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Ethics

Is it Wrong to Deliberately Select Embryos which will have Disabiltites?

A current bill before Parliament would revise the current regulation of IVF. One clause has caused great debate, especially amongst people with disabilities. It states:

(9) Persons or embryos that are known to have a gene, chromosome or mitochondrion abnormality involving a significant risk that a person with the abnormality will have or develop—

(a) a serious physical or mental disability,
(b) a serious illness, or
(c) any other serious medical condition, must not be preferred to those that are not known to have such an abnormality.

Some people with disabilities like deafness or dwarfism wish to use IVF to select embryos with the same disabilities. For reports of such cases, see Sanghavi, D. M. ‘Wanting Babies Like Themselves, Some Parents Choose Genetic Defects’, The New York Times, (December 5, 2006).

According to a recent survey, deliberate selection of children with conditions such as deafness or dwarfism is not uncommon: 5% of 190 of PGD clinics surveyed in the US have allowed parents to select embryos with conditions commonly taken to be disabilities (See Baruch, S. Kaufman, D. and Hudson, K. L. ‘Genetic testing of embryos: practices and perspectives of U.S. IVF clinics’ Fertility and Sterility (2006).)

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‘Reasonable steps’ to prevent gambling

The BBC
reports today that a compulsive gambler has failed in a High Court bid to make
the bookmaker William Hill repay £2 million of his gambling losses. The gambler, Graham Calvert, claimed that the
bookmaker failed in its ‘duty of care’ by allowing him to continue to place
bets after he had asked the company to close his account. The judge recognised that William Hill failed
to take ‘reasonable steps’ to prevent Calvert from gambling, but said that it
was probable that Calvert would have continued to gamble even had such steps
been taken, meaning that William Hill is not responsible for his losses.

Does a
bookmaker have a duty of care towards its customers? The judge in the case thought not, so let us
pose a far more modest question: ought a bookmaker to take ‘reasonable steps’
to prevent its customers from gambling in certain cases? Answering ‘yes’ to the latter question raises
a number of puzzling questions. For
example, what counts as a reasonable step, and under what circumstances ought
such a step to be taken? Consider the
reasons we might believe that pathological gambling is bad: I suggest that
three important reasons are (1) that it is irrational, in that the gambling
behaviour of pathological gamblers is highly unlikely to help realise their goal
of winning money and is highly likely to frustrate this goal; (2) that
pathological gamblers gamble often, and gamble more money than they can afford
to lose; and (3) because of (1) and (2), pathological gamblers are likely to
suffer large financial losses, which can disrupt other aspects of their lives,
such as their personal relationships, health, and career. 

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The Transparency of Clinical Trials

An article in the current issue of Science examines the extent to which new policies regarding the governance of clinical trials promote transparency. It goes on to suggest further issues that remain unaddressed and require attention. The authors suggest that recent policy changes have improved the extent of public access to clinical trial data. In particular, they suggest that Section 801 of the FDA Amendments Act “should go a long way in ensuring that all patients and all data are publicly accounted for.” However, with the Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, they do worry that some patients “are left on the cutting room floor to make a drug look better than it really is.”

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Methuselah’s planet: the population cost of longer life

Ageing is a mysterious process. There is a good deal of ongoing research aimed at trying to understand its biological cause, though much remains unknown. Some research is aimed at trying to unlock longevity, for example a study published this week that found a particular gene mutation in a group of long-living Ashkenazi Jews. Other researchers are actively looking at rare diseases like progeria which lead to accelerated ageing. It is often expressed that such research will make it possible to extend the normal human lifespan.

But should we try to make our lives longer? In an era of increasing environmental awareness, when the costs of human overpopulation are all too clear it might be argued that the planet cannot support a significant increase in our lifespan.

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The Transplant Case in Real Life

Philosophers have long debated about the moral permissibility of Transplant Cases such as the following one presented by Philippa Foot:

A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no-one would suspect the doctor.

Most people believe that it is not permissible for the doctor to murder this patient and harvest his organs, although a few consequentialists, e.g. Alastair Norcross, have argued that it might be acceptable under certain circumstances.

In a possible real-life version of the Transplant Case, the New York Times reported recently that Dr. Hootan C. Roozrokh, a transplant surgeon from Stanford, is being charged with ordering the removal of a life-supporting ventilator and prescribing excessive and improper doses of drugs, apparently in an attempt to hasten the death of a disabled and brain damaged man named Ruben Navarro in order to retrieve his organs sooner. 

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Changing the Building Blocks of Life: Playing God and Being gods

All life on earth has the same simple basic structure. It is based on the genetic code contained in DNA. The differences in DNA between a toad and Albert Einstein are what determines their different properties.

The active ingredients in DNA are also simple. They are 4 bases: cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine, or A, T, C and G. The order of these 4 bases is what determines the characteristics of life, the differences between Einstein and a toad.

Scientists in California have created two new bases in addition to A, T, C and G: dSICS and DMMO2. These new bases function like natural ones, they pair appropriately with their partner and are faithfully copied by the natural enzyme, DNA polymerase, responsible for making the billions of copies of DNA necessary to programme each cell in the body of a living organism.

At present, these new bases or building blocks do not do anything. But scientists hope they could be used

"for hundreds of purposes: for example, to build complex shapes, to build complex nanostructures, silence disease genes or even perform calculations… [and even]expand the genetic code and ‘evolvability’ of an organism."

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Post-mortem punishment and public dissection.

A television report aired in the US last week claimed that bodies used
in public anatomical exhibitions might have included executed Chinese
prisoners. There have been subsequent denials from exhibitors that any
of the bodies currently being shown in Pittsburgh came from prisoners.
Apparently one exhibition includes bodies of individuals who died from
natural causes but were ‘unclaimed’, while another exhibition includes
only individuals who have consented to their bodies being used for
education or research. But it is interesting to try to ‘dissect’ the
outcry.

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The Rogue Senator and the Protection of Genetic Information

The editors of Nature have today called for the US Senate to bypass Senator Tom Coburn’s (Republican, Oklahoma ) ‘hold’ the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Bill. The Bill, if enacted “would protect people from being discriminated against by health insurers or employers on the basis of their genetic information” but Senator Coburn has used a procedural manoeuvre called a “hold” to prevent it from coming to a vote in the Senate. In their editorial the editors suggest that by putting a hold on this Bill, the senator from Oklahoma is preventing the enormous research and clinical progress from continuing and further developing the era of personalised medicine.

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Earache for teenagers

The BBC today
reported calls to scrap an acoustic device designed to disperse crowds of
troublesome teenagers. There are 3,500
such ‘Mosquito’ devices in use in England, which work by emitting a
sound normally audible only to those under the age of 25. The sound is turned on for 20 seconds at a
time, and becomes irritating after around 15 seconds, causing those who can
hear it to move away. Typically, the
devices are installed in areas where groups of teenagers gather, such as
shopping precincts.

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A child of many parents: a new way to have two mothers

The Guardian and Telegraph, are today reporting that British scientists have created ten human embryos which each include DNA from one man and two women. This was done by taking a one day old IVF embryo and removing its pronuclei (the parts containing the chromosomes from the parents). These were then inserted into an egg cell from the second woman, which has had its nucleus removed. The result is a new embryo with its primary DNA coming from a man and a woman, and the body of its cell coming from the second woman. This is an amazing experiment, and comes hot on the heels of other multi-parent experiments, but why has it been performed and what are the ethical implications?

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