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Ethics

The Dignity of the Carrot

What are you allowed to do to plants? At least in Switzerland you are not allowed to do research that deeply offend the dignity of plants. The Swiss federal Gene Technology Law stipulates that any scientific research should respect the "dignity of creation". All plant biotechnology grant applications must now state how they take plant dignity into consideration, confusing researchers.  The Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) have issued some guidelines (pdf) which make the situation even more confusing. Neither humans nor plants are likely to be helped.

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Do we own our bodies? Should we?

There was a sad story last week about a young woman who died unexpectedly at the age of 19.   She was on the organ donor register, and her own mother was on the waiting list for a kidney donation, but the mother was refused one of the kidneys.  Even the transplant coordinator was ‘crying her eyes out’, but there was apparently no escape.  Rules were rules.  Cadaveric donations must go impartially and anonymously to the most compatible people at the top of the waiting list, and the authorities decreed that these organs must go to three strangers – whose identity the mother will never even know.

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Trading on Testosterone: Doping and the Financial Markets

Two cambridge researchers have found that  found that the amount of money a male financial trader makes in a day is correlated with his testosterone level. The pair – John Coates and Joe Herbert – also found that a trader’s testosterone at the beginning of a day is strongly predictive of his success that day, suggesting that testosterone causes improved stock market performance, rather than the reverse.

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Academic Integrity and Vioxx

Drug company Merck and its product Vioxx are in the news again. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has examined the documents from the legal proceedings against Merck in connection with the withdrawal of Vioxx from the market in 2004. From their analysis, a significant number of journal articles – mostly review articles rather than articles reporting clinical trials – were written in-house and senior academics were brought in late to be lead named author. At least one of these academics has disputed the accusations made in the JAMA article.

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Who’s this ‘we’, Dr Soon? Unconscious Action and Moral Responsibility

A paper in Nature Neuroscience by Soon, Brass, Heinze and Haynes has demonstrated that it is possible (in
the case of a simple decision about pressing buttons) to predict what the
decision will be and when it will happen several seconds before the decision is consciously “made”. Does this demonstrate that our free will is an
illusion? That depends on what we mean by "we".

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Expert advice

Last Friday, on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions?, one of the questioners picked up a theme that had appeared many times in the media during the week.  ‘What is the point’, he asked, ‘of asking for advice from an expert independent panel of advisers and then disregarding it?’. 

He was referring to leaked information that the government’s  Advisory Commission on the Misuse of Drugs was going to recommend that cannabis should retain its current status as a class C drug, but that the Prime Minister was nevertheless ‘minded’ to restore its former B classification.  Class B drugs are regarded as more serious than those of class C, carrying a five year maximum prison sentence for possession, as opposed to the current two years. 

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The stresses of 24 hour creative work: How much would Aristotle blog?

New York Times writes about the stressful
lifestyle of for-pay bloggers. The bloggers get rewarded for being
prolific and quick to comment, but since the Internet never sleeps they feel a
pressure not to sleep either. The result is physical and emotional stress that
never lets up – especially since often the home is also their workplace. This
is just one example of the high stresses of many new creative class occupations. Is there any way out of knowledge-economy workaholism?

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Helping human-animals to die

A French woman, Chantal Sebire with a disfiguring and painful terminal
illness recently failed in her appeal for medical assistance to help
her to die. Before her death Chantal Sebire was quoted as saying “We
wouldn’t let an animal go through what I have had to endure”(1).
Euthanasia for animals is commonplace, and is widely accepted as a
morally acceptable response to animals whose suffering is unable to be
relieved. But, with the exception of a few places such as the
Netherlands, Belgium and the US state of Oregon, euthanasia for humans
is legally prohibited.
But is it speciesist to make a distinction between animal and human
euthanasia? In the case of terminally ill humans who request medical
assistance in dying we may have more reasons to permit euthanasia than
in the case of animals. If the arguments against euthanasia are so
forceful that it should not be permitted even in tragic cases like that
of Chantal Sebire should animal euthanasia be prohibited?

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Catholic Conscience and Hybrid Embryos

The first hybrid embryo was created yesterday and the debate about it and the HFEA Bill continues. Recently, the most senior Catholic scientist Sir Leszek Borysiewicz has criticised the Church for its position. Sir Leszek is quoted in The Times as saying:

I was brought up as a Catholic at home, both my parents are Catholics and I have continued to be a member of the Church … I go to church but I have had considerable issues with some of the stances the Church has taken on a variety of health-related issues. My conscience tells me very firmly that I should support the Bill as it stands.

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Extinction Risks and Particle Physics: When Are They Worth it?

The Large Hadron Collider, LHC, is the worlds biggest particle accelerator and due to start investigating the structure of matter later this year. Now a lawsuit has been filed in the US calling on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to stop preparations for starting the LHC for a reassessment of the safety of the collider. The reason is fears that the high energy collisions could cause some form of devastating effect threatening the Earth: either the formation of miniature black holes, strangelets that absorb matter to make more strangelets or even a decay of the vacuum state of the universe. Needless to say, physicists are very certain there are no risks. But how certain should we be about safety when there could be a risk to the survival of the human species?

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