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Will you live to 100? Should we tell people that they have (or lack) the genes for long life?

In the news today – scientists have identified a cluster of longevity genes. From the Daily Mail A genetic test which tells whether you will make it to your century has been developed by scientists. The computer program will give individuals their odds of reaching the age of 100 – and tell them whether their… Read More »Will you live to 100? Should we tell people that they have (or lack) the genes for long life?

Ethical questions surrounding the BP Oil Spill

Largest oil spill in U.S. history continues to devastate
Gulf wildlife while the press and independent scientists are continually denied access to
spill site and surrounding beaches.

by Stephanie Malik

On April 20 a wellhead on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling
platform blew out in the Gulf of Mexico approximately 40 miles southeast of the
Louisiana coastline. What BP had initially claimed would be a spill with
“minimal impact”, 69 days later now constitutes the largest offshore oil spill
in U.S. history. Today the well is conservatively estimated to be leaking at a
rate of 1,900,000–3,000,000 litres per day—though several expert estimates
based on footage of the spill suggest the actual rate is more likely to be 3 to
5 times higher than this. The unusually wide disparity in expert estimates is
due to the fact that BP has continually denied the requests of a number of independent
scientists to set up instruments on the ocean floor that could measure the rate
of the leak more accurately. “The answer is ‘no’ to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom
Mueller, said earlier this month. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts
now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response
effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

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Foetal pain and the abortion debate: believing what you want to believe

By Janet Radcliffe-Richards

Last Friday’s BBC morning news headlines included a report of two reviews by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of evidence about foetal pain. The reviews concluded that foetuses under 24 weeks could not feel pain, because “nerve connections in the cortex, the area which processes responses to pain in the brain, does not form properly before 24 weeks”, and that even after that stage “a foetus is naturally sedated and unconscious in the womb”.

The corresponding article on the BBC website added the comment that “anti-abortion campaigners challenged the reports”. There were no details about the form these challenges took or who they came from, but as the reports were reviews of scientific evidence, it sounds as though a challenge to the reports must have been a challenge to the scientific claims. Of course scientific claims are always potentially open to challenge, so if the article had reported that scientists had come forward to challenge the methodology of key studies, for instance, or the way the reviews represented the data, we would just have known there was an ongoing scientific debate on the subject. But the implication of the BBC article was that people who were against abortion were challenging the scientific claims about foetal pain. And if this is true, it is interesting. Why should people with particular moral views (about the wrongness of abortion) or political ambitions (to prevent it) issue challenges to scientific claims? Most of these people are not scientists, and there is no reason to think they have special knowledge of nerve connections in the foetal cortex. So why are the challenging what the scientists say?

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Choosing how to live: death row inmates and terminally ill patients

by Shlomit Harrosh

Convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner was killed by gunfire on July 18, 2010. Given the choice between lethal injection and being shot, Gardner opted for the firing squad. This was the first firing squad execution in the state of Utah since 1996.

In the 37 states where the death penalty is in practice, lethal injection is the primary method of execution. Alternative methods are provided in 20 states, contingent upon the prisoner’s choice, the date of execution or sentence and the constitutional standing of the method used. In Virginia, for example, a convicted murderer can elect to be executed either by lethal injection or electrocution, while in Washington prisoners are executed by lethal injection unless they choose death by hanging.
Assuming that it is a good thing for prisoners to have some choice as to their method of execution, what does this tell us about the morality of voluntary euthanasia in terminally ill patients?

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A costly separation between withdrawing and withholding treatment

by Dominic Wilkinson

Television child star Gary Coleman died recently following a severe brain haemorrhage. He was taken to an intensive care unit, but the next day was taken off life support because of the severity of his brain injury.

Decisions like the one made by Gary Coleman’s doctors are common in intensive care. Many deaths follow decisions to stop intensive treatment because it is believed to have no chance of succeeding or because of the burden of illness even if the treatment does work. One question raised about cases like these is about the importance (or risks) of living wills. A separate question (and one that was raised during the critical care grand round earlier today) is about the difference between stopping treatment and failing to start treatment.

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The ethics of geoengineering – comments welcome

Should we encourage or avoid large scale environmental manipulation, for example in order to reduce climate change?

Measures such as carbon dioxide capture or ocean iron fertilisation have the potential to mitigate global warming, but what ethical issues are raised by these technologies? How should we take into account the potential risks of such measures, and how should they be weighed against the risks of inaction?

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The Brainy or the Rich: who should inherit the Earth?

Does it matter if Britain is ruled by toffs?

Nineteen British Prime Ministers attended one extremely expensive boarding school for boys on the far western outskirts of London, an astonishing statistic. David Cameron is the latest Old Etonian Prime Minister.

Tomorrow the nominations close for the Labour Party leadership and commentators (many of them Oxbridge-educated) have decried the fact that the main candidates ‘look the same’: white, forty-something, and, most damning of all, graduates of Oxbridge. Cameron, like almost his PM predecessors, studied at Oxbridge (Oxford, in his case). Two thirds of his Cabinet are products of Oxbridge. And you are much more likely to get into Oxbridge if you are from a wealthy background.

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A Sting for Absolutes

Sam Harris can sting. Well known for his sharp criticisms of religion, this social gadfly has picked a new target: moral philosophy. His recent TED talk and later articles about the science of morality (here and here) have caused a bit of a ruckus in philosophical circles as well as a feisty response from the general public. His main claim is simple enough: science can give us answers to moral questions. Not just inform our moral judgments or help us get what we want out of life, but actually tell us what we ought to value. In his words, values are a certain kind of fact.

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