by Julian Savulescu
two early comments on the online debate website raise concerns about allowing performance enhancing drugs in sport:
Read More »Drugs in sport debate: Proposer’s response to comments
[This is the first post in the Trinity term Oxford University
Online Debate. Feel free to comment on any of the debate either at this blog or over at the official debate website. Votes can be cast after the concluding statements – between 5th and 9th July]
by Julian Savulescu
Two great sporting events are about to commence. Le Tour de France and the Football World Cup. Doping will play a part in both of these. In every professional sport where doping could confer an advantage, there is doping. Even if it is not widespread and even if you don’t know about it.
by Julian Savulescu
It is time to put the GM debate in a lead-lined coffin. To lay it finally to rest. And get things in perspective again.
by Julian Savulescu
Walter argues that addiction is:
1. a disorder of self-control that comes in degrees. It is essentially pathological self-control, like compulsive hand-washing, where the addict has limited control in some circumstances but not enough self-control.
2. a mental disease.
Bennett Foddy and I have argued that while addicts may have poor self-control and act imprudently, poor self-control and imprudence are not diseases. They are features of the human condition. People become addicted to all sorts of things: heroin, alcohol, nicotine, gambling, sugar, sex, the internet and food. What is common to all these addictions is that involve the reward system. Heroin may be more potent at activating this system than sugar, but they all act in a similar way. There are differences in degree, not kind.
With his new paper Craig Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity’s history, potentially peeking into it’s destiny. The challenge is to eat the apple without choking on the worm.
Craig Venter’s team have succeeded in producing a synthetic bacterium capable of self-replication. The group synthesised from scratch a variant of the Mycoplasma mycoides genome, which they then transplanted into a different Mycoplasma species to produce a bacterium controlled by the synthetic genome. The resulting bacterium could be regarded as the first truly synthetic organism. Earlier forms of genetic engineering have involved modifying the genome of an existing organism; Venter’s group have produced an organism whose genome was instead pieced together from chemical building blocks.
The prospects created by this kind of work are huge. Synthetic organisms could in theory be programmed to perform a range of useful functions: to produce drugs, biofuels or other useful chemicals, to act as ‘bioremediators’, breaking down environmental toxins, or perhaps to act as anti-cancer ‘search and destroy’ agents.
However this research also raises some ethical concerns.
Read More »Venter creates bacterium controlled by a synthetic genome
Ilina Singh and colleagues argue that the use of drugs such as Ritalin among young people is becoming so common that family doctors should be able to prescribe them as study aids to school pupils aged under 18.(1)
While the Guardian article rather cherry-picks from the range of Singh’s arguments in her original article, I have made broadly similar arguments to those in the Guardian article supporting cognitive enhancement myself (see here for a selection on enhancement).
However, one might ask whether the prescription of enhancement for young children who are incapable of consenting for themselves raises unique issues.
Read More »How to Prescribe Smart Drugs to Children Ethically
by Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu
There are 8000 patients on transplant waiting lists in the UK. Every year 400 patients die while waiting for an organ to come available.
We are all far more likely to be in need of an organ transplant than to be a donor. Most of us expect that if we needed a transplant that someone would donate one. On the basis of the ethical golden rule – do unto others as you would want them to do for you, we should all think seriously about whether and how we could donate our organs if we no longer need them.
By: Julian Savulescu
Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge physicist, has recently argued, in a Discovery channel documentary, that alien life forms probably exist somewhere in the Universe, but we should avoid contact with them. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8642558.stm). His reason is, apparently, that if they are anything like humans, they are likely to be aggressive and either exterminate us or pillage our resources.
"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said. "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."
In Australia, Norrie is understood to be the world’s first person to have ‘Sex Not Specified’ on their birth certificate. The NSW government has legally recognised that Norrie is neither male nor female. “Norrie, 48, was born in Scotland and registered as male at birth. At age 23 Norrie commenced sex and gender conversion to… Read More »Choose Your Sex: Male, Female or Neither … or Both
