Capital punishment was not always on the list of activities proscribed by the medical profession. It was a doctor, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who proposed a technologically advanced method during the French Revolution in the belief that it was more humane than hanging or the axe.
And despite the adamant opposition of the American Medical Association to participation in capital punishment, surprisingly, there are still doctors who feel that it is more altruistic to take part than abstain, especially when lethal injections are involved. Of 900 executions since 1977, 40 have been botched by incompetent staff. Last year the governor of Florida declared a moratorium on executions after a particularly gruesome death.
The most recent sighting of dissension is in the latest issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings. David Waisel, an anaesthetist at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, argues acerbically that "the current AMA policy increases the chances of a botched execution". Absolute abstention, he contends, is nearly impossible, anyway, because physicians would have to train non-physicians to do the job.
Dr Waisel's opponents worry that participation could debase the medical profession, erode its ethic of compassion and make it easier for doctors to collude in government-sponsored killing. But he maintains that even though his death is involuntary and not in his best interest, a condemned prisoner should be spared unnecessary suffering. In any case, in Oregon and in the Netherlands doctors already participate in killing patients.
There may be more sympathy for Dr Waisel's forthright views amongst his colleagues than one might think. If the AMA were to reverse its stand, a 2001 survey indicated that about one doctor in five would be willing to participate. ~ Mayo Clinic Proceedings, September
LIBERALS ARE SMARTER, SAY NEUROSCIENTISTS
In the on-going search for neurological explanations of all human behaviour, researchers have found that liberals are smarter than conservatives, at least in the US. Writing in Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA report that political liberals are better able to handle "informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty" (yay!!) , while conservatives "show more structured and persistent cognitive styles" (boo!!).
They conclude that their investigations demonstrate "how abstract, seemingly ineffable constructs, such as ideology, are reflected in the human brain".
The researchers recruited college students who rated themselves on a scale from "very liberal" to "very conservative". The test consisted of tapping a keyboard when an M appeared on a screen and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W. M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee- jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter. Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, but they were equally accurate in recognising M.
Lead author David Amodio, of New York University, cautioned one could not conclude that being a liberal was better than being a conservative simply because of skills in pressing Ms and Ws. Other factors, such as education and income, affect political orientation, too, he noted. In fact, he says, some liberals have been known to oppose higher taxes and some conservatives to favour abortion rights. ~ Nature Neuroscience, September; Los Angeles Times, Sept 10
SURROGATE MUM HEADS FOR DOUBLE DIGITS
Britain's surrogacy champ is undoubtedly Ms Carole Horlock, who is eight weeks into a pregnancy which will make her the mother of 12 children of other people. "I like being pregnant," she says. "I can become pregnant very easily and I don't have a problem handing the babies over after they are born."
Currently she is carrying triplets for a Greek couple, the result of her first IVF treatment. She had twins once before, making a total of nine surrogate pregnancies -- in addition to a daughter from her first marriage, a daughter from a subsequent relationship, and a step-daughter from her current relationship.
Her last pregnancy involved the most problems. Unfortunately she discovered that the child was her partner's and not her client's. "The couple were very angry," she says, "but they went ahead with the adoption."
Nearly continuous pregnancy over 12 years has reportedly earned Ms Horlock something in the vicinity of £50,000, and she is now living in a four-bedroom farmhouse near Bordeaux, France. Still, she insists that she does it largely for the pleasure of helping infertile couples. "What people forget is that, emotionally, I get a lot out of this too," she says. "Surrogacy has made me a much more confident and fulfilled person." ~ Evening Standard, Sept 6
IS YOUR TOASTER A MORAL AGENT?
While the rest of us are still taking baby steps towards the solution of bioethical conundrums involving unborn people, sick people and dying people, more adventurous minds are pole-vaulting ahead to create a bioethics for machines. The recent Singularity Summit in San Francisco, an annual event held to discuss how to prepare for a super-human artificial intelligence which will make human intelligence irrelevant, featured a serious discussion of machine morality.
Wendell Wallach, of Yale University, is trying to create Artificial Moral Agents (AMAs) which have supra-rational faculties. In some respects, they might even be more moral than men. "Is the absence of a nervous system subject to emotional hijacking a moral advantage?" asked Wallach. However, he acknowledged that programming computers with emotions, sociability, embodiment of the world, empathy, consciousness and theory of mind will be extremely challenging. ~ Singularity Summit website
UK CLINICS TO OFFER EGG FREEZING
Two of Britain's leading fertility clinics are to offer egg freezing so that women can delay having children until well into their 40s. Until recently, there were few successful pregnancies from frozen eggs. But with the development of a new technique, vitrification, it is claimed that chances of an IVF pregnancy are comparable to using fresh eggs -- about 30 to 40%.
The clinics' motive is openly more commercial than medical. Formerly it was offered to women who might lose their fertility because of cancer treatment. But they see it as an expansion of consumer choice.
Dr Simon Fishel, managing director of Care Fertility, says that "People are going to say how disgraceful that women can go on and have their careers and not worry about having a family until they are 40 years of age... But the tragedy for women is that, if a man decides in his mid-forties that his career is established and he wants to settle down and have a family, he can do that. But the poor women is faced with the prospect that this is not going to be possible for her. I believe this new technology makes it ethical for us to offer egg freezing to all women."
And Professor Gedis Grudzinskas, of Bridge Fertility Clinic, says that it will be very useful for women "for personal and social reasons rather than for medical reasons".
But Josephine Quintavalle, of the lobby group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, points out that all IVF treatment involves medical risks. "To imagine that IVF can be an alternative to natural reproduction for healthy women is an absurdity," she says. "The chances of children having grandparents becomes ever more remote. This will undermine the whole structure of society." ~ London Times, Sept 2
US IVF CLINICS MAY BE OVER-SERVICING
American IVF clinics may be overusing a technique for fertilising patients' eggs to create embryos, costing couples and some insurers hundreds of extra dollars. According to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the technique, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) was originally developed to help men with defective sperm or low sperm counts by injecting a single sperm into an egg. However, many clinics are now using it for other infertile couples.
"This paper is particularly troubling because we've got a major shift in practice that isn't evidence driven," says bioethicist Arthur Caplan, of the University of Pennsylvania. "The paper suggests that it may be driven by money." The research team reviewed a decade of IVF and found that ICSI treatments had risen from 11% in 1995 to 58% in 2004. However, the incidence of male infertility had remained the same, at about 34%. Not only does the technique cost about US$1,500 more, but it is not quite as effective as standard IVF. ~ AP/Daily Herald, Sept 9
ORIGINS KEPT SECRET FOR EMBRYO DONATION KIDS
Parents who have children via embryo donation or adoption have just as good relationships with them as IVF parents. But more than half of all embryo donation families try to keep the origins of their children's birth a secret.
Dr Fiona MacCallum and Sarah Keeley of the University of Warwick claimed that the quality of parenting does not depend on a genetic link between parent and child, nor is the experience of pregnancy and childbirth vital for parents to bond with their child - as is the case with donated embryos.
The only difference between the three types of family is that embryo donation families are more likely to keep the method of family creation a secret from their child. Only 41% of the couples they surveyed said that they planned to tell their children how they were conceived, compared to 89% of IVF families. All of the adoptive families said they would reveal their child's history.
This finding could have uncomfortable implications because the British government has recommended that children born from donated sperm or eggs should have this fact recorded on their birth certificates. ~ British Psychological Society
FUTURE COULD BRING PIG-HEARTED PEOPLE
Maverick IVF specialist Lord Robert Winston has unveiled a plan to solve the organ transplant crisis with genetically-engineered pigs. He is trying to trick the immune system with pig organs which the human body will not recognise as foreign. He believes that these could be ready for transplants within 10 to 15 years. "The immunology is going to be very complicated but I think the ability to make a large transgenic animal is very close," he says.
One obstacle to progress in this line of research, especially in the UK, is animal rights activists who will insist that it is unethical to kill animals for their organs. Lord Winston's response is: "If we broadly as a society agree that it is fundamentally ethical to use large animals as a food source, then surely you could argue it is better to use them to save lives?" ~ This is London, Sept 11
LITHUANIAN STOUSH OVER DRUG APPROVAL
Government meddling in drug approvals is not an issue only in the US, where foot-dragging over the morning-after pill has landed the Bush Administration in hot water. In Lithuania, the government is defying the European Union, its State Medicines Control Agency, NGOs and several parliamentarians over an anti-cancer drug. The locally- made drug Graslava was sold widely in Eastern Europe before Lithuania joined the EU. It is a less expensive imitation of Amgen's Neupogen, a product which speeds up the process of white blood cells. However, all other EU countries have banned it, as there are concerns about its safety.
The dispute has become a political hot potato. The deputy head of the State Medicines Control Agency deregistered it, but when the director returned, she reinstated the drug and sacked the deputy. Employees of the agency say that they fear losing their jobs if they oppose the drug. ~ Respublika, Sept 5; Euro, Aug 9
STEM CELL PROGRESS
ALL SHOOK UP: Researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University have discovered that gently shaking embryonic stem cells, rather like how an embryo is shaken in its mother's womb, improves their development and could some day control what type of cell they eventually become. ~ Georgia Tech, Sept 10
CARTILAGE: Rice University biomedical engineers have developed a technique for growing cartilage from human embryonic stem cells, a method which could be used to grow replacement cartilage for knees, jaws, hips and other joints. Lead researcher Kyriacos Athanasiou says that he finds ESCs easier to work with than adult stem cells, but has an open mind about it. "Keep in mind that these processes are very complicated, so it may well be that different types of cells work best in different situations," he says. ~ Science Daily, Sept 7
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