Practical Ethics

Extinction Risks and Particle Physics: When Are They Worth it?

The Large Hadron Collider, LHC, is the worlds biggest particle accelerator and due to start investigating the structure of matter later this year. Now a lawsuit has been filed in the US calling on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to stop preparations for starting the LHC for a reassessment of the safety of the collider. The reason is fears that the high energy collisions could cause some form of devastating effect threatening the Earth: either the formation of miniature black holes, strangelets that absorb matter to make more strangelets or even a decay of the vacuum state of the universe. Needless to say, physicists are very certain there are no risks. But how certain should we be about safety when there could be a risk to the survival of the human species?

Peering into the mind and 'new threats to privacy'

In recent studies, neuroscientists have been able to use brain imaging to reliably predict inner states such as lying or intention. In a groundbreaking study published in a recent issue of Nature (and briefly summarised here, here and here), Kay and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to make predictions about what subjects were seeing. Using a complex mathematical model based on decades of research into the human visual cortex, measured brain activity to estimate which grayscale natural image the subject was seeing at a given point in time. This goes beyond prior attempts at 'brain reading' in that the analysis did not merely use simple artificial stimuli or generic statistical signal-processing methods to identify neural patterns but employed data about the early stages of visual processing to develop a model that was then able to accurately predict which of a large number of novel and complex natural images was seen by the subject.

PatientsLikeMe.com

The New York Times recently published a feature article on a website called PatientsLikeMe. This is an online community like facebook or MySpace, but with a medical twist. The members have serious medical conditions, like Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, or HIV, and they use site to post quantitative information about their treatment and symptoms. The site then presents this information for all to see. For example, users can search the website for a drug and then view bar graphs illustrating reasons that members take the drug, the distribution of dosages, length of treatment, reasons for stopping treatment, and patient ratings of the treatment. Individual profiles also show line graphs plotting disease progression and showing major treatment events. The aim is to offer patients the information required to better tailor their own treatment.

It’s easy to think of both risks and benefits of this sort of website.

Are artists, writers, sportsmen, academics, scientists, politicians, and businessmen addicts?

Various news sources this week, including Fox News and The Guardian, are reporting on an editorial published in this month’s American Journal of Psychiatry. In it, the author, Jerald J. Block, argues that internet addiction is a real psychological disorder, and that it ought to be recognised as such in DSM-V, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is currently being compiled by the American Psychiatric Association.

A National Health Database

      The Australian Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon has announced plans for a national health database. According to a report in The Australian today, the current version of these plans includes enabling patients to look up mortality rates for surgeons as well as rates of hospital-acquired infections and readmission rates. This development is seen by many as a response to a series of recent medical scandals in Australia, most notably the ‘Dr Death’ scandal at Bundaberg Base Hospital in Queensland. Predictably the Australian Medical Association is opposing these changes. Their reaction has been slammed by the Australian nurses union who have accused medical staff of ‘closing ranks over rogue surgeons’, according to Samantha Maiden, writing in The Australian.

    The current Australian Government proposal is far reaching but it is far from groundbreaking. It follows in the footsteps of similar proposals that have been implemented in the United Kingdom, over the past ten years, as well as some American precedents. Comparative cardiac surgeon’s performance data has been published on the internet by the United Kingdom Healthcare Commission since 2006. Visitors to http://heartsurgery.healthcarecommission.org.uk/ can discover survival rates for coronary artery bypass grafts, aortic valve replacement surgery, and for all forms of heart surgery, for individual surgeons working at surgical units across the United Kingdom.

Adoption and the golden rule

In a recently published book, ‘When the Bough breaks’, Julia Hollander describes her difficult decision to give up her severely disabled daughter Imogen to foster care. Her decision has been roundly criticised by some, who have described her choice as ‘selfish’ and ‘monstrous’.

We have good reason to admire parents who are able to care for children like Imogen. The challenges that they face are enormous, and the personal sacrifices that they make are often extraordinary. But should we demand parents sacrifice their own interests, those of their other children and their partners? What weight should we put on the interests of future children – who would not be born if the parents continue to care for this child?

Remembering what happened vs. remembering what it meant

An upcoming issue of the Psychological Bulletin will include a review suggesting that the memories of children may be more reliable - at least for evidential legal purposes - than the memories of adults.

The review conducted by Valerie Reyna and Chuck Brainerd assesses over thirty studies sparked by their own earlier research on what they call the Fuzzy Trace Theory. According to that theory, people store two different kinds of memory of experiences: memory of what happened (verbatim memory), and memory of the meaning of what happened (gist memory). Reyna and Brainerd hypothesised that children rely more on the former, and adults rely more on the later, and they presented results indicating that this makes adults more prone to certain sorts of 'false memory', since what an event meant to someone may be inconsistent with what actually happened. In the upcoming review, Reyna and Brainerd will claim that the slough of publications triggered by their initial research backs up these hypotheses.

Suppose that Reyna and Brainerd are right. What would follow?

Killing the goose that laid the golden egg

The US government has just announced that it is likely to close its enormous Pacific salmon fishery, which stretches across 80% of the USA's west coast. The once vast salmon stocks have crashed and are now at a mere 6% of the long-term average. Many readers will remember the similar crash in the cod stocks off the east coast of Canada in the early 90s which led to great economic hardship in the area. The cause of both incidents is the same: overfishing. The Canadian and US fishing industries destroyed these vast renewable resources and in doing so have probably killed their very own geese of the golden eggs.

Is it Wrong to Deliberately Select Embryos which will have Disabiltites?

A current bill before Parliament would revise the current regulation of IVF. One clause has caused great debate, especially amongst people with disabilities. It states:

(9) Persons or embryos that are known to have a gene, chromosome or mitochondrion abnormality involving a significant risk that a person with the abnormality will have or develop—

(a) a serious physical or mental disability,
(b) a serious illness, or
(c) any other serious medical condition, must not be preferred to those that are not known to have such an abnormality.

Some people with disabilities like deafness or dwarfism wish to use IVF to select embryos with the same disabilities. For reports of such cases, see Sanghavi, D. M. ‘Wanting Babies Like Themselves, Some Parents Choose Genetic Defects’, The New York Times, (December 5, 2006).

According to a recent survey, deliberate selection of children with conditions such as deafness or dwarfism is not uncommon: 5% of 190 of PGD clinics surveyed in the US have allowed parents to select embryos with conditions commonly taken to be disabilities (See Baruch, S. Kaufman, D. and Hudson, K. L. ‘Genetic testing of embryos: practices and perspectives of U.S. IVF clinics’ Fertility and Sterility (2006).)

'Reasonable steps' to prevent gambling

The BBC reports today that a compulsive gambler has failed in a High Court bid to make the bookmaker William Hill repay £2 million of his gambling losses. The gambler, Graham Calvert, claimed that the bookmaker failed in its ‘duty of care’ by allowing him to continue to place bets after he had asked the company to close his account. The judge recognised that William Hill failed to take ‘reasonable steps’ to prevent Calvert from gambling, but said that it was probable that Calvert would have continued to gamble even had such steps been taken, meaning that William Hill is not responsible for his losses.

Does a bookmaker have a duty of care towards its customers? The judge in the case thought not, so let us pose a far more modest question: ought a bookmaker to take ‘reasonable steps’ to prevent its customers from gambling in certain cases? Answering ‘yes’ to the latter question raises a number of puzzling questions. For example, what counts as a reasonable step, and under what circumstances ought such a step to be taken? Consider the reasons we might believe that pathological gambling is bad: I suggest that three important reasons are (1) that it is irrational, in that the gambling behaviour of pathological gamblers is highly unlikely to help realise their goal of winning money and is highly likely to frustrate this goal; (2) that pathological gamblers gamble often, and gamble more money than they can afford to lose; and (3) because of (1) and (2), pathological gamblers are likely to suffer large financial losses, which can disrupt other aspects of their lives, such as their personal relationships, health, and career.