Practical Ethics

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

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.

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.

Postcode lotteries

In its just-published report Taking Exception on the allocation of cancer drugs by UK Primary Care Trusts, the Rarer Cancers Forum (http://www.rarercancers.org.uk)  provides further evidence of a ‘postcode lottery’ operating within the UK National Health Service. For example (p. 26), the Mid-Essex PCT has granted 96% of requests to its ‘exceptional cases panel’, while neighbouring South-West Essex PCT has granted none.

Would you rather be invisible or be able to fly? (Or: are you a sneaky superhero?)

If, like me, you were one of the kids whose preferred superpower was invisibility, you may soon be in luck. The BBC reports today that US scientists have created a material that could one day be used to make people and objects invisible. The material, which has so far been created only on a microscopic scale, neither absorbs nor reflects light, meaning that anyone looking at an object covered in it would see what lies behind the object rather than the object itself. It’s likely that such technology will be snapped up first by the military, but perhaps, in years to come, invisibility cloaks will be available to all.

For some, the idea of being invisible is distasteful. Being invisible means being able to get away with anything - and why bother to act morally when you can be sure that you’ll never be caught out? In this case, would a world full of people who can turn invisible at the drop of a hat be a world full of thieves, cheats, and sneaks?

Cold and Calculating NICE

Yesterday's Daily Mail online contains an opinion piece bemoaning the decision by NICE - the UK body responsible for rationing healthcare resources - to decline funding for four new treatments for Kidney Cancer. The Mail complains:

...what does NICE offer by way of explanation? A cold, calculating statement that, while the drugs work for many of those with advanced kidney cancer, they are not 'cost-effective'.

What a clinical way to assess whether a person should be afforded precious extra months and years of life, or consigned to a 'death sentence'.

I don't want to defend NICE's decision in this particular case, but the Mail's attack on NICE's "clinical" decision-making process is clearly unjustified.

One step closer to human cloning

Scientists in Korea have for the first time successfully cloned a dog commercially. Cloning of dogs is notoriously difficult. This brings us closer to human cloning.

The film Boys from Brazil , made in the earlier 80s, portrayed accurately and vividly the process of cloning that produced Dolly.

The later film The Sixth Day depicted not just cloning of the genome of a human being, like what scientists in Korea have done for a dog, but copying an entire living human being -true human cloning - by producing a copy of the bodies and transferring all the mental states, including memories, attitudes, abilities and all characteristics of the person. This is done by the imaginary process of cerebral syncoiding.

The road to human cloning began, in The Sixth Day, with Repet - a company that cloned dead pets.

Science fiction film has once successfully predicted the future. Will it again?

Julian Savulescu

The point of death

The Guardian yesterday reported the death of the man who had been so tragically shot in Antigua, with his wife, three weeks after their wedding. It began like this:

"Ben Mullany, the newlywed who was shot on honeymoon in Antigua in an attack that killed his wife, Catherine, died in hospital in Wales yesterday after his life support machine was switched off.  The 31-year-old trainee physiotherapist, who had suffered a fractured skull and had a bullet lodged in the back of his head, was flown back to Britain while in a coma on Saturday. Tests carried out when his condition stabilised after the 24-hour journey established he was brain dead." 

This is a familiar way of describing such happenings, even among clinical professionals.   Brain death is pronounced, so the life support machine is switched off, and the patient dies.   The clear implication is that brain death is not death.  The machine is still keeping the patient alive, and it is switching off the machine that causes real death. 

Slaves to consent?

Nature reports that in response to analysis done by bioethicist Robert Streiffer (and published in the Hastings Center Report), Stanford University may withdraw the use for research of several of its publicly funded stem cell lines because of concerns about consent. In 2001 President Bush decreed that only lines already in existence would be eligible for federal funding – 21 lines were subsequently approved by the NIH.

Are falling house prices good or bad?

House prices have been falling quickly in both the US and, more recently, the UK. Newspaper reports tend to use negative language to refer to this fall. For example, todays edition of The Independent says:

Today's gloomy data, which is worse than economists had forecast, ...

However, it is not at all obvious that low house prices are a bad thing.