Federal funding, without actually banning the research, scientists have gone to the states and to philanthropists to plead for funds. He likens it to research into assisted reproduction which has had very little Federal regulation and oversight. Promising research halted only when the Federal government stepped in to regulate it.
Although scientists are convinced that government funding is essential to kickstart basic research, business spending on R&D is what really pushes a field ahead. "Economic growth [is] associated almost entirely with private sector research funding," Bailey argues, citing an OECD 2001 report. "As private donors and states continue to shovel tens of millions at stem cell researchers," he concludes, "it may just be that President Bush did embryonic stem cell research a huge favour when he imposed restrictions on federal funding of it." ~ Reason, Jan 19
TOP BRITISH SURGEONS CASH IN ON BREAST ENLARGEMENT
Some of the leading figures in British cosmetic surgery are cashing in on the growing demand for breast enlargements by slashing their prices to tap into the low-income market. But it's not simply a commercial decision, they insist: they want to prevent women from being fleeced by under-qualified surgeons in Britain or overseas. Their internet company, mybreast.org, will deal exclusively with breast augmentation and will undercut the normal fee of £7,000 by £3,000. A lingerie gift voucher will be given to women who pay for the treatment. At the moment, about 26,000 women have these operation each year.
The doctors involved in the company include Peter Butler, who is better known for his controversial plans for a full face transplant, and Norman Waterhouse, a former president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons. Their project was criticised by a psychologist, Dr Eileen Bradbury, of Alexandra Hospital in London. She said that "women who have breast enlargement are a more vulnerable population. Any procedure that encourages women to have breast augmentation when they are vaguely thinking about it, by making it easier and quicker, is riding roughshod over this vulnerability."
Canadian research published last year suggests that women who have breast enlargements are at higher risk of suicide, not because of the surgery, but because of pre-existing issues of low self-esteem and psychiatric illness. ~
London Times, Jan 21
IN BRIEF: survival, kidney sales, genetic privacy
Survival: The first embryo of 1,400 rescued from a flooded New Orleans IVF laboratory has been born. His parents have named him Noah. Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, police used boats in a mercy dash to rescue canisters of frozen embryos before they thawed in the sweltering heat. ~
AP, Jan 17
Kidney sales: Poor Indian fisherfolk whose livelihoods were destroyed by the Indian Ocean tsunami two years ago are selling their kidneys for about US$900 to $1,350. Village leaders say that only two or three people a year used to sell kidneys before the disaster, but about 100 people, mostly women, have done so over the past two years. Police are investigating the racket. ~
Reuters, Jan 16
Genetic privacy: President Bush has urged the US Congress to pass a bill which would safeguard genetic privacy. Experts say that this would encourage millions of Americans to take genetic tests which might help to prevent and treat cancer and other diseases. The bill would bar employers and insurance companies from discriminating on the basis of the tests. ~
New York Times, Jan 18
How to support BioEdge
BioEdge and ABI's other services rely completely upon the generosity of private benefactors and volunteer workers. ABI has no institutional backing. If you would like to support the best bioethics news service on the Web, you can do it painlessly through Paymate, a thoroughly reliable payment service which is affiliated with the internet auction site eBay.
Just access the Paymate website and follow the instructions. You will need to fill in our email address, which is bioedge@australasianbioethics.org. You will also have to give your credit card details and an amount in Australian or US dollars. Thanks!
|
To subscribe to our weekly email newsletter,
click here for the HTML version.
click here for the text version.
To cancel your newsletter subscription, click here.
Australasian Bioethics Information
ISSN 1446-2117
Website:www.australasianbioethics.org
BioEdge editor: Michael Cook
New Zealand Contributing Editor: Carolyn Moynihan
The BioEdge privacy policy
Your subscription information will be kept private and is not publicly accessible.
Your email address and other information will never be sold to a third party or given out
without your consent. You may cancel your subscription at any time.
|
