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Julian Savulescu

Doping: Russian Cheats or a Failed System?

A stunning report from a WADA Commission, led by former head of WADA Dick Pound has made a series of allegations against Russian athletes and authorities, including that 1400 samples were deliberately destroyed ahead of a visit by WADA. It recommends the suspension of all Russian athletes over the period including the Rio Olympics, and lifetime bans for five individual athletes and five coaches. It says the London Olympics was “sabotaged”, not only by the Russian authorities, but also by the inaction of the IAAF.

While this report focuses on Russia, early independent analyses of leaked blood profiles estimated at least 1/3 of medals involve doping or raised suspicions of doping. So the problem extends way beyond Russia. Arson Wenger, Arsenal Football Club’s manager, recently claimed doping was widespread in football, a sport which has so far had few scandals.

Back in 2012, there was more confidence in the ability to enforce the rules: speaking ahead of the Olympics, the UK Minister for Sport and the Olympics Hugh Robertson  said:

“We cannot absolutely guarantee that these will be a drug-free games,” he said.

“But we can guarantee that we have got the very best system possible to try and catch anybody who even thinks of cheating.””

Mr Robertson may have been correct that it was the best system possible. But today’s report, and earlier analyses of leaked blood data show that doping is likely to have nevertheless been widespread, amongst both Russian athletes and those of other nations.

I have argued that in the light of the proven inability to enforce a zero tolerance approach to sport, we should instead take a pragmatic approach. As a very brief and incomplete overview, I argue that we should allow doping within safe, measurable physiological parameters. For example, if an athlete’s haematocrit is under say 50%, we should not worry about whether she reached that level by altitude training, hypoxic tent use, genetic good luck, or EPO. We should focus resources on drugs which are unreasonably risky for athletes, or which are against the spirit of the individual sport (by which I mean they substantially remove the human component of a given sport). The doping we allow should be supervised by a medical professional, within prescribed safe ranges, and tested by independent accredited and monitored laboratories. You can read in more detail here or throughout this blog in the Sport category.

This position remains controversial. But its opponents imagine an Eldorado where sport is mainly clean, and that the few athletes who do dope are likely to get their comeuppance. They argue that allowing doping would be unfair to clean athletes who would not be able to compete. They argue that it would push young athletes into doping. But we now know that doping is not a rare aberration. It was not rare in the 90s for cycling, and it is not rare, 20 years later for athletics.

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From Self-Interest to Morality: How Moral Progress Might Be Possible

One of the most stunning successes I have personally seen in my life is the emergence of the Effective Altruism movement. I remember when Will Crouch (now MacAskill) first presented 80 000 hours to our Graduate Discussion Group and Toby Ord was still a grad student. From their ideas a whole movement has emerged of brilliant young people galvanised into doing good. We are getting the brightest, best people of the current generation coming to Oxford to engage with the Centre for Effective Altruism. Almost every grad student I come across has some connection. Well done Will and Toby, and all those others who have contributed to establishing this movement

So I guess I should not have been surprised when during my visit to Harvard this week, a student contacted me from EA to give an ad hoc talk. I discovered there were cells all over the world and the movement had spread way beyond Oxford.

Anyway, I gave an impromptu talk and predictably there were many questions I could not answer satisfactorily. One the issues I covered was the need to create a new basic (or minimal) secular morality. This is necessary not only to decide what the goals of moral bioenhancement should be (my favourite current pet topic), but indeed how education should be revised and society ordered. Every society has a set of normative commitments. Ours are outdated, archaic and unfit for the challenges of a globalised, interconnected and technologically advanced world.

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Clone me up, Scotty: A brief satirical history of cloning and ethical progress

Julian Savulescu
@juliansavulescu

The 90s was a terrifying decade. Boris Yeltsin with his finger on the button. Fortunately he was too drunk some of the time to move. The Spice Girls. And Y2K. I bought plenty of water.

Civilisation came to the brink in 1997 when Ian Wilmut managed to play God and clone a mammal, a sheep called Dolly. International chaos ensued. The German Prime Minister said it would lead to “xeroxing people.” The European Parliament beat its breast, proclaiming cloning an affront to human dignity. It proudly asserted that every human being had a right to genetic individuality (let’s conveniently forget that 1/300 live births involve clones or identical twins that lack genetic individuality).

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Brain in a Vat: 5 Challenges for the In Vitro Brain

Julian Savulescu

@juliansavulescu

In Roald Dahl’s short story, William and Mary, William dies of cancer. But a novel procedure allows his brain, with one eye attached, to be kept functioning in a clear plastic vat. His wife convinces William’s neurosurgeon to allow her to take William (or rather his brain and eye) home with her.

When home, Mary places William in a prominent place in the sitting room from where he can survey all her actions. He had been a domineering and controlling husband. He forbade her to have a TV and to smoke. Now, Mary purchases a TV and takes up smoking, blowing smoke in the direction of William. She will punish him for his abuse and his brain may stay alive, utterly powerless, for up to 200 years.

This story was science fiction. But yesterday, the first step to creating the brain in a vat was reported in the US. Back in July 2013, scientists reported the first organ grown from stem cells: a liver. A kidney, heart and other organs have followed. The potential of these technologies to eventually provide replacement organs is also an opportunity to sweep away complex ethical issues: most obviously in avoiding the need for organ donation, but also in enhancing the ability to test drugs on lab grown organs before testing in humans- reducing the risk of harm to research participants, hopefully some day to a negligible amount.

Now, just 2 years later, the first brain has been grown in a laboratory. The organoid has been grown for 12 weeks, the equivalent of a 5 week old foetus.

Lead researcher Professor Rene Anand, from Ohio State University in the US,
said:

“It not only looks like the developing brain, its diverse cell types express nearly all genes like a brain.”

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Pinker Bioethics: What Should We Learn?

Julian Savulescu 
Twitter @juliansavulescu

Steven Pinker has recently written an op-ed questioning the contribution of bioethics to the safe and efficient regulation of research. This has been widely misinterpreted and criticised, though Alice Dreger has written a recent accurate blog in support of Pinker. Pinker provocatively said that bioethics should get out of the way of research. This has been interpreted to mean that we should give up ethics review of research. Nobody, not me, and not Steven Pinker, thinks we should abandon ethical review of research. He actually says, ” Of course, individuals must be protected from identifiable harm, but we already have ample safeguards for the safety and informed consent of patients and research subjects.” Pinker is objecting to the unnecessary, unproductive obstruction that much bioethics represents to good research and regulation.

I largely agree with him and have said as much myself over the years. I recently wrote a piece for the anniversary issue of the JME arguing as much. I applaud him for trying to generate some self-reflection in the field.

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Doping: Alive and Well in the Tour But You Won’t Hear About It

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my argument for legalising doping in sport, aiming to focus resources on harm reduction rather than zero tolerance. Key safeguards in this approach are (1) doping carried out under the supervision of a doctor, and (2 ) checks on athletes to ensure they maintain normal physiological ranges of relevant parameters.

Many commentators consider this approach unrealistic. But as the world’s elite riders commence the Tour de France 2015, it appears that they will be riding under something very close to that vision.

In March this year, the Cycling Independent Reform Commission published a report into current doping practices. It concludes that doping is still prevalent, with estimates from those in the sport ranging from 20 – 90% of athletes participating in doping.

However, two mechanisms within anti – doping policy, the Athlete Biological Passport, and the Therapeutic Use Exemption, appear to be functioning effectively as regulators on doping behaviour: enhancing its safety and limiting its impact, without preventing its use outright.

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Three Ethical Ways to Increase Organ Donation in Australia

Authors: William Isdale & Julian Savulescu

An edited version of this post was published by The Conversation

Last week the Federal Government announced that there would be a review of Australia’s tissue and organ transplantation systems. The impetus for the review appears to be continually disappointing donation rates, despite the adoption of a national reform agenda in 2008.

Since 2008 there has been an increase from 12.1 dpmp  (donations per million population) to a peak of 16.9 in 2013 – but the dip last year (to 16.1) indicates that new policies need to be considered if rates are to be substantially increased.

Australia’s donation levels remain considerably below world’s best practice, even after adjusting for rates and types of mortality. At least twenty countries achieve better donation rates than Australia, including comparable countries like Belgium (29.9), USA (25.9), France (25.5) and the UK (20.8).

The review will focus in particular on the role of the national Organ and Tissue Authority,  which helps coordinate donation services. However, many of the key policy settings are in the hands of state and territory governments.

It is time to go beyond improving the mechanisms for implementing existing laws, and to consider more fundamental changes to organ procurement in Australia.

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How to Be Free: Objectification and the Noumenal World An Impression of Neil Levy’s First Leverhulme Lecture

Y Lim

When I was a medical student and doctor, there were a few legendary teachers at the Alfred Hospital. The greatest of these was a general physician called Y Lim. He was the Sherlock Holmes of bedside clinicians. He would take groups of medical students to see a patient and diagnose the patient “from the end of the bed”, just by observing carefully the paraphenalia around the patient’s bed, the medication and the movement of the side of their chest.

He was highly sought after as tutorials with Y Lim spelt success in the clinical examinations. I never had him but my friends in the year before did. At the end of their last tutorial, just before the final examinations, they asked him, “Y Lim, how do we do well in the short and long cases? How can we become a doctor?”

Y Lim replied, “Look like a doctor. Talk like a doctor.”

Three Ordinary Agents

Consider the following 3 people (philosophers call them “agents” because they do stuff, like secret agents do stuff secretly). They are all based on real life characters.

Read More »How to Be Free: Objectification and the Noumenal World An Impression of Neil Levy’s First Leverhulme Lecture