Are there neuroethical issues in sports? Dr Judy Illes thinks so, in a talk given in Canada on September 17. People are using neuroimaging to assess ability (which may also pick up unsuspected pathologies in the brain), intervening against depression in athletes, and perhaps using deep brain stimulation for enhancing motor performance. Does enhanced training methods pose a new problem for sport?
Should scientists be allowed to publish anything, even when it is wrong? And should there be journals willing to accept everything, as long as it seems interesting enough? That is the core of a debate that has blossomed since the journal Medical Hypotheses published two aids-denialist papers. Medical Hypotheses is a deliberately non-peer reviewed journal: the editor decides whether to publish not based on whether papers are true but whether they are bold, potentially interesting, or able to provoke useful discussion. HIV researchers strongly objected to the two papers, making the publisher Elsevier withdraw them. Now there are arguments for removing Medical Hypotheses from PubMed, the index of medical literature. Ben Goldacre of Bad Science and Bruce G Charlton, editor of Medical Hypotheses, debate the affair on Goldacre's blog. Are there scientific papers that are so bad that there should not be any journal outlet for them?
An article in the Times argues that life extension will bring us problems: long-lived people will bankrupt the NHS, pensions would become expensive, the pension age would need to be changed, there would be a pressure for resources and life would become meaningless. It is a surprisingly common criticism that would never be levelled at… Read More »Longer life, more trouble?
An article and editorial in Nature warns about the militarization of agents that alter mental states. While traditional chemical weapons are intended to hurt or kill people, these agents are intended to disable. For example, they might induce confusion, sleepiness or calm. The Chemical Weapons Convention contain a loophole for using biochemical agents for law enforcement including domestic riot control, and there is a push from some quarters to amend it to allow novel incapacitating agents. Is disabling agents just an extension of other forms of non-lethal force, or is this a slippery path we should avoid?
Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial
Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield, warns that we are well on our way to get military killer robots that have great autonomy in applying deadly force. Current military "robots" such as UAVs have limited autonomy. They are
remotely controlled by humans, but increasingly given ability to
patrol, find targets and attack on their own. It would be a natural
progression to give them increasingly free reign, with the humans
merely granting permission – but in an active situation human reactions
might be too slow. Will the current convention that a properly trained
military human operator has to make the final decision still hold true
in the future?
Read More »Four… three… two… one… I am now authorized to use physical force!
Researchers have managed to produce live-born mice (original article) descended from induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS cells), cells taken from adult animals and treated to become stem cells. That individuals could be produced from embryonic stem cells was already known, but this proves that the IPS cells can produce all kinds of cells in an adult body. Good news for people uneasy about the need for embryonic stem cells… or is it?
If one argues that it is wrong to use embryonic stem cells because embryos carry moral rights, then the question is whether the creation of IPS cells produce something that also has moral rights.
This has been a good week for life extension research, with the Nature paper Rapamycin fed late in life extends lifespan in genetically heterogeneous mice by Harrison et al. (free News and Views) showing that the drug boosts lifespan in middle aged mice, and Science countering with Caloric Restriction Delays Disease Onset and Mortality in Rhesus Monkeys by Colman et al. showing that in a 20-year longitudinal study rhesus monkeys do seem to benefit from caloric restriction (CR). CR involves keeping the energy intake low, but not so low that it induces starvation.
Not everybody seems to like the experiment. The Swedish major newspaper Dagens Nyheter had an article by Per Snaprud
that appeared to criticise the monkey experiment on ethical grounds. He
quotes Mats Spångberg, chief veterinarian at the Swedish Institute for
Infectious Disease Control, who doubts the experiment would have been
approved in Sweden. The only use of monkeys in Swedish research is AIDS
vaccine research. The article concludes by stating that the virus kills
2 million people every year, 270,000 of whose are children.
But ageing kills 100,000 people worldwide each day directly or indirectly. 100% of humans and monkeys are "infected".
Read More »Hunger for long life: the ethics of caloric restriction experiments
After the Times exposed the identity of the police blogger "Night Jack" he has been disciplined by the police force. The blog (now deleted) had won the Orwell Price for political writing and often expressed critical views related to the police and the justice system. In a court ruling Mr Justice Eady claimed that blogging was "essentially a public rather than a private activity" and that it was in the public interest to know who originated opinions and arguments. Do we have a right to anonymity on the net? And is it truly in the public interest to know who every blogger is?
Read More »Sometimes justice wears a mask: blogging, anonymity and the open society
Police are reinvestigating the 2007 death of Yolanda Cox, a woman who collapsed in anaphylactic shock after being injected with an experimental drug by her sister, a GP. The drug was developed by their mother, originally intended to treat diabetes but apparently believed to extend lifespan. After testing on diabetic patients and apparently themselves without any apparent side effects the mother and sister gave it to the woman three times, with tragic consequences the third time. Was it a failure of medical ethics, research ethics – or plain psychological bias?
Read More »Not better than the alternative: an informal experimentation tragedy
The UK police has an estimated 5.3 million DNA profiles in its databases, of which about 850,000 are of people who were never convicted of any crime (including 24,000 samples of youngsters who have never been convicted, cautioned or charged with any offence). Although the European Court ruled that a policy of retaining profiles of innocent people is illegal, the Home Office seems keen to retain them anyway, at least for serious crimes. Now it is claimed by a police officer that police in Camden deliberately target young people who have not been arrested yet in order to obtain DNA samples. According to him it is part of a long-term crime prevention strategy to discourage future crime. But does pre-emptive acquisition of DNA profiles make sense as crime prevention?
Read More »Precrime in Camden: using DNA profiles for crime prevention
