Finally, some good news for women at risk of HIV

Women and girls are the new face of HIV/AIDS. Globally, there are twelve HIV-positive women for every ten HIV-positive men. In the hardest hit countries of sub-Saharan Africa, young women are three times more likely than their male peers to become infected.

The disproportionate impact of HIV on women is due to a variety of biological and socioeconomic factors, factors that also make current HIV prevention tools – including condoms and mutual monogamy – inaccessible to those most at risk. For example, many women do not have the social or economic power necessary to insist on condom use and fidelity, or to abandon partnerships that put them at risk.

Thus, there is a desperate need to develop new user-controlled tools to enable women to protect themselves, such as vaginal microbicides. Over the past two years, a series of flat findings and trial closures have shaken public confidence in research to develop safe and effective microbicides. But now there’s a glimmer of hope.

Yesterday, at the 16^th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Montreal, a team of researchers funded the US National Institutes of Health announced the results of HPTN 035, a clinical trial of PRO2000 and BufferGel, two candidate vaginal microbicides.

This study enrolled over 3000 at-risk women in Malawi, South Africa, United States, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In addition to showing that these products were safe to use, the study found that women used PRO2000 (as a topically-applied gel) plus condoms had 30% fewer HIV infections than those who used only condoms or condoms plus a placebo gel.

Although the decrease in HIV infections among women using PRO2000 did not quite achieve statistical significance, this is first large-scale clinical trial showing that a candidate microbicide might actually work in women. A second trial of PRO2000, enrolling more than 9000 at-risk women in Southern Africa, is currently underway. The results of that study – known as MDP201 – will be available in November. If the data from the MDP201 trial also show that PRO2000 is safe and effective, it is expected that this gel will be submitted for regulatory review and approval, hopefully giving women worldwide access to a new and sorely needed HIV prevention tool.

(Still) Wanted: A Female-Controlled Method to Prevent HIV

Twenty-seven years after AIDS was first diagnosed among gay men in California and New York, HIV/AIDS has become a health threat borne disproportionately by women in the developing world. Globally, there are twelve HIV-positive women for every ten HIV-positive men. In the hardest hit countries in sub-Saharan Africa, young women are three times more likely than their male peers to become infected.

The disproportionate impact of HIV on women is due to a variety of biological and socioeconomic factors. Many of those factors make today’s HIV prevention options – condoms, mutual monogamy, and male circumcision – inaccessible to women at greatest risk of infection. Many women do not have the social or economic power necessary to insist on condom use and fidelity or to abandon partnerships that put them at risk, and a recent study from Uganda shows that circumcision does not protect female receptive sex partners. There thus is a desperate need to develop new tools to enable women to protect themselves, including microbicides.

This morning, the Population Council posted the results of a phase III effectiveness study of a candidate microbicide called Carraguard, an odorless, clear gel made from carrageenan. Over 6,000 women in South Africa volunteered to be part of this clinical trial, in which participants were randomly assigned to either receive Carraguard or a comparator gel. Trial participants were instructed to use the gel plus condoms every time they had sex, and asked to return to the study clinic repeatedly over a two-year period. During this time, they were provided with condoms and received comprehensive risk reduction counseling, HIV testing, and screening and treatment for STIs.

Unfortunately, trial results showed that the product was safe and acceptable to women, but did not reduce their risk of acquiring HIV.

Twelve other candidate microbicides are currently in human trials, and a new generation of antiretroviral-based products is entering the development pipeline. But developing and testing these compounds is a time- and resource-intensive process, and many policymakers have begun to question whether or not limited public health resources are better used to promote proven prevention technologies like condoms.

This, I believe, is short sighted. For the reasons mentioned above, proven HIV prevention technologies will not protect at-risk women. Furthermore, drug development is always a long term struggle, with dozens of failed products for every one that makes it to market.

As disappointing as these results are, the fact that the trial reached completion is itself a breakthrough. Successful completion of the Carraguard trial is a testament not only to the commitment of the study investigators but also to the dedication of the trial participants themselves.

Regardless of the results, this trial will yield important information about microbicide effectiveness, safety, use, and acceptability, and will help researchers design and test new HIV prevention technologies.

The Human Side, or the Female Side?

Election years are always interesting in their coverage of candidates - and since I'm something of both a news and politics junkie, it's tailor-made news heaven. This year proves to be an especially interesting one with Hilary Clinton's run for the White House, not necessarily because of her politics or even that she's a Clinton, but because she's a woman, and it really lets us see the double standard the media, and perhaps the public, have towards men and women.

As is being reported in quite a lot of places, Clinton won New Hampshire because she emoted - something, her lack of emotion, she has been criticized heavily for in the past. Now this in and of itself is an interesting thing; when is the last time you can remember a male presidential candidate being skewered for his lack of emotions? Most male candidates don't get choked up, don't cry on camera, keep very firmly in control of their emotions - in fact, to this day many people think that Howard Dean's "famous Iowa scream" is what ultimately cost him the Democratic nomination. A showing of too much raw, uncontrolled emotion.

A negative thing in a man.

But in a woman, not showing emotions seems to be a negative trait. We, as a matter of fact, have some rather unflattering terms for women who're viewed as carefully in control of their emotions, from frigid or ice queen and on.

Yet on the flip side, although apparently her teary exchange with New Hampshire voters did Clinton a world of good, her campaign staff was nervous about how it would play. How would people perceive a woman teary and tired, talking about how exhausting campaigning is? The concern was that it would badly undercut her messages of being experienced, that she is strong, that she can handle the demands of the job.

Do men on the campaign trail face similar damned if you do, damned if you don'ts? At the moment, I'm hard pressed to come up with an example that fits, but that also could be because I'm seeing this very clear example for a woman being damned no matter what she does in front of me. What about you - do you think male politicians face these same issues? Or are we really seeing a nasty side of ourselves that we thought that, as a society, we had passed beyond, where in the same situation women are judged against standards and qualities that men are not?

Perhaps most to the point, I think we have to ask ourselves a simple question: if Obama or Edwards had become teary-eyed in front of voters, talking about the same concerns, would Maureen Dowd of the New York Times have written an article entitled "Can Obama/Edwards Cry His Way To the White House"?
-Kelly

"We" not "She" had an abortion

(This follows nicely from the post on gender.)

blog.bioethics.net reports on a new movement to involve men in outlawing abortion.

According to the article by the L.A. Times:

Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman's issue: her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement -- both political and deeply personal in nature -- contends that the pronoun is all wrong.

I think that it is great that there is an effort to involve men more in the process of sex and pregnancy. But let's encourage a genuine effort to empower men and give them a voice in this process - let's advocate for men to become more aware of all the processes related to sex, pregnancy, and birth. The archaic "predatory" model of men and sex needs to be fully rejected, and parents need to stop raising their boys to "go get 'em!" while relying on intimidation and threats to foist the burden of chastity only onto their daughters.

It is a good start that men are beginning to realize the emotional impacts of pregnancy termination, but our society ought to come together to share the emotional impacts of all aspects of intimacy and reproduction, aspects that until recently have been shrouded in mystery and shame (and just a bit of possessiveness by women) and withheld from men.

Let's truly forge new respect for life by bringing in both sides of the equation into this effort.

Gender: Love It or Kill It?

Colleague George Dvorsky sent me a recent blog post of his, thinking that I might be interested -- the title is "Overcoming Gender", and it's a quick summary of a formal paper he and James Hughes are co-authoring on postgenderism. Perhaps it is my feminine nature, but I had to laugh when I read the summary because one of my first thoughts was, "how typically male it is to see gender as something that has to be overcome, rather than something to be embraced or even transcended." (a more tame version of what Ken Wilber said about men and testosterone in A Brief History of Everything) -- so dualistic, rather than integrated.

But then again, I suppose one could argue that that just proves his point?

Benazir Bhutto

The first woman to lead a Muslim government in modern times, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated today at a rally in Pakistan.

Regardless of what one thinks of her policies, politics, or even the possibility that the corruption charges repeatedly raised against her were true, Bhutto focused attention on the social, health and human rights of women in a state that routinely treats women as second class citizens.

Critics charge she was all promise and no action, while supporters argue that she was hamstrung by opposing, conservative political parties at every turn. It might be impossible to ever untangle fact from fiction from political manipulation, but what is undeniable is that she was a very visible, female face in Islamic politics, in a region of the world not known for allowing women that type of power.
-Kelly

Over at the Business Ethics Blog: Sexism in Coffee Shops

Thanks to Chris MacDonald over at the Business Ethics Blog for posting this interesting tidbit about Waiting for Good Joe: Do coffee shops discriminate against women? Who would have thunk it? You can read the full post here.

Misogyny Beyond Movies?

While the allegations of Warner Brothers studio President of Production Jeff Robinov stating that “We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead” because of low/fatal box office tallies is not necessarily new news, and was not originally something I thought terribly relevant to blogging for any of the communities I write for, this piece from the UK MSN website by their movies editor Ed Holden is interesting.

Obviously, as Holden points out, the inherent misogyny of the comment is unarguable. But also something you can’t really argue with is the fact that movies with female leads are tanking. Have people suddenly stopped enjoying women? Looking at Nicole Kidman? (The last time I saw a total, her latest movie, co-starring Daniel Craig, hadn’t even made back its $80 budget.) And while that might strike you as a misandrist comment – consider the utter box office failure of all romantic movies, regardless of the gender of the lead, or the fact that, again as Holden notes, the female target audience has largely disappeared. (Maybe they’re all in grad school, like me, and have only had the time and spare money - $12 for a movie?! – for one movie a year?)

But what is truly interesting to me is something I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere but in this piece, and what I suddenly find myself wondering about in other settings. Rabinov blamed the box office failure on the leading role being a woman - not bad marketing, or bad writing, directing, or anything else. Roles typically taken by men in the movie industry, and that clearly have much more control over the quality of the movie, or the ability to draw an audience. It’s convenient to scapegoat the women, something my women’s studies friends would probably say is an attempt to subvert the strides women have made in gaining equality. Put her back in the kitchen – or at least the role of the helpless romance interest.

The academy has some similar gender concentrations, for lack of better concept, with women newly (and massively, by general statistics) emerging in all fields, but men still being in many, if not most, of the positions of authority. I wonder, then, just how much scapegoating of women in our own field has occurred because of faulty assumptions, blaming her gender rather than other circumstances around the failure (or perceived reason to scapegoat).

So I toss it out to you, at a sleepless 4am, and wonder if you know of any experiences like this for women in our (vastly defined) field, or if you think it’s happened to you? Is this, in your opinion, an isolated instance, or do you think it’s more common to reach for blaming the woman involved? It’s genuinely something that’s never crossed my mind, and I’d like to hear your thoughts.

-Kelly Hills

ASBH Scholarships for Graduate Students

As part of WBP's program to honor "Mothers of Bioethics", we are offering one year ASBH membership scholarships to six full or part-time graduate students studying bioethics. To be considered, email (info (at) womensbioethics.org) one paragraph about your academic passion and commitment to ensuring the field reflects the perspectives, needs, and concerns of women. Be sure to include your name, graduate program, and university affiliation. Submissions must be received by May 9th. Program honorees and scholarship winners will be announced on May 11th - just in time for Mother's Day.

Eat Until You're Beauti-Full

Too tired to workout at the gym? Prefer big macs to salads at lunch? Jealous of the size 0 model on magazine covers? Well then trade your jeans for pants with elastic waistbands, cancel your gym membership, supersize your order, and move to Mauritania.

In Mauritania, beauty still appears to be measured in pounds. Situated in northwest Africa, this country has traditionally encouraged and sometimes demanded that its women stay overweight. Certain households, particularly in more rural areas of the country, continue to force-feed their daughters at an early age (1). This ritual is referred to as gavage, and is the same term used to describe the practice of fattening geese (1). Many of the country's middle-aged women can recall repeatedly tolerating physical punishment when they refused to drink excessive quantities of camel milk (1).

Though these brutal feeding practices are not as common today, societal pressure remains. Husbands even threaten to divorce wives who exercise and lose too much weight (1). Since the country's ancestors often had difficulty foraging for food in the desert, obesity became a symbol for health (1). However, this cultural preference greatly jeopardizes the physical health of these largely overweight women. Though their love handles are admired, they are ultimately at a much higher risk for major health complications, such as Type II diabetes and heart disease (1). Even simple tasks become laborious for these obese women who are frequently short-winded (1).

Conscious of this health dilemma being perpetuated by tradition, Mauritania's government has turned to the media. Aimed at increasing public awareness, many television and radio advertisements now contain information on the consequences of overeating (1). Still, reversing popular attitudes is a slow process.

Reference
1. Callimachi, Rukmini. New views in desert culture on fat women. Seattle Post-Intelligencer. 16 April 2007.

Everything Conceivable - New Book

From the dust jacket: Skyrocketing infertility rates and the accompanying explosion in reproductive technology are revolutionizing the American family and changing the way we think about parenthood, childbirth, and life itself. In this riveting work of investigative reporting, Liza Mundy, an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post, captures the human narratives, as well as the science, behind what is today a controversial, multibillion-dollar industry, and examines how the huge social experiment that is assisted reproduction is transforming our most basic relationships and even our destiny as a species.

Based on in-depth reporting from across the nation and around the world, using riveting anecdotal material from doctors, families, and children—many of them now adults—conceived through in vitro fertilization, Mundy looks at the phenomena created by assisted reproduction and their ramifications. Never before in the history of humankind has it been possible for a woman to give birth to an infant who is genetically unrelated to her. Never before has it been possible for a woman to be the genetic parent of children to whom she has not given birth. Never before has the issue of choice had such kaleidoscopic implications. If you support reproductive freedom, does that mean you support everything being offered in the reproductive marketplace? Thawing frozen embryos and letting them expire? Selecting the sex of your baby? Conceiving triplets and “reducing” the pregnancy down to twins?

Everything Conceivable explores the personal impact on individuals using assisted reproduction to conceive, and the moral, ethical, and pragmatic decisions they make on their journey to parenthood. It looks at the vast social consequences: for hospital neonatal wards, for family structure, for schools, for our notion of genetic relatedness and whether it matters, for adoption; for our nation as a whole, and how we think about the earliest human life-forms.

The book explores questions of social justice: the ethics of buying or borrowing some part of the reproductive process, as with egg donation and surrogacy. It looks at entirely new family structures being created by families who have conceived using sperm donors, so that children may have half-siblings around the country with whom they are, or are not, in contact. And it looks toward the future, to the impact today’s technology may have on coming generations.

NOTE: WBP Founder Kathryn Hinsch will be interviewing author Liza Mundy on Wednesday, May 9th, 7:30pm at the Seattle Town Hall. Join us for the conversation!

UN Panel on HIV/AIDS and female Genital Mutilation

Who: IHEU -- Appignani Center for Bioethics, Population Communications International and Femmes Afrique Solidarite

What: UN Panel on Health and Empowerment: The Impact of HIV/AIDS and FGM

Where: 777 UN Plaza, New York City

When: Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2007 12:00 PM-1:45 PM

Contact: 212-687-3324 (tel) | 212-661-4188 (fax) | www.iheu.org/bioethics | E-mail: AnaLita@iheu.org

On Wed, Feb. 28, 2007 a panel of bioethicists, physicians and activists will discuss "Health and Empowerment: The impact of HIV/AIDS Epidemic Worldwide and Female Genital Mutilation in African Diaspora Communities" at the United Nations under the auspices of the Division for the Advancement of Women, Commission on the Status of Women.
The panel will discuss the health and empowerment of women, focusing on the international HIV/AIDS epidemic, female genital mutilation (FGM) in Africa and immigrant communities living in Western nations.

Although the practice of FGM is viewed by many within the international community as a human rights violation, FGM is reportedly still performed on three million women annually. It is estimated that 130 million girls alive today have undergone FGM.

The U.N. has challenged the world to fulfill eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015 that would drastically improve living standards around the world. The panel will address FGM within the context of these goals, FGM's relationship to the HIV-AIDS epidemic and directions for the future.

Speakers include:

Wayne R. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D is chairman of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Jamaica Hospital NY, visiting professor Dept. of Ob--Gyn and Women's Health at Albert Einstein Bronx, NY. He was the Obstetrician and Gynecology-in-Chief Sinai hospital of Baltimore Maryland. He wrote an important book entitled Complications in Pregnancy, published by Lippincott Williams&Wilkins 2000 (the 5th edition).

Adrian Sângeorzan, M.D., a specialist obstetrician and gynecologist and a full-time attending and faculty adviser at Jamaica Hospital, New York. A graduate of the Medical School at the University of Cluj, Transylvania, Sângeorzan worked as a doctor in Romania until immigrating to the United States in 1990. His prizewinning, best-selling volume of memoirs and fiction, ,Between Two Worlds-- Tales of a Women's Doctor, is published in Romanian and English.

Zeinab Eyega, M.Sc, executive director and founder of Sauti Yetu, an organization seeking to empower women to exercise, advocate and protect their rights based in New York City. Previously she was a program director for the African Immigrant Program at Research, Action and Information Network for the Bodily Integrity of Women (RAINBO), a program that examined the needs of circumcised women and girls in New York City. In addition to teaching and public speaking, she has facilitated numerous cross-cultural competency workshops for health care providers and reproductive health promotion seminars for African immigrant and refugee communities throughout the U.S.

Tata Traore, director of intervention for the Bondala Department of the Harlem United Community AIDS Center, a community-based organization providing a unique continuum of care for over 2,300 clients per year. She works to integrate socially and economically disenfranchised people into a healthy and healing community, offering clients access to a full range of medical, social, and supportive services.

Ana Lita, Ph.D., director of the IHEU-Appignani Center for Bioethics in New York City. She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Ethics and Social Philosophy from Bowling Green State University. The author of numerous conference presentations and publications in the fields of education, ethics and bioethics, Ana Lita is a Women's Bioethics Project Scholar and
the recipient of a Soros Foundation Fellowship and a National Association Fellowship for International Scholars.

Michael Castlen, executive director of PCI --Telling Stories, Saving Lives in New York City. He has an extensive background building organizational capacity in non-profit organizations, specifically those involved in international development. He served as Chief Operating Officer at the Foundation for a Civil Society and worked with NGOs in the Czech Republic and Slovakia to strengthen civil society organizations and nurture local corporate philanthropy. At Holt International he worked in Romania on strengthening child-welfare.

The IHEU-Appignani Center for Bioethics focuses on raising awareness of bioethical issues confronting the international. The Center is a new initiative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), an international umbrella organization for humanist, ethical culture, rationalist, secularist and free-thought groups. IHEU holds a special consultative status with the U.N., a general consultative status with UNICEF and the Council of Europe as well as operational relations with UNESCO in Paris.

PCI -- Telling Stories, Saving Lives (Population Communications International) is dedicated to the promotion of education and health, including reproductive health and informed choice; sensitivity to national and local cultures; and the principles put forth by the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. PCI develops entertainment-education programs and social marketing strategies that support targeted health and poverty alleviation initiatives. For more than 20 years, PCI has worked in over 27 countries, producing more than 75 radio and television programs, training hundreds of individuals, providing technical assistance to more than 100 international organizations. Central to PCI's long-running Kenyan radio drama Ushiwapo Shikamana was a storyline about the health consequences of female genital mutilation (FGM).

In the fall of 2006, PCI and the IHEU-Appignani Center for Bioethics launched a new program, the Women's Health Center, aimed at supporting grassroots women's health organizations develop their own resources to address the global status of women's health. The Women's Health Center enables these organizations to merge their resources and develop new, innovative strategies to improve the lives of the world's most vulnerable women.

Washington State to Offer Free Gardasil Jab

Washington state Gov. Christine Gregoire's budget includes buying bulk quantities of Gardasil and offering it for free. Doctors will still be able to charge for the jab as a service performed, but they won't be able to charge for the vaccination (fluid) itself.

Gregoire thought that it was premature to make the vaccination mandatory, which doesn't rule out that she will make it so in the future. The cost to the state is a bit unknown, since its being lumped under the reported budget for the next two years along with a rotavirus vaccine; the two together will cost about $26 million for 2.5 years.

Altruism and the Brain

"Are you a giver? Brain scan tells the truth."

Or so the headline of a recent MSNBC.com article on altruism and the brain declares. With the recent hype around gender differences and the brain, and the fact that many fMRI studies include men only, I thought it was prudent to find out if women were part of this 45 person study, and if so, did the researchers find any gender differences.

One of the authors of the study published in Nature, Scott Huettel, Ph.D, responded to my email inquiry:

Our subject sample - not all college students, although all were 35 and under - comprised 25 males and 20 females. We looked at gender effects, but found no significant influence on either brain activation in key regions or on the relation to altruism. Now, of course, this does not mean that there are no gender differences in altruism nor in the function of these regions; it just means that our study doesn't provide any evidence for such gender effects.

Thank you, Dr. Huettel.

As with my previous post on the importance of including women in heart clinical trials, it is critical that we study the female brain as well. We don't want to wake up twenty years from now, as we have with heart disease, and need to promote a "National Wear Grey Day" because we didn't have the data we needed on how to treat women for depression, Alzheimer's, and a whole host of other neurological diseases.

"The Heart Truth"

I recently received an email asking us to help promote National Wear Red Day (February 2, 2007) which is part of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute's "Heart Truth" campaign to make women more aware of the danger of heart disease. The campaign's goal is to "give women a personal and urgent wake up call about their risk of heart disease".

This is a worthy campaign and if you are inclined to wear red, go for it. But I think there is another "heart truth" that needs to be told. We didn't just magically find out a few years ago that heart disease in women typically follows a different course than it does in men (risk factors as well as diagnosis and treatment.)

We have this critical data because women's health activists, women Congressional leaders, especially Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Patricia Schroeder (D-Colorado), and members of the medical community led by Nanette Wenger, MD challenged the prevailing notion that women were "mini-men" and insisted that women be included in clinical heart study trails. Until the early nineties, men were the model subjects in most funded biomedical studies.

Medical and women's history buffs can check out the article "Coronary Artery Disease in Women: A Historical Perspective" by Joan L. Thomas, MD and Patricia A. Braus, MPH published in the AMA Journal of Internal Medicine (Feb 23, 1998) for more exacting details.

But the bottom line from their study: "Pressure from women concerned about the emerging knowledge about the adverse effects of heart disease in women helped to persuade a group of public officials of the importance of funding research related to women and heart disease."

Now that is the heart truth.

Bioethics and Women: Across the Life Span

It's a snow day in Seattle (three whole inches!) so all my meetings were cancelled. This unexpected gift of time gave me the opportunity to read Mary Briody Mahowald's recently published book: Bioethics and Women: Across the Life Span (Oxford University Press). I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Mahowald last March when she participated in the WBP/Ford Foundation sponsored planning meeting in Washington, D.C., to organize the first-ever Bioethics Seminar for Women State Legislative Leaders.

Dr. Mahowald's book is not "bioethics-lite." Reading the first chapter transported me back to my graduate school days. In the first 30 pages alone it seems as though she touches on every critical philosophical underpinning of bioethics. Always a teacher, she has a delightful habit of including little explanatory notes in the text - in case your memory is a little fuzzy on Latin terminology or you aren't up on the latest medical interventions.

I went to Amazon.com to get a book cover image and found an editorial overview so much wiser than one I could craft. Here is an excerpt:

All persons, while different from one another, have the same value: this is the author's relatively uncontroversial starting point. Her end point is not uncontroversial: an ideal of justice as human flourishing, based on each person's unique set of capabilities. Because the book's focus is women's health care, gender justice, a necessary component of justice, is central to examination of the issues. Classical pragmatists and feminist standpoint theorists are enlisted in support of a strategy by which gender justice is promoted.

Two features of the book are unique: (1) the topics presented cover the entire life span of women, not just those related to reproduction; (2) a range views about moral status are applied not only to fetuses but also to individuals already born.

While delineating and defending the book's perspective, the first section provides an overview of bioethics, critiques prevalent approaches to bioethics and models of the physician-patient relationship, and sketches distinguishing aspects of women's health care that are prevalently neglected. The second section identifies topics that are indirectly as well as directly related to women's health, such as domestic violence and caregiving. Brief cases illustrate variables relevant to each topic. Empirical and theoretical considerations follow each set of cases; these are intended to precipitate more expansive and critical examination of the issues raised.

The last section is devoted to an egalitarian ideal that may be pursued through an ethic of virtue or supererogation rather than obligation. By embracing this ideal, according to the author, moral agents support a more demanding level of morality than guidelines or laws require.

Bioethics professors - take note: This book would be a great addition to your syllabus.

If I Only Had a Brain

Reproductive technologies seem to be getting all the press these days: from designer/deformer babies, made-to-order embryos, to womb transfers. And while these issues are of critical importance to women, I believe neuroscience is the emerging field we need to keep an eye on (and drive the policy debate.)

Advances in neuroscience are going to pose some of the most important ethical questions yet about what it means to be human – challenging our concepts of free will, gender and genetic determinism, and what sets us apart from other species. Many believe that it will displace genetics as the leading edge of scientific discoveries in the 21st century.

I was pleased to learn about an upcoming conference on the implications of neuroscience - see details below. The Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future has recruited an impressive range of scholars and policy makers including:

Marsha Darling, Ph.D., Professor of history and interdisciplinary studies and director of the African American & Ethnic Studies Program at Adelphi University;

Andrew Imparato, J.D., president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities;

U.S. Representative Brad Sherman, J.D., CPA, (D-CA), member of the House Committee on Science;

Patricia Smith Churchland, Ph.D., professor of philosophy at the University of California San Diego and author of Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain;

Linda MacDonald Glenn, J.D., L.L.M., faculty member in the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical Center and in the University of Vermont’s College of Nursing and Health Sciences

Conference details:
A Spotless Mind? Policy, Ethics & the Future of Human Intelligence
Friday, February 16, 2007 - 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
National Press Club, 529 14th Street N.W., Washington, D.C.
RSVPs are required. There is no charge for the event.
E-mail: rsvp@thehumanfuture.org

I'll be there and will be reporting live from the conference.