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For health and legal professionals with an interest in bioethics
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2007: articles in the media by Michael Cook
Whatever you may think of the euthanasia activist Philip Nitschke, you have to admire his progressive use of technology. >>>> more by Michael Cook
ONE of the world's most respected medical journals, The Lancet, has called for regime change in a once-great country whose health policies are succumbing to "the politics of fear and neglect" and "profound intolerance". Its target? Zimbabwe? Pakistan? Kazakhstan? >>> more by Michael Cook
What would you do if your infant daughter's mental age would always be measured in months rather than years? If she would never walk, talk or swallow food? If she might never recognise you? >>> more 2006: articles in the media by Michael Cook
What magic is there in embryonic stem cells to make some scientists so economical with the truth and some science journals so credulous? Only a few months after the disgraceful Korean stem cell scandal, another scientist has again announced a breakthrough, and has again been denounced as a liar. more >>> by Michael Cook
The website of the Missouri Coalition for Life-Saving Cures shows what most voters, and not just in Missouri, expect from embryonic stem cell research. Gathered in the website's "Stories of Hope" are two dozen heart-rending stories of children dying young of chronic diseases and adult lives consumed by disease and spinal cord injuries. They all conclude with the same desperate plea: vote in November for an amendment to the Missouri constitution; bulletproof our stem cell cures from meddling, mean-spirited enemies of science and progress. more >>> by Michael Cook
Two things blaze out with noonday clarity about embryos and their stem cells: scientists appear to know almost everything, and the rest of us fear we know almost nothing. In fact, since stem cell biology is such a fast-moving field, all Australians - even other scientists - depend completely on what we are fed by a few dozen stem cell specialists... more >>> by Michael Cook
At the beginning of January, a Federal law aimed squarely at crushing the life’s work of one man came into effect. It is now illegal to provide advice over the Internet on how to commit suicide and Dr Philip Nitschke is considering a self-imposed exile in New Zealand as a result. But let’s give this news some positive spin. Finally the world’s most prominent euthanasia campaigner is getting the recognition he deserves. How often does the machinery of parliament grind and whirr to accommodate a single citizen? more >>> by Michael Cook
STEM cell scientists have been shattered by this week's confirmation that their poster boy, South Korean Hwang Woo-suk, is a fraud. Not Hwang alone, either. Many of his 24 co-authors on a landmark paper claiming to have cloned human embryos and created stem cell lines must have been accomplices. Storm clouds are gathering over Gerald Schatten, of the University of Pittsburgh, Hwang's co-author. The Korean president's chief science adviser, also a co-author, has resigned. Hwang may face criminal charges. It is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud in living memory. more >>> 2005: articles in the media by Michael Cook
After the incarceration of Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan doctor who bumped off more than 100 patients with gas, drugs and contraptions like his "Mercitron", the mantle of Doctor Death has fallen upon the broad Australian shoulders of Philip Nitschke. Such is his notoriety that the Howard Government has garlanded him with a law drafted, debated and passed specifically to keep him from his life's work. The Criminal Code Amendment (Suicide Related Material Offences) Act 2005 will soon ban giving advice about committing suicide through the internet. How often does the machinery of Parliament grind and whirr to accommodate a single citizen? Who needs knighthoods? more >>> (PDF) by Michael Cook, Australian, 22 December 2005 OVERSEAS it was a horror week for therapeutic cloning. The first scientist to create stem cell lines from cloned embryos, Korean Hwang Woo-suk, has been disgraced as a lying charlatan. The peer review process of the journal which made him an international celebrity is under a cloud. Scientists around the world are asking themselves not only why their poster boy stumbled, but whether his 24 co-authors colluded in the fraud. more >>> by Michael Cook, Spiked (UK), 9 August 2005 It was a Homer Simpson moment for the British Medical Association. At the end of its annual representative meeting on 30 June 2005, delegates voted to withdraw the organisation's firm and long-standing opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide. This leaves the world's most prestigious gathering of medical professionals in the absurd position of having no opinion on whether killing their patients is good or bad. Doh! more >>> by Michael Cook, TechCentralStation (US), 10 June 2005 Before the faithful get too wound up, something has to be tidied up: the little matter of whether Karol Wojtyla was, in fact, the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century. If he was, canonisation might not be such a good idea. more >>> by Michael Cook, Australian, 23 May 2005 MANY people probably read only one word of the banner headlines over news that Korean scientists have successfully cloned 11 embryos and created stem cell lines – cures. more >>> by Amin Abboud, The Age (Melbourne), 6 May 2005 What is the real agenda of the IVF industry in the stoush over Canberra's plan to roll back funding for IVF? Is it to ease the pain of infertility for desperate couples or to insulate a cushy industry from the pain of regulation? more >>> by Michael Cook, PLoS Medicine, April 2005 The debate between a libertarian bioethicist and a communitarian bioethicist [1] illustrates why American bioethics is becoming increasingly marginalised and irrelevant to the democratic society that it intends to serve...more >>> by Michael Cook, Herald Sun (Melbourne) 3 May 2005 TONY Abbott and Peter Costello blundered when they tangled with the IVF industry over statistics. There is nothing in which Australia's IVF doctors are more expert than their success rates... more >>> by Michael Cook, The Age (Melbourne), 31 March 2005 With the impending death of Terri Schiavo, US euthanasia advocates have scored a public relations hat-trick. Within a single month Clint Eastwood won an Oscar for Million Dollar Baby and The Sea Inside, about a quadriplegic who commits suicide, was feted as the best foreign film... more >>> by Amin Abboud, Sydney Morning Herald(subscription), 24 March 2005 It passed largely unnoticed, but the UN General Assembly has banned all forms of human cloning, including research or therapeutic cloning. Australia voted to support the resolution, giving a moral victory to opponents of therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cell research. The resolution called on "member states to...more >>> by Michael Cook, Herald Sun (Melbourne), 24 March 2005 A FURORE over a single brain-damaged Florida woman might seem like hysteria. But as details of how Terri Schiavo has been treated emerge under the white-hot spotlight of the international media it has become obvious her doctors gave up too easily. more >>> 2004: articles in the media by Michael Cook, TechCentralStation, 27 December 2004 If any country knows about the war on AIDS, it's Uganda. Prevalence there has dropped from 30 per cent in 1992 to about 6 per cent now. And the secret of its success has not been mass distribution of condoms, but aggressive marketing of abstinence. First Lady Janet Museveni was proud to tell a rally recently in Kampala that Americans come to Uganda to learn how to fight AIDS. "There is a tendency for people to think that African people have no self-control," she said. "That they need condoms because they cannot abstain from sex. But you have proved the world that you can say No." more >>> by Michael Cook, api7.com, 17 December 2004 Merry Christmas! From the Netherlands, the country that brought you Santa Claus, comes the ultimate Christmas present, involuntary euthanasia for kids! Groningen Academic Hospital has asked the Dutch government to approve protocols for killing deformed and terminally ill children -- after admitting that it had already done this four times in the past year. more >>> by Michael Cook, The Age (Melbourne), 22 November 2004 For a small country, Australia punches above its weight in bioethics. There's Peter Singer, now at Princeton, one of the most prestigious universities in the US. He has become world famous as a theoretician of animal rights and advocate of infanticide for disabled babies. more >>> by Michael Cook, The Age (Melbourne), 14 October 2004 Why are we rushing to canonise Christopher Reeve? To US presidential hopeful John Kerry, the quadriplegic actor who died this week was "truly America's hero". To NSW Premier Bob Carr, he was "the most impressive person I have ever met". more >>> by Michael Cook, TechCentralStation (US), 14 October 2004 Why are we rushing to canonize Christopher Reeve? To presidential hopeful John Kerry, the quadriplegic actor was "truly America's hero". As far away as Australia, he was "the most impressive person I have ever met" for one of that country's leading politicians. Even President Bush paid tribute to his "personal courage, optimism, and self-determination". more >>> by Michael Cook, The Weekly Standard (US), 9 September 2004 AFTER MORE THAN TWO YEARS of complaining that President Bush's Council on Bioethics has been a reactionary, jaundiced, and unscientific influence upon American science policy, its critics have changed tack. The sneer du jour is that it has had no effective influence upon the administration. more >>> By Michael Cook, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 August 2004 Why didn't the doctors at Abu Ghraib prison protect their patients? It is becoming clear that it was not just trailer trash who were corrupted by their power over Iraqi detainees in the prison. That power also poisoned the people who should be the bulwark of humanitarianism: the medical staff. This is the message of the latest issue of The Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals. Based on a detailed report by an American doctor, it has called upon health care workers to break their silence about these shameful events. more >>> By Michael Cook, Herald Sun (Melbourne), 8 July 2004 IT'S the season of pseudo-science in Hollywood. First we had the greenhouse effect on steroids in The Day After Tomorrow. And now, opening today, there's Godsend, a thriller about human cloning. In fact, Godsend is god-awful. Robert De Niro plays a high-flying but obsessed IVF doctor who takes a cloned embryo from a petri dish and places it in the womb of a hysterical mum. more >>> By Michael Cook, PLoS Biology, June 2004 Blackburn and Rowley's (2004) criticism of a report on embryonic stem cell research from the President's Council on Bioethics (2004) is puzzling. Where is the bioethics? The nub of their complaint is that some details of the report have been partisan and have distorted ‘the potential of biomedical research and the motivation of some of its researchers’. No doubt their quibbles are well-founded, as every committee report is a compromise. more >>> by Michael Cook, Australian Doctor, 15 June 2004 NOW that an Australian military lawyer has been linked to the shameful treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the Federal Government had better ensure that its medical personnel have had nothing to do with torture, either actively or passively. US health personnel have probably colluded in torture. None of them has been charged so far, but army medics, and possibly prison doctors, must surely have been aware that prisoners were subject to the "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" - to quote the official report - that went on in Abu Ghraib. Why didn't they blow the whistle? Their duty to do so is crystal clear. more >>> by Michael Cook, The Saturday Mercury (Hobart), 22 May 2004 The tragic figures of John Godfrey and his mother Elizabeth Godfrey deserve enormous compassion, but no support whatsoever as martyrs for the cause of euthanasia. In fact, Elizabeth's misery fits into a neat pattern of victimisation of women -- a victimisation in which they all too often meekly comply. When it comes to so-called "mercy killing", two-thirds of the killed are women and 70 per cent of the killers are men, according to a 2001 survey by psychologist Silvia Sara Canetto, of Colorado State University. "Many women do not have the resources, the sense of entitlement or the power and freedom to make the choice they desire, especially when they are sick or disabled," she wrote. more >>> by Michael Cook, Herald Sun (Melbourne), 16 March 2004 THE RECENT NEWS that an IVF clinic has created two saviour siblings is more than an ethical challenge -- it is slick public relations. Sydney IVF made world headlines after revealing that it had selected embryos to be perfect tissue matches for sick children in need of bone marrow transplants. This marks an advance on techniques used by Melbourne clinics which have tested embryos for genetic errors. It is the first time embryos have been matched for compatible blood groups in Australia. Other couples are now queueing up in the hope of cures for their children. This is not just a reminder of scientists' amazing ability to manipulate embryos. It also highlights the fact that fertility medicine has swollen from a single baby 25 years ago into an immense industry with growing political and social clout. more >>> by Michael Cook, On Line Opinion, 19 February 2004 The first thoroughly documented cloning of human embryos shows that in the biotechnology business fortune favours the brazen – and the unscrupulous. The shock announcement by South Korean scientists last week was carefully timed. The publication of their results in the prestigious American journal Science coincided with the annual conference of the journal’s publisher, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This guaranteed world-wide publicity over the weekend for the journal, the AAAS, the scientists and the South Korean biotechnology industry. more >>> By Michael Cook, Courier Mail (Brisbane), 4 February 2004 The absurdly lenient sentence handed down in a German court last week to a computer technician who killed, butchered and ate a man he had met on the Internet highlights the shaky status of human dignity among lawyers and philosophers. In March 2001, Armin Meiwes struck an extraordinary agreement with Bernd-Jurgen Brandes, a engineer from Berlin. It was a win-win pact which would gratify both of their kinky fantasies. more >>> By Michael Cook, Herald Sun (Melbourne), 15 January 2004 MARCH 9, 2001, was the ultimate bad herr day for Bernd-Juergen Brandes, a 43-year-old Berlin computer engineer. In the morning he made his will, leaving everything to his gay live-in partner. Then he took a 300km train trip to the central German town of Rotenburg. There he met Armin Meiwes, a mild-mannered 42-year-old computer technician. What they had on their minds was dinner, Meiwes's dinner, to be precise. Brandes was responding to his request in an internet chat room for a "young well-built man who wants to be eaten". more >>> 2003: articles in the media
2002: articles in the media
2001: articles in the media
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