Of Mice and HuMice, Part Deux

We blogged about Clyven, the chimerical transgenic mouse with human intelligence, before; but now researchers have 'kicked it up a notch', by creating mice with the human version of a gene involved in language, called FOXP2. As the article in Discover magazine notes, "hile the mice didn’t exactly sit up and start reciting poetry about cheese, they did show some intriguing differences in both their vocal patterns and brain structure."

The region of the brain that was affected was the basal ganglia; the humanized mice grew nerve cells that had a more complex structure. Baby mice utter ultrasonic whistles when removed from their mothers; the researchers' findings that the baby hu-mice, when isolated, made whistles that had a slightly lower pitch, among other differences. Here the video with research Wolfgang Enard that provides a summary of the paper published in Cell:



So what does it mean when we 'uplift' animals? Colleague and friend George Dvorsky has some interesting thoughts on this here.

Turn on the Bright Lights, Baby...

First, there were glowing cats.






Then, reports of glowing dogs.









Now, glowing marmosets;









The gene for express the green fluorescent protein in their skin was delivered to the first marmoset embryos via a modified virus, but the significant news here is that the genetically modified primates that can pass their modifications to their offspring; it is the first known case that an introduced gene has been successfully inherited by the next generation in primates. Why is that important? Because medical researchers have yearned for an animal model that is closer to the human anatomy; researchers may now be able to produce whole groups of marmosets that mimic humans with diseases like cystic fibrosis or Alzheimers'.

While this breakthrough is exciting, warning bells have sounded that this is one step closer to the creation of human designer babies. So, let me know pose this question: How comforting or discomforting would it be to see your baby glowing the dark?

A Critical Link: The Environment and Women's Health Conference

A Critical Link: The Environment and Women's Health Conference
In recent years there has been an increased awareness of the connections between environmental contaminants, fertility, and health -- and a growing body of evidence supporting these concerns that link reduced fertility to pregnancy loss, adverse birth outcomes, reproductive tract abnormalities, learning disabilities in children, and various cancers to environmental contaminants. It is becoming increasingly clear to those of us who work for women's health that we must begin to turn our attention to the environmental toxicants that are affecting the ability of couples to become pregnant, have healthy pregnancies, and give birth to healthy babies.

At Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, we feel a responsibility as a health care organization to help our patients and communities make the link between human health and the products we put in our bodies, and in our homes and schools.

On September 10, 2009, PPNNE is presenting A Critical Link: The Environment and Women’s Health, in Burlington, VT. This ground-breaking conference will feature a keynote address by ecologist, author, and cancer survivor Sandra Steingraber. Steingraber and other environmental health experts, will participate in a panel discussion moderated by Dave Rapaport, Seventh Generation’s senior director of corporate consciousness, and Mia Davis, national grassroots coordinator for the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Cecile Richards will kick off the conference and share the Planned Parenthood perspective on providing greener, healthier choices to patients. For more information go to http://www.good-chemistry.org/

A.I:. Salvation or Annihilation?

It's summertime and time for a new Terminator movie -- and Terminator Salvation asks the age-old question will Artificial Intelligence (the coming Superbrain, as the NY Times article dubs it) be our salvation or annihilation?:
"Today, artificial intelligence, once the preserve of science fiction writers and eccentric computer prodigies, is back in fashion and getting serious attention from NASA and from Silicon Valley companies like Google as well as a new round of start-ups that are designing everything from next-generation search engines to machines that listen or that are capable of walking around in the world. A.I.’s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the question of where the technology might be heading and, more ominously, perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how quickly."



Whether you are with Bill Joy on this or with Ray Kurzweil, A.I. is quickly coming to be part of our everyday lives. In a bizarre twist (hat tip to Jay Hughes on this) and juxtaposition of news articles, a recent article outlines how an A.I. System Suggests Arbitrariness of Death Penalty. Link to the abstract and article here.

Short People Got No Reason....(to gripe)

That's not how the song goes, but according to a recent NPR podcast, a recent neuroscience study shows that short people actually may experience things more quickly than tall people. Really, it's more an experiment about the subjective nature of time than about tall vs. short -- from the same neuroscientist who brought us the Possibilitarian movement, Dr. David Eagleman combines psychophysical, behavioral, and computational approaches to understand the neural mechanisms of time perception. For example, touch your nose and toe at the same time. (Humor me, will you?) ... Did you feel the touch at the same time? I did. But if you think about it, shouldn't the signal from the toe take a tiny bit longer longer to get to your brain? After all, your nose is on your face, which is closer to your brain. So shouldn't you have felt the touch on your nose first?

Eagleman calls this phenomenon "temporal binding": the brain manages to synchronize what's happening even though sensory data comes through your eyes, ears, tongue and skin at slightly different times and speeds. According to Eagleman, it may be that our sensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest piece of information to arrive; "Given conduction times along limbs, this leads to the bizarre but testable suggestion that tall people may live further in the past than short people."

To listen to the entire podcast, click here, and to read more about subjective time versus neural time, click here. And to learn more about Eagleman's Lab for Perception and Action, click here.

Excellence in Inter-American Health Awards

The Pan American Health and Education Foundation (PAHEF) (www.pahef.org/awards/)is pleased to announce the extension of the deadline for the 2009 Call for Nominations of the Awards for Excellence in Inter-American Public Health Program to Monday, June 1, 2009, 5:00 p.m. Washington DC time.

The foundation is proud to administer this joint program with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). This program started in 1975 with the creation of the Abraham Horwitz Award for Leadership in Inter-American Health. Recipients of each award are recognized with a certificate of honor, a monetary award, and a paid trip to Washington DC.

Again, the deadline for submission of nominations for the five awards is now Monday, June, 1, 2009, 5:00 p.m. Washington DC time.

Abraham Horwitz Award for Leadership in Inter-American Health
Pedro N. Acha Award for Veterinary Public Health
Clarence Moore Award for Voluntary Service
Fred L. Soper Award for Excellence in Health Literature
Manuel Velasco-Suárez Award in Bioethics

Please be advised that the nomination process has changed. Now all award nominations must be submitted through an on-line application form.

We encourage you to forward this announcement to your friends and colleagues in Latin America and the Caribbean who may be eligible and share our interest in improving the health of the people of the Americas.

Lessons Learned from PrEP Trial Cancellations

Between August 2004 and February 2005, the HIV prevention world was rocked by the suspension and cancellation of two pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) trials in Cambodia and Cameroon. To the considerable surprise of researchers, advocates and donors, these HIV prevention trials became embroiled in escalating controversies and sparked protests by activists speaking on behalf of the communities where trial participants were being recruited. The activists not only raised questions about how the research was being conducted, but also challenged the fundamental ethics and underlying motives of the research.

Just this week, my colleagues at the Global Campaign for Microbicides released two in-depth case studies relating the events that led to these trial cancellations and extracting the lessons they provide for current and future research:

• Research Rashomon: Lessons from the Cameroon Pre-exposure Prophylaxis Trial Site by Elizabeth McGrory, Andrea Irvin and Lori Heise
• Preventing Prevention Trial Failures: A Case Study and Lessons for Future Trials from the 2004 Tenofovir Trial in Cambodia by Anna Forbes and Sanushka Muldaliar

Acknowledging that no single version of the events constitutes the “real story”, the case studies are built from extensive interviews with researchers, policymakers and other government officials, donors, NGO staff, and advocates to reconstruct often incompatible accounts of what eventually led to government intervention that halted the research. The case studies capture the political context and backdrop against which the controversies arose and the underlying and unaddressed conflicts that led to the costly collapse of two Phase 3 trials.

These reports are important and exciting reading for anyone interested in sound science, human rights, gender equality and communication across enormous cultural, social, and economic disparities. The HIV prevention field has made substantial progress since 2005 in forging mechanisms to be transparent and build trust between trial communities and researchers. Still, much remains to be done and the potential for conflict remains.

As the first PrEP trials move toward completion this year, these case studies offer a timely look at what we have learned and what pressing challenges remain unaddressed.

The two case studies are available on-line at http://www.global-campaign.org/.


UPDATE: Dr. Free-Ride over at the blog Adventures in Ethics and Science is going to be hosting a virtual journal club on these two case-studies. Join in the fun here.

Are your genes your property?

In an earlier related post on biobanking, we asked our readers if they thought whether or not one's DNA should be private or publicly banked; the response was overwhelmingly in favor of privacy. Similarly, the notion of property rights in application to genes and genetic information presents serious challenges, as the Council for Responsible Genetics has long argued; their Genetic Bill of Rights includes a section that states "All people have the right to a world in which living organisms cannot be patented, including human beings, animals, plants, microorganisms and all their parts."

Now this issue is going before the courts: A group of patients, genetic researchers, and professional associations have filed a lawsuit against Myriad and the US Patent Office for patenting the genes known as BRCA1 and BRCA2. From the NY Times this morning:

"When Genae Girard received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2006, she knew she would be facing medical challenges and high expenses. But she did not expect to run into patent problems.

Ms. Girard took a genetic test to see if her genes also put her at increased risk for ovarian cancer, which might require the removal of her ovaries. The test came back positive, so she wanted a second opinion from another test. But there can be no second opinion. A decision by the government more than 10 years ago allowed a single company, Myriad Genetics, to own the patent on two genes that are closely associated with increased risk for breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and on the testing that measures that risk.

On Tuesday, Ms. Girard, 39, who lives in the Austin, Tex., area, filed a lawsuit against Myriad and the Patent Office, challenging the decision to grant a patent on a gene to Myriad and companies like it. She was joined by four other cancer patients, by professional organizations of pathologists with more than 100,000 members and by several individual pathologists and genetic researchers.

The lawsuit, believed to be the first of its kind, was organized by the American Civil Liberties Union and filed in federal court in New York. It blends patent law, medical science, breast cancer activism and an unusual civil liberties argument in ways that could make it a landmark case. "

The complete article is accessible here; stay tuned as we follow this case, which could change the landscape in the field of genes and patents.

[Editor's note, added at 7:55pm, EDT: Colleague and WBP Supporter Art Caplan comments on this topic in his regular MSNBC column here, commenting that it is not always a bad thing when patent lawyers feel queasy. :>) ]

Swine Flu is not a Hoax

Here's a link to a piece I wrote that was in this weekend's Houston Chronicle. Although it is more from a public health perspective than a bioethics one, there's an aspect to disaster planning that I think should be of interest to us--which is the burden that falls to women because of the absolute lack of public health infra-structure. Who do you think has to take off of work when a school is closed or a family member is sick? How would any of us care for ourselves, our families, and our pets if we could not leave the house?
Although any infra-structure can be overwhelmed given a sufficient burden, we in the United States start in the postion: we have nothing to be overwhelmed.

The School of Athens and Bioethics

Raphael’s The School of Athens presents a scene familiar to anyone who has spent time in the world of bioethics, a swirl of heated discussion among passionate individuals from many backgrounds.  The painter draws his viewer’s eye to the very spot I occupy every day as director of a public policy think tank in Seattle: the intersection of reality, possibility, and belief. 

As biotechnology continues to outpace the imagination of all but the visionary, individuals face real life scenarios that were beyond our collective imagination a decade ago.  Whom I would add to Raphael's visualization of knowledge and great conversation today? Or, put another way, what knowledge do we now have that the earlier philosophers did not? How has that knowledge – scientific, aesthetic, political, psychological - changed how we understand what it means to be a moral human being?

I would add representatives from the fields of genetics, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. Genetics helps us understand our origin in and connection to the natural world. Sociobiology takes that knowledge further and helps us understand the complex relationship between nature and nurture. Evolutionary psychology will help us understand the emotional and cognitive adaptations we make to technological gains. 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.

I believe the most important conversations in this century will be between the scientists and the broader community as we struggle to understand the implications of new technologies. Let's make sure we are all in the picture.

Beans (A Poem for Organ Donation)

Beans

Because they fail to work properly on their own
A catheter was inserted into her abdomen
For easy access to the machine she uses daily
To help her kidneys balance the minerals that flow
In and out of her blood stream
The process is intricately connected to her food-intake
And the money she makes
The support she has from friends and fam
That worries about the fragility visible in her face
As she recants tales of fighting her landlord
Who doesn’t care about her handicap placard
Or the government that sits on the hill counting kidney transplants,
Comparing them to dollars and cents
As if they were beans in a jar
For years she’s struggled with doctors
Trying to make sense of the disease they cannot fully explain
- It causes swelling, bone loss, brain damage, and severe joint pain
She was taken off the transplant list, put back on… then taken off again
No one understands the agony she’s in
Not even I – her sister-friend
Although weak from frustration, mineral imbalance, and poverty
She writes letters to congress, speaks at rallies, and talks to anyone willing to listen
To God she prays for a kidney that works
As hard as she does to make life meaningful and whole
Like two kidney beans in concert
It is for KH that I write
In hopes that others will get to know the miracle of organ donation
And know that life…your life amounts to more than a hill of beans…

Posted by L7Holly

Women's Health Heroes Awards

The voting has started for Women's Health Hero over at the Our Bodies, Our Selves blog, and our very own Kathryn Hinsch has been nominated! Go Kathryn! Voting is only open until May 8, so get on over and vote!

Stop that Bug!

Colleague and WBP supporter Art Caplan explains that the 1918 offers some lessons for us today and that all of us have a responsibility to keep swine flu from spreading:

When faced with the threat of disease, the impulse of most Americans is to think about medical technology and miracle drugs. These are not likely to be much help in the battle against swine flu — but the history books might.

As history has proven, the best way to halt a deadly virus is to keep infected people away from others. In 1918, an influenza pandemic caused by a strain of flu similar to the one identified in Mexico killed more people than died in all of World War I. Up to 50 million people died worldwide. The greatest number of deaths occurred among young adults between the ages of 15 and 35.

At the time, young American men were being mustered into military camps from all corners of the country to prepare for the war. A few brought to those cramped quarters a new strain of flu. They quickly infected one another at an astonishing rate. As they were ordered to ship out, the epidemic spread along the train lines they used, with the flu jumping into the civilian population at every stop, right up to the harbors and port cities where they departed. Many experts think the flu followed these troops on their convoys into Europe, causing millions more to die.

We risk making that same fatal mistake this time around.

The Obama administration has developed plans to send National Guard troops from all over the U.S. to the Mexican border to help contain the violence from the bloody drug war raging there. I hope that by now the White House has realized this is a really, really bad idea. Sending the Guard right now to battle drug war lords could accelerate the spread of the swine flu among a high-risk group while giving the virus a free pass to travel all over the United States as the troops rotate home.

The 1918 pandemic offers additional stark lessons. While an effective vaccine may be found against this rare strain of swine flu, it will take many months to produce in large amounts. The best weapons we have right now are not glamorous and have little to do with doctors, drugs and hospitals: They are isolation, hygiene and controlling large gatherings of people.

New Zealand just quarantined a group of students who had flown back from Mexico. We may need to do the same thing.

Americans are not used to giving up individual liberty in the name of the common good. But that attitude is exactly what diseases such as the swine flu virus thrive on.

Heading out to church, the movies, restaurants, subways, supermarkets, day care centers, schools and other places where large numbers of people gather is a recipe for spreading the virus. What if infected people and those who have close contact with them won’t stay home? What if people with symptoms slog in to work anyway? Will we intrude on their basic rights and make them stay home? Are we willing to cancel public events and close schools, museums and churches until the infection passes, no matter how loud the protests?

Good hygiene — washing your hands frequently; wearing a filtering mask; keeping doorknobs and surfaces clean; being careful about sneezing, spitting and coughing — is helpful in controlling the spread of nearly all infectious diseases, swine flu included.

Each of us needs to take responsibility for stopping the spread of the flu.

What the nation needs is not to send an army to sit in the path of a deadly virus. Instead, we need to prepare for a short period of time when individual rights to go where we want, spend time with who we want and assemble as we want yield to the necessity of protecting the common good.

Reprinted from MSNBC website, original article can be found here.

The Handmaid's Tale - Revisited

Just in time for Mother’s Day (May 10th this year - mark your calendars!), the Women’s Bioethics Project Book Club has released its next selection: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Download the book club kit developed by WBP advisory board member Sue Trinidad and join us as we explore the bioethical implications of commercial surrogacy, the role of genetic relatedness, redefining concepts of motherhood and the commodification of women's bodies.

Read and discuss with your Mom, your daughters, and friends – let us know what you think – join the conversation!

Panayiotis Zavos: I've Cloned a Human!

Whether the news stories on Panayiotis Zavos’ latest efforts to clone a human embryo are a hoax or not, there is no doubt that a tremendous amount of scientific progress has been made since the 1997 announcement that a sheep had been successfully cloned; cloned primates and pets and the creation of induced pluripotent stem cells and human-nonhuman chimeras are just a few of the scientific discoveries that get us closer everyday to the prospect of a cloned human being. The ability to radically alter human reproduction raises fundamental questions regarding the nature of our humanity and the character of our society.

Thousands of scientists, scholars, journalists, religious leaders, and policy makers have debated and discussed the ethical implications of a wide range of reproductive technologies, citing ethical concerns from safety, kinship disruption, and the commoditization of reproduction to concern for genetic diversity and the threat of eugenic application. While the benefits of many reproductive technologies – genetic testing, therapeutic cloning, genetic germline modification, and chimeric modeling, to name a few – are still being debated, reproductive cloning is nearly universally opposed. Most believe it currently poses unacceptable safety risks.

The opposition to reproductive cloning has led to a growing effort to ban the practice at a state, national, and international level. All this activity led us to consider the question: Is there a consistent theme in the ethical language used to justify banning reproductive cloning? Does the language reflect the moral values and common goals of the world community or does it unwittingly set the stage to undermine procreative liberty and scientific progress by appealing to vague ethical principles that serve a broader political agenda?

Before we support a worldwide ban on cloning, we need to carefully examine the ethical language used and be sure it reflects the common good. We must watch carefully as human dignity is employed to ban human reproductive cloning, for it can set the stage for banning other reproductive technologies such as IVF, genetic testing and genetic modification as well as therapeutic cloning.

You can read our full analysis here.

Poor justice for the innocent

Living a Life Sentence
Kelly Cobiella
CBS Sunday Morning
April 19, 2009

Anything can happen to anyone at anytime and good things do not always happen to good people. One of the worst nightmares that can happen in a person’s life is to be falsely imprisoned and, even worse, executed. But this recurring nightmare has been experienced by thousands of people through the years. Some spend the remainder of their lives in prison, never returning to the life they once knew. Thanks to the breakthrough of DNA evidence, many have been fortunate to be exonerated of rape and murder charges after years and even decades behind bars. Others are freed as a result of determined sleuth work on the part of supporters or loved ones, people recanting original testimonies, suppressed evidence being revealed, or the surfacing of new evidence. Whatever the circumstances of their release, all of the newly freed face the same challenges of reintegrating into society.

After the initial elation of finally achieving the dream of freedom, reality is a real slap in the face for the newly exonerated. While decades passed, society moved on, technology advanced, and life slipped away. Homes were lost, careers destroyed, families broken up, insurance coverage stripped away, and children grew up. Release brings a new beginning for the wrongfully accused, with a prison record on their resumes. Many were imprisoned based on little or no evidence. In some cases, evidence was suppressed by police or prosecutors, physical evidence planted by police, other evidence manufactured by forensic scientists, and lying witnesses knowingly placed on the stand by prosecutors, all for the purpose of getting a conviction, whether to advance a career or for political or other reasons.

Beverly Monroe was 55, with a successful career as a chemist, when she was convicted of murdering her companion, Roger de la Burde, in 1992, even though police thought it was a likely suicide. There was no other evidence against Beverly but the prosecutor withheld this crucial information during her trial. Beverly’s daughter, Kate, was just starting her career as a lawyer and she quit her job to devote the next six years to freeing her mother, which she was able to do in 1999 based on the suppressed evidence. Beverly is now 62 and trying to piece her life together. Although potential employers have been sympathetic to her story, her prison record remains, and she has only been able to find a job as an administrative assistant with no benefits, a stark contrast to the success she had enjoyed before her conviction.

Following her mother’s release from prison, Kate Monroe moved to Utah to work as executive director of the Rocky Mountain Innocence Project, which has worked to pass a compensation law to aid the wrongfully convicted upon their release from prison. The law, which was passed in 2008, awards about $35,000 for each year of false imprisonment up to 15 years, and expunges the person’s criminal record. Only 25 states have such a program. Virginia, where Beverly Monroe lives, is not one of them. Another group called the Innocence Project has helped free 235 people with DNA evidence; 17 of them were on death row. The Innocence Project also works to reform the criminal justice system in order to prevent recurrences of such stories, many of which are far worse than Beverly Monroe's.

It’s true that mistakes can happen. But it’s hard to imagine the sheer powerlessness and devastating bitterness one must feel at the hands of someone who deliberately steals your life from you for personal gain. We never hear the names of the prosecutors or police officers who tamper with evidence or suppress information. There must be a law that is protecting them. We need laws that provide accountability for such misconduct. Or maybe we have them but the victims simply don’t have the fight left in them or the resources to engage in another battle. Or maybe they’re just grateful to be free. It seems that there is a conspiracy of silence regarding this issue. It is fair that victims of the justice system should be compensated and their records expunged in the case of wrongful incarceration. State governments should all adopt laws similar to the one passed in Utah and I further propose that resources should be allocated to psychological counseling and job counseling, as well as job placement and other services to ease the transition from prison to society. It wouldn’t give back the lost years but it would help to make the remaining ones better.

What is happiness, really?

I recently purchased a book titled, The Geography of Bliss, in which the author, who spent 10 years as a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio visiting some of the unhappiest places on earth, decided to visit some of the happiest. There is actually a map of the happiest and unhappiest places on earth. Denmark has topped the charts for the past 30 years as the happiest country on earth. The United States is currently ranked number 17 out of 95, up from 23 in 2006 (Zimbabwe and Moldova ranked at the bottom), and number 97 out of 140 in peacefulness.

We as Americans believe that we have such a high standard of living. We have convinced ourselves, rightly so, that we are the greatest nation on earth, but we have so much to learn from other countries that appear to have so much less, yet are ranked higher in happiness. People in other countries have enough. We have excess everywhere we turn: extremes of wealth and poverty, consumerism, obesity, you name it.

I think that our American need to be the best and have the most has created a very unhealthy lifestyle, especially in areas like the Northeast. We spend too many hours working and driving and too little time relating, exercising, and enjoying ourselves. Parents compensate for being absent by spending guilt money on their children. More and more stuff and less and less quality time is the name of the game. We have also lost the fine art of conversation. People don’t have anything to talk about except who worked more hours than whom (which often turns into a p*ssing contest), what they bought, and everyplace they had to drive the kids to. People don’t talk about books they’ve read, or a meal at a special restaurant that they enjoyed, or the beauty of a sunset at their vacation island.

I had a conversation yesterday with a lovely man from Columbia. He described life in his town, where people dress up in the evening to go for a stroll through the square, the streets are closed off for walking on the weekend, and people don’t have a whole lot of money, but seem to really enjoy themselves and their relationships. And they are much healthier. I find that this is sadly lacking in our American lifestyle. People really do have a lot but no one seems to be enjoying any of it very much. Stress levels are very high and satisfaction is low.

But I think the authors might be confusing satisfaction and contentment with happiness. Morley Safer of 60 Minutes did a segment on Danish happiness in 2008 to find out why the Danes are so happy. A Danish research team concluded that, although the Danes do a lot of complaining, they have modest expectations; therefore, they are rarely disappointed. I lived in Denmark for 13 months from 1978-1979 and I can tell you that my stay there was one of the happiest times in my life. As a people the Danes have a very high self-esteem that borders on arrogance. They are very outspoken and not at all politically correct. But they sure are a lot of fun to hang out with. I recently asked a Danish friend what he thought of the researchers’ finding and he told me that, because of their social welfare system, “I know that whatever happens, I cannot fail.”

My friend’s statement pinpointed the contrast between life in the US, which can be one long adrenaline rush, and life in some of the happier, safer places on earth. People come to the United States for challenge, excitement, and the chance for a new life. It’s a crap shoot. We fight for our survival everyday here because failure can put us out in the street, as we have seen with our recent economic crisis. But that is also what makes us so creative, innovative, and competitive. We have to be—it really is a matter of survival.

But our failure right now can be a good thing. I think we have traded our health and happiness for having more stuff. This economic crisis is forcing young people in their 20s to move back home. It’s not the ideal, but families are getting closer. For the first time in decades, people are saving more, buying less. Everyone is getting more conscious of the environment now, too. We are resetting our values. I think this will all lead to healthier lifestyles in general. People are switching to new careers and learning new skills that they never would have considered before. I think we as Americans can adopt a healthier lifestyle, maybe tone it down a bit, but I don’t think we can ever be the happiest nation on earth—that would mean that we have stopped searching, exploring, daring, taking chances. Innovators and dreamers are never satisfied or content, and that is what we are. But we can be healthier while we are pursuing our bliss and that is something that we can achieve.

The latest on designer children...

From the Onion (no further comment needed :>) :


Disney Lab Unveils Its Latest Line Of Genetically Engineered Child Stars

Twitter Women’s Bioethics Project News

You can now follow the latest updates on the issues, programs, and priorities of the Women’s Bioethics Project, a public policy think tank based in Seattle, by adding khinsch to your Twitter list. Join the conversation!

Recent Twitter updates:
Welcome Margaret Lane, JD, the newest member of the Women’s Bioethics Project Advisory Board. Read her bio here.

Eggs for sale, wombs for rent, vaginas by the hour. Commodification a good thing? Scholar Heather Widdows says no. Find out why.

Bad Doc, Greedy Doc? Is it ethical for Physicians to add cosmetic procedures to their core practice?

Gregory Stock is probably right: to upgrade is human. Check out his TedTalk on how biotech will drive evolution.

Memory Erasing/Enhancing: the possibilities

A recent New York Times article asks: What would your life be like if you could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain? Imagine being made to forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, or even a bad habit. This notion seems like a cheesy Sci-Fi movie; however researchers are on the verge of making memory erasing a reality.

Dr. Todd C. Sacktor and his team of scientists from SUNY Downstate Medical Center have been able to show how a single dose of an experimental drug can, in animals, block the ability of the brain to hold onto specific types of memories.

The positive side to this research includes the fact that the drug blocks the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information. And if enhanced, the substance could help ward off dementias and other memory problems. With an estimated 100 million Alzheimer's and dementia sufferers worldwide by the year 2050, this appears to be a clearly beneficial target treatment.

This possibility of memory editing has enormous possibilities; yet it also raises huge ethical issues. For example, how will erasing specific memories affect humans? Any such drug could be misused to erase or block memories of bad behavior, even of crimes. It may seem beneficial to erase traumatic memories, but the erasure of other troubling memories, and the healthy dread of them, form the foundation of moral conscience.

I know that memories of punishments from parents and other authority figures have had a major impact on my decision making and resultant actions. If I had no recollection of the way I felt during punishments, then I would probably be apt to repeat the same mistakes. If somebody erased those types of memories, then it would be like somebody squashing my internal "Jiminy Cricket".

A substance that improves memory would raise larger social concerns in addition to ethical concerns. For example, when scientists find a drug to strengthen memory, will everyone feel compelled to use it? People already use smart drugs and performance enhancers of all kinds; so a substance that actually improved memory could lead to an arms race.

At this point in time, the ethical and social implications of memory erasing/enhancing are just another future dread. However, we can all find comfort in the fact that such drugs may never even make it to human trials. Also, we can always rely on our government to halt any possibilities of future research. I say this because there may actually be positive aspects to this type of drug, such as Alzheimer's treatment, and we know how the government has reacted to promising studies (pre-Obama days)…case in point: will stem cell treatments ever get off the ground?