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Who is your hard drive working for?

Who is your hard drive working for?

Western Digital, a producer of networked
hard drives that enable users to access their files across the net, has blocked customers
from sharing media files from their drives. Needless to say, users are not
amused and hard at work at finding workarounds. The move is possibly a
pre-emptive way for the company to avoid being sued by the content industry for
providing a means for piracy. The block covers most popular media formats,
regardless of who owns the copyright of the contents. This makes it impossible
for users to share e.g. home videos or their own creations. Who really owns the
hard drive – the customer or Western Digital?

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Private genetic tests, and the case for ‘Genetic education’

An advisory body to the UK government, the Human Genetics Commission has called for more regulation of genetic tests that are available for the public to buy privately.

The completion of the human genome project, and the advances (and economies) in genetic technology have led to a burgeoning industry in private genetic tests. In the US especially, but increasingly also in Europe it is possible to order a wide range of tests for genes associated with risk of disease.

It is argued that tests with significant health implications should not be advertised to the public, and should be available only through a medical practitioner. But is this attitude to testing unduly paternalistic? Is greater regulation a realistic response?

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Restoring Sensation to Amputees’ Lost Limbs

Scientists at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University made two amputees ‘feel’ their lost arms by rerouting to their chest the key nerves that transfer sensations from hand to brain. After several months, stimulation to the area of the nerves would produce rich sensations experienced as if occurring in the missing limbs. Interestingly, the patients could still distinguish between sensory stimulation of chest nerves and that of the rerouted arm nerves.

For a summary, see Yahoo News

For the original paper, see PNAS paper

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Unjustified asymmetries in the debate on GM crops

In his valedictory speech as Government’s chief scientific adviser on November 27th , David King said there was a "moral case" for the UK and the rest of  Europe to grow genetically modified crops as the technology could help the world’s poorest.

A research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences only one day after encourages this hope that GM crops might offer a solution to word poverty. New drought-tolerant plants are reported to grow with only one third of the usual water.

Nonetheless, antagonists of GM continue to point to the possibly severe side effects of the release of GM crops outside the lab. These unintended side effects might indeed outweigh the benefits, albeit such secondary effects seem very unlikely. But the keypoint overlooked in these debates is that the uncertainty is not only on the side of the harms from GM. The benefits of GM may also be unlikely to be realised – though not on scientific grounds. Overlooking these uncertainties raises an untenable asymmetry as the debate seems to suggest that the benefits are opposed by highly unlikely risks. This stands in the way of a rational evaluation of the use of GM crops.

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Honest Opinions or Bullying?

Recently the website SpickMich.de that allows German pupils to anonymously rate their teachers defeated a legal challenge from teachers claiming invasion of personal privacy.
This was just the latest of a series of legal victories for the site. German courts have found that freedom of speech trumps teacher concerns about privacy and mobbing. Rating teachers, the court found, is a value judgement protected by law as long as it does not cross the line into "abusive criticism".

Teacher’s unions are however likely to continue criticising such sites. Andreas Meyer-Lauber, chairman of the union GEW in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has complained that pupils have no competence to judge teaching quality. "We need an impartial dialog between students and teacher," he said. "The Internet is not an appropriate medium for internal school feedback and self-evaluation."

But maybe that is exactly what the Internet could be?

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Feeling good about the failure of others

The journal Science last week published a study indicating that the reward centres in our brains are highly sensitive to the success of others. In the study, 19 pairs of subjects were presented with a task involving the estimation of the number of dots on a screen, and were then provided with feedback about their perfromance and about a monetary payment that they would receive. They were also provided with the same information about the other member of the pair. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to ascertain the effects of this feedback on blood flow in the midbrain-striatal and midbrain-prefrontal dopaminergic projections – parts of the brain implicated in generating subjective rewards, such as positive feelings, in response to achievement. The researchers analysed the cases in which both members of the pair were successful on the task and found that, in such cases, the reward centres activated more strongly in response to a given payment when the other member of the pair received a lower payment than when the other received an identical or higher payment.

The main conclusion that the authors draw from this finding is that it supports the widely held view that subjective rewards are sensitive to the success of others, at least where success is measured in financial terms. Existing studies claiming to support this view have faced difficulties in, among other things, measuring subjective rewards, but the authors of the Science article suggest they they can avoid this difficulty by using activation of the reward centres as an objective proxy for subjective feelings.

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Our Obligations to the Poor

The relationship between the rich and the poor countries of the world has been questioned in a number of ways today. Oxfam have released a report, Investing for Life, which suggests that pharmaceutical companies are missing an important opportunity by not focussing their attention on the large health problems of the poorest countries. At the same time, in the US, apparently significant developments have been made in the production of drought–resistant crops and, in the UK, the government’s chief scientific adviser will call for a rethink on GM crops.

These two issues pull in interestingly different ways. In the first case, the challenging question is how best to balance the value of a market-based research industry with the need to provide assistance to the poorest countries. In the second, the challenge is the price we are prepared to pay for our worries about genetically modified crops. In both cases our obligations to the poor sheds important light on the values of our society.

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The importance of life extension

One of the most important ideas in public health is that we can never really save lives: we just extend them. If a doctor ‘saves the life’ of a 60 year old patient who later dies at 90 years of age, then she hasn’t actually stopped the patient dying, but has extended the patient’s life by 30 years.

With this in mind, consider the recent research by a team from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They investigated the effects of a vast array of different chemicals on a test organism, the tiny nematode worm C. elegans. While many were found to be harmful, one chemical was greatly beneficial, significantly extending the worm’s short life span.

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