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Who is watching the watchmen?

Who is watching the watchmen?

Today, British
MPs approved the government’s highly controversial plan to extend
pre-charge detention of suspects to 42 days. This proposal initiated a discussion, though unfortunately still
fairly sparse, on Britain’ s
headlong way towards a surveillance state (see for example this editorial
in the Guardian).

 Technologies that allow the state to monitor aspects
of private life are not in the realm of science fiction anymore. This is
highlighted by the widespread
use of network monitoring and data mining suites, which are readily
available from major international companies involved in the standardization of
processes ensuring the lawfulness of the
monitoring. Emerging technologies like nanotech might significantly enhance
these existing possibilities and threats to privacy.

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Cloned Animal Meat

The Food Standards Agency in the United Kingdom has released the results of a study it commissioned on public sentiment about cloned animal meat, reports James Meikle in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/06/foodtech.food. It seems that the majority of the British public are resolutely opposed to the commercial use of cloned animal meat. The study reported a range of concerns about the possible harms of farming and consuming cloned animals, as well as a lack of appreciation of any benefits other than additional profits to farmers, biotech companies and food retailers. The views reported in the study are roughly in accord with a recent opinion of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE), presented to the European Commission, which suggested that cloning animals for food is unethical. See http://ec.europa.eu/european_group_ethics/activities/docs/opinion23_en.pdf.

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Abortion for Fetal Abnormality?

Abortion remains a crime for most Australians. Laws are inconsistent between states. In contrast, long ago the UK Abortion Act 1967 repealed and replaced its antiquated legal statutes on which much of Australian abortion law is still based.

The government in the state of Victoria asked the Law Reform Commission to provide legislative options to decriminalize abortion. Law reform is expected later this year.

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Cloning and animal exploitation

The Daily Mail reports this morning that 8 clone-offspring cows have been born in the UK. Also today, the first survey of public opinion on ‘clone farming’ has been released indicating significant unease and opposition to the idea of meat products or milk from cloned sources.

There are strict prohibitions on reproductive cloning for humans in most countries (for example, the recently debated HFEA bill in the UK, and the Human reproductive Cloning Act 2001). However there are few, if any, constraints on the cloning of animals. Is this the start of a new era of animal exploitation?

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Betting on bad health (with inside information)

Personal DNA testing is here. For $1,000 you can send off a DNA sample to an american company and find out your genetic predispositions to a wide variety of illnesses and problems, from male pattern baldness to cancer. The Telegraph is running a story by a woman who has just ordered such a test and has seen her predispositions. The story makes many of the issues quite vivid and shows how one can use the bad news in such tests, say a predisposition to a certain illness, to make special efforts to guard against that illness, or at the very least to be ready for the effect it might have on your life. There is, however, a problem with these cheap, voluntary tests. It is not a problem for the individual taking them, but a problem for society.

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Two approaches to climate control

The Guardian leader today drew what it called a crude distinction between “two sets of people who both want to fight climate change”.   Some think we can carry on more or less as we are while pursuing technological means to counterbalance the accelerating impact of our species on the natural environment, while their opponents think we should be getting that species to make radical changes in its way of life before its home becomes uninhabitable.   The article was mainly about plans for carbon capture, but there had been another piece a few days before about much further reaching ideas of geoengineering or ‘ecohacking’ – “using science to change the environment on a vast scale” by such means as screening the whole planet from the sun – which, it seems, might become feasible sooner than we realize.

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Conditional gifts for the NHS

The Royal Bank of Scotland has donated a state-of-the-art three dimensional CT scanner to an Edinburgh hospital, but with strings attached. The scanner will be available for use by NHS patients, but the Bank wants its staff to have priority access to up to 25% of the scanner’s capacity.

Some politicians and academics are opposed to the gift. But would there be good grounds for rejecting it?

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Personal Carbon Credits and Fairness Considerations

Not a day
seems to pass without some news on the possible catastrophic impacts of climate
change. International politics aims at establishing binding regulations for
greenhouse gas emissions – but quite rightly gets accused of only paying lip
service (though at least last weeks agreement of the G8
states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions might yield the right direction).
However, implementation of these emission cuts is up to the individual states –
but whichever step a government undertakes, there seems to turn up an interest
group that is heavily opposed. The UK’s proposed system of personal carbon
credits suffers exactly this fate.

In a report published this
Monday, the environmental audit committee urged the government to lead the way
in allocating individuals an allowance of marketable carbon credits. Under this
scheme, people would be given an annual carbon limit for fuel and energy uses.
This limit could be exceeded by buying credits from those who use less. Apart
form being accused as “costly,
bureaucratic, intrusive and unworkable”, criticism was also raised as this personal
carbon credit scheme might be unfair – just as, for example, a taxation
approach to reduce carbon dioxide emissions would be unfair as well. Some
people might have good reason for using more fuel than others as they live in
the countryside, drive their old neighbour to the supermarket, etc.

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False Hope? Greenpeace on Carbon Capture and Storage

     Earlier this month Greenpeace released a report entitled ‘False Hope’ attacking carbon capture and storage (CCS) on the grounds that it ‘wont save the climate’ and that it therefore presents us with a false hope. (See: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/false-hope ). Greenpeace argue that we should abandon attempts to develop CCS technology and that we should devote our efforts to reducing energy demand and developing solar, wind and wave power instead. It seems very odd that an organisation that devotes itself to saving the planet should spend its time trying to attack an emerging form of technology that is being developed to help reduce carbon emissions especially at a time when, as Greenpeace are quick to stress, the carbon we emit is causing environmental damage to the planet – damage that may be irreversible.

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Legal Abortion Time-Limits: Arbitrary Limits Harm Women

By Dr. Lachlan de Crespigny, Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Melbourne

The vote by the British parliament to keep the upper legal limit on abortion at 24 weeks was headline news around the world. An article in The Economist (1) considers that the British were spared America’s abortion wars partly because Britain is less religious than America, but also because abortion laws are made in Parliament, where shades of grey can be debated, not in the courts, where black or white usually prevails.

Interestingly much of the debate was about ‘viability’ – the minimum gestational age at which a newborn is said to be capable of surviving with modern intensive care facilities. This is a simple across-the-board week count. But the survival rate of newborns also depends on many other factors, including where they are born (2, 3), fetal health including the presence or absence of an abnormality (which remains lawful where the child will be ‘seriously handicapped’), plus the condition of the newborn. While around half or so of 24 week newborns in Britain may survive, many or most of the abortions at around that gestation are of problem, or unhealthy, pregnancies.

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