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Geo-engineering: an essential part of our toolkit

Geo-engineering: an essential part of our toolkit

The current issue of the Royal Society’s journal (Philosophical Transactions) is devoted to geo-engineering. That is, very large scale engineering projects aimed at combatting global warming. For example, one proposal is to release sulphate aerosols in the stratosphere in order to increase the reflectivity of the earth and thus lower the earth’s temperature enough to offset global warming. Another proposal is to increase the reflectivity by producing more cloud over the ocean. This could be achieved with a large fleet of wind powered yachts, blowing a fine mist of salt spray into the air and thus seeding cloud formation. Such proposals offer a serious hope for avoiding most of the damage from significant climate change, and yet they are often rejected by environmentalists (for example see yesterday’s article in the Guardian by Greenpeace’s chief scientist). However, there is a strong case that these environmentalists are mistaken and should be encouraging this research.

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Abortion is No Place for the Law

Victorian politicians are debating how to reform law on abortion. In Victoria, as in other states, abortion remains a crime. This is inconsistent with what happens. There are nearly 100 000 abortions every year in Australia.

The Victorian government will decide between 2 Models. According to Model B, abortion will be available on request until 24 weeks of pregnancy, but after that point 2 doctors must agree that it is indicated. Doctors who fail to comply with the law would receive professional and other sanctions. On Model C, abortion is available on request all through pregnancy. Premier Brumby and a majority of politicians support Model B.

Why is the imposition of sanctions on doctors who provide abortions so attractive? Firstly, abortion is an undesirable means of birth control. Most people would prefer to find other ways of not having unwanted children. Secondly, many people believe that as the fetus grows, and looks more like a baby, its moral status increases. After 24 weeks, some fetuses are even capable of living in intensive care units, outside the womb, as extremely premature newborns.

Despite its superficial attractiveness, Model B is deeply morally flawed. According to Model B, the moral status of the fetus, and whether it is kept alive or aborted, depends on the judgement of 2 doctors. Their decisions will usually be based on whether there is a disease or disability present. But this implies that fetuses with disabilities have less of a right to life than those which do not have disabilities. This is discrimination against the disabled and those with diseases. We would not allow 2 doctors to kill a child just because it had spina bifida. Why would we think the presence of spina bifida should change the moral standing of a fetus? Doctors can withdraw medical treatment leading to the deaths of their patients, but only when the patient’s life is no longer worth living. This is not the case in virtually all abortions.

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A Nasty Dilemma for NICE

After a prolonged disagreement with patient groups, the NHS’s funding guidance body, NICE, has approved the £10,000-an-eye blindness treatment, Lucentis. The drug has been shown to halt the progression of wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the most common cause of blindness in developed countries. But as the BBC  note, in approving it, NICE may have unwittingly deprived the NHS of a much cheaper alternative.

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The truth about saving water

The last few years have seen some very bad droughts. In the UK, the drought of 2004-2006 was severe enough to nearly require the shutting down of domestic water in London and the fetching of water from public wells (called standpipes). Australia has been suffering from its own decade long drought with devastating consequences. As a result, water-awareness in both countries has been rising. People are at least dimly aware of ideas for saving water, such as turning off the tap while brushing one’s teeth. In Australia there was even a government sponsored advertisement recommending taking showers with someone else. However, as a recent report from the World Wildlife Fund shows, even if we stop showering altogether, we will still be using an unsustainable amount of fresh water.

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Doctors or Resource Allocators?

A recent survey by Myeloma UK, and reported on the BBC website, suggests that many doctors do not tell patients about drugs that may be beneficial and which are licensed in the UK. The trouble is that the drugs have not yet been approved by NICE and so may be difficult to obtain on the NHS. This seems to suggest that something is wrong with the way in which NICE functions with respect to licensing and that doctors are in some way complicit.

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Radical organ retrieval procedures

I wrote recently
about the controversial news that surgeons in Denver had taken organs,
including the hearts, from newborn infants who had died in intensive
care.
In recent years the retrieval of organs from patients whose hearts have
stopped (so-called donation after cardiac death, DCD) has become more
popular. In part this is because of the problem that there is a
shortage of organ donors who are brain dead. It is also because of the
recognition that when patients die after removal of life support, their
organs may still be viable for transplantation.

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The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

Studies of the content of dreams confirm what most of us already suspect: dreams are more likely to be nasty than pleasant, or as the researchers put it, “negative dream contents are more frequent than corresponding positive dream contents”. A recent study reports that threatening experiences are more frequent and intense in dreams than in real life. All this is in line with the entertaining (and not implausible) ‘threat simulation theory’ of dreams, according to which the evolutionary function of dreams is to simulate threats so that our ancestors could spend their nights rehearsing attacks by enemies and predators.

So dreams have a serious negative bias. All of this might have been extremely useful back then. But an unwelcome consequence is that we spend a large portion of our life in pointless misery. Clinical depression is often understood as a disposition to obsessively accentuate the negative. It seems all of us are clinically depressed during certain hours of the night. Think of a human life and how many hours of sleep it contains. Of these, many are spent dreaming. And most of these dreams are unpleasant in different ways. If we add all this up, dreaming makes our lives significantly worse, on balance. Shouldn’t we do something about this?

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How to Improve on Bolt’s Performance

You might think after Usain Bolt’s almost superhuman performances in the 100 and 200 m that the war on doping has been won. However winning one battle is not winning the war. As the example of Lyudmila Blonska shows, doping is still occurring. It is almost certain that there are other medals and world records that were achieved by athletes who were doping but were not caught. The sophistication  of the technology means that just because we are picking up fewer positive tests, it does not mean that there are fewer athletes doping

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Silicon dreams: digital drugs and regulation

A new worry has hit parents: digital drugs. The idea is that sounds can affect brain states, so by listening to the right kind of sounds desired brain states can be induced – relaxation, concentration, happiness, PMS relief or why not hallucinations? Apparently "idosers" walk around high on sound. Just the right thing for a summer moral panic – kids, computers, drugs and pseudoscience.

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When the heart stops: harvesting organs from the newly (nearly) dead

In the New England Journal of Medicine yesterday, doctors from Denver reported on three controversial cases of heart transplantation from newborn infants. These cases are striking for several reasons. They were examples of so-called ‘donation after cardiac death’ (DCD), an increasingly frequent source of organs for transplantation, but done very rarely in newborns. They are controversial because the transplanted organs were hearts that were ‘restarted’ in recipients after they had stopped in the donor. Transplant surgeons waited only a relatively short period after the donor’s heart had stopped (75 seconds) before starting the organ retrieval process. These transplants raise serious questions about the diagnosis and definition of death.

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