A BBC documentary screening this evening on the ‘Inside Out’ program reports on what it describes as a breakthrough for patients in a vegetative state. It is based upon research by a group of neuroscientists in Cambridge, who have used sophisticated brain scans (functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)) to look for signs of consciousness in patients who have previously been thought to be completely unaware of their surroundings.
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.
After steering the Lewis wind farm proposal though a six year development process, the Scottish Government has decided not to consent to the proposal. The Scottish Energy Minster is reported as saying that the proposal by Lewis Windpower to build a 181 turbine wind farm on the Western Isles of Scotland would have a ‘serious impact’ on the Lewis Peatlands Special Protection Area, which is the home to a number of rare and endangered species of birds (http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2008/04/21/afx4911829.html). These include Golden Eagles, Merlins, Dunlins and Greenshanks.
Read More »The Lewis wind farm and the need to compromise environmental values
International negations on climate change
sometimes give the impression that a lot of hot air is raised for nothing:
Politicians, policy makers and scientists alike gain air miles on their way to countless
conferences, thereby emitting non-negligible amounts of greenhouse gases, only
to arrive at the lowest common denominator satisfying none of the parties. International
treaties resulting from these negations suffer a rather bad reputation.
ruffled feathers of all those who see international regulations as the sole
remedy to global environmental problems. At the annual
meeting of the international research program SCOUT-O3 that ends tomorrow, researchers
presented simulation
results showing how the Montreal
Protocol – originally ratified in 1992 to reduce the emissions of CFCs and
other ozone-damaging substances –has contributed to a healthier environment
(see newspaper
coverage).
Read More »What computer simulations can tell us about the success of international treaties
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.
The Queensland Government, in Australia, has announced it will ban cosmetic surgery in people under 18 years of age. Other states, such as New South Wales, have stated they will also consider restricting access by teenagers to cosmetic enhancement.
This is problematic in a number of ways.
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.
Read More »Trading on Testosterone: Doping and the Financial Markets
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.
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".
Read More »Who’s this ‘we’, Dr Soon? Unconscious Action and Moral Responsibility
There has been an increasing buzz in the papers regarding the impending launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Some of this concerns the possibility that it will lead to a disaster which destroys the world. This certainly sounds unlikely, and people who seriously suggest this are typically brushed aside with official calculations about the chance that the LHC will indeed destroy the world in any of the ways that have been suggested. For example, it is said that the chance of it destroying the earth though the creation of a particle called a strangelet is only about 1 in 50 million and the chance of it creating a black hole which does not evaporate is much less than this. However, these are not the probabilities we are looking for.
Read More »These are not the probabilities you are looking for
