Two slightly curious stories about drugs and sex.  Or, rather, two stories about drugs and sex curiously juxtaposed.

First, this story from Sunday’s Independent was inspired by this paper in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.  Quite how much weight we should put on the JSM‘s paper is a moot point – it’s a case study involving one person, rather than a full RTC – but I’m interested in the way that it was represented by the Indy:

Oxytocin, a hormone traditionally used to induce labour, is as sexually arousing to men as Viagra, according to new research.

Studies conducted in the US found that a married man who sniffed a nasal spray containing oxytocin twice daily became more affectionate to friends and colleagues and recorded a marked improvement in his sexual performance.  According to the actual breakdown of results, the man’s libido went from “weak to strong”, while arousal went from “difficult to easy”. Ego certainly wasn’t hurt either: sexual performance, according to feedback from his wife, was classed as “very satisfying”.

Let’s take it at face value, and ignore the leap from the experience of one man to all men, and the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, and all the rest of it: a man who was apparently having some sex-related difficulties was helped by oxytocin.  Bravo for him. Hurrah.  Oxytocin for all!

Or maybe not. more…

Rob Crilly reported in the Telegraph a couple of days ago that Pakistan is to pursue a policy of fining people who do not have their children vaccinated against polio.  Now, at the time I write this, I can’t find this story or anything like it replicated elsewhere – Dawn, which is Pakistan’s biggest English-language newspaper and has carried 15 stories on polio so far this year (and which is supportive of mass vaccination), doesn’t mention it; nor does al-Jazeera – but let’s allow for the sake of the argument that the story is true, and that fines are to be imposed on parents who fail to get their children vaccinated (or that they’re being at least considered).  I’m in two minds about such a policy.

Obviously, the prevailing attitude in anglophone bioethics is to be suspicious of mandatory interventions into health decisions: it’s hard to get away from the Georgetown Mantra.

On the other hand, polio is very nasty indeed, and Pakistan is one of the three remaining countries in the world where it exists.  (The others are Afghanistan and Nigeria; in all three cases, there have been active campaigns against vaccination on the grounds that it’s “un-Islamic” – which I suppose is true, but only inasmuch as that it has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam – and suspicion of vaccination workers has grown in Pakistan over the last year because they’re seen as potential CIA operatives.)  Vaccination is much less nasty than polio, and Pakistan is already implementing a number of policies (such as offering it free at toll-booths) to increase vaccination.

There seem to be two questions that need to be addressed.  First, is a policy of mandatory vaccination permissible?  Second, is a fine the right way to enforce it? more…

BioNews asked me to write something about Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg and Rebacca Roache’s paper on engineering humanity to minimise global warming.  I’d been meaning to for a while, so this was the prod I needed.  Anyway: my take on their paper is here; but I thought I’d also reproduce it on this blog.  What follows is the version I submitted; it’s substantially the same, save for a few tweaks that BioNews made to conform with their house style.  (They didn’t like the Latin…)  I am massively grateful to the student who made the point about small people taking more steps to get anywhere.  I’d also like to think that the idea of making people smaller led me to Lilliput, thence to Gulliver, thence to the voyage to Laputa.  It didn’t.  I’m not that clever.  Laputa made its appearance quite unbidden.  But – hey, it works.

 *     *     *     *     *

There’s a part of Gulliver’s Travels where Gulliver visits the grand Academy at Lagado, wherein one of the academicians is trying to derive sunbeams from cucumbers.  It’s tempting to wonder at first glance whether there’s something of the Academy to Liao, Sandberg and Roache’s proposed strategy for combating climate change: that we could engineer humanity to be less of a drain on the environment.  Their paper, “Human Engineering and Climate Change” (forthcoming in Ethics, Policy and the Environment, with a pre-publication version here), has already attracted a reasonable amount of media interest, and it’s not hard to see why.  The headline proposal is that we could engineer people to be smaller, on the grounds that smaller people require less food and fuel: a population that is smaller on the whole would have less environmental impact.  (A small part of this – and I’m genuinely fond of this idea – is that heavier people wear out shoes and carpets more quickly, so are more resource-hungry.  On the other hand, as one of my students has pointed out, short people take more steps to get across the room; the carpet might actually suffer more.  Moreover, a small person has a greater surface-to-volume ratio, and so would lose heat more quickly, possibly requiring more central heating and more food.) more…

Xtaldave, by his own admission, has the horn.  Well, if you’re being accurate about it, he has the tusk.  But what’s important is that he has a whopping great piece of ivory to play with.

Dave works in the labs here in Manchester, doing clever things with chemicals and science and crystalography and that sort of thing.  The ivory has been confiscated by customs; it found its way into his lab because the dentine in a great big tooth is a useful medium on which to carry out research that may generate significant benefits.  In his words, the tusk is

an acceptable substitute for human bone in the sorts of assays that our lab does to test the effect of various substances on cells called Osteoclasts that are responsible for bone resorption (basically bone destruction).  During growth and development of the skeleton, bone is formed (by Osteoblasts) and broken down (by Osteoclasts) – it is thought that the bone disease Osteoporosis is caused by an imbalance of bone formation and destruction – i.e. too much Osteoclast activity.

If we can find a therapeutic agent that inhibits Osteoclast activity, we might be able to halt or slow the progression of Osteoporosis.  The upshot of all this is that our lab has obtained a section of Elephant horn that has been confiscated by the UKBA.  We will recycle this and use the dentine in our bone resorption assays.

Why’s this of interest here?  Well, the ivory trade is (a) illegal, and (b) deeply morally problematic.  The fact that it’s illegal means that the UK Border Agency confiscates ivory as it’s imported into the country in most cases.  (There are situations in which importation is legal, but they’re rare, and needn’t concern us here.)  And this confiscation means that the Agency ends up with a load of ivory on its hands.

One option might be to sell it; but that’s ruled out by the same considerations that make importation illegal to begin with.  Another is simply do destroy the lot.  A third is to allow labs like Dave’s to make use of it.  This is where the moral claims come in.  It would be, he says, immoral (as well as legally problematic) to sell the ivory, and

if someone has already killed the elephant and removed the Ivory, better that we use it to further medical research and perhaps save or improve some lives, than turn it into a bauble that sits on a shelf gathering dust.

Or, to put it another way: that the elephant has been killed is bad; but we can at least salvage something from the moral wreckage.

Is this correct?  Well, the structure of the argument seems to follow quite closely that which is sometimes presented in relation to the use of – for example – data derived from the morally repugnant experiments of the past.  If there is, in Stan Godlovich’s words, “demonstrably important and beneficial information gathered methodically through means completely unacceptable to us”, what should we do with it? more…

It’s been a while since the last post, and there’s a couple of serious entries on the way – but they’ve been displaced by a bit of silliness from Oklahoma.  State Senator Ralph Shortey (or SHortey, if you follow his Facebook style) has introduced a Bill demanding that

[n]o person or entity shall manufacture or knowingly sell food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients.

Robin Marty elaborates:

The Republican has proposed a bill that will ban the use of “aborted human fetuses in food,” despite his admission that he doesn’t know of any companies that actually…well..use them.

So where did Sen. Shortey get this idea?  According to him, from the internet.

The “internet research” Shortey is referring to likely is an ongoing anti-choice crusade that began months ago, when an activist group began demanding a boycott of PepsiCo, which works with a research and development company that uses a line of embryonic kidney stem cells created in the 1970′s to test “flavor enhancers.” The boycotters, led by a group called Children of God for Life, say that’s the same as using aborted fetuses.

Ah: teh interwebz.  I see.  (For the record, the LA Times reports that “[a] U.S. Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman told the Associated Press that the agency has never gotten any reports of fetuses being used in food production.”)

Since there’s never likely to be a better excuse to link to [SPOILER ALERT] the final scene of Soylent Green on this blog, that’s precisely what I’ll do; I only wish I could get the clip to embed.

But there’s more to this than lampooning a typographically-challenged Senator, because the Bill, in its brutal simplicity, is brutally simplistic. more…

Here’s a little holiday challenge for you: come up with a bioethical controversy that some dark part of your soul wants to be real, if only because (a) you can get a paper out of it, and (b) it’ll cause heart attacks among the sort of people who make a point of listening to The Moral Maze.  The only real constraint that I’m placing is that your scenario has to be at least on nodding terms with plausibility.

Put the title of the paper, and the abstract, in the replies.  Since the scenarios you’ll describe will almost certainly never arise, there’s no need to worry about having your thunder stolen.  Although, thinking about it, it’d be interesting to see if any real papers did materialise.

Here’s mine to get you going.

How Reproductive Cloning can Solve the Organ Shortage.

Saviour siblings have enjoyed a reasonable amount of attention in the bioethical literature over recent years, with a significant number of voices arguing in favour of the permissibility of deliberately choosing embryos that are tissue-matches for older siblings – though perhaps with the proviso that the parents should have been intending to reproduce anyway.  But what about adults who develop serious health problems requiring a transplant?  One potential solution to the problem is therapeutic cloning.  However, this is potentially problematic, on the grounds that it involves creating a human life just to harvest component parts.  A better solution would be to create a saviour sibling by means of reproductive cloning; this would mean patients benefit from new bone-marrow, and a nice new baby brother or sister.

Sheelagh McGuinness tells me that she and Margot Brazier cooked up something to beat this a while ago, and described the outline.  It was impressively weird: I hope she posts it.

Alex Calladine has asked me to publicise this – and I’m only too happy to oblige:

SYBHEL Short Story Competition

Synthetic Biology & Human Health: Myths, Fables & Synthetic Futures

Calling all writers, film makers, animators and artists – do you have a story to tell about the impact synthetic biology may have on future people?

Throughout history people have used their imaginations to create stories. While stories often entertain, they are also used to make sense of human experience and gain insight into philosophical questions. In the 20th century, writers such as Huxley, Orwell, Burgess and Ballard have employed futuristic narratives to explore the philosophical, psychological and moral issues raised by the interaction between technology and society.

The possible health advances from the emerging science of synthetic biology may have a significant impact on both our lives and the lives of future people. It may result in medical applications which affect human experience and the sorts of people who come in to existence. It may lead to new ways of treating diseases, such as targeted cancer treatments, which could radically extend the human lifespan. Or, it could give us new psychopharmaceuticals which allow us, or other people to change our emotions and psychological states. It may also lead to people having new physical capabilities and powers which human beings have never had before

The SYBHEL Project is instigating a short story competition in order to imaginatively consider these sorts of issues through the creation of fictional narratives. We are interested in stories told using a range of different media including, writing, film, animation, graphic novels, spoken word or music. If you would like to enter and see the prizes on offer please visit www.sybhel.org for further information, you can also follow us on twitter @SYBHEL_Project.

Prize:

1^st Prize £100

Two 2^nd Prizes £50

In addition to the cash prize there will also be an opportunity for shortlisted stories to be published in some form on the SYBHEL website. Winners may also have the opportunity to be invited to the final SYBHEL Project event.

Further details are available here.  Get writing!

You’re all probably way ahead of me on this, but there’s a series called The Philosopher’s Arms currently enjoying a run on Radio 4.  The premise of the programme is that philosophical questions are discussed in the context of a conversation in the pub – which has, of course, been the traditional haunt of philosophers ever since Plato and his mates went out on the razz and decided to publish the transcripts of what was said.

The Practical Ethics blog currently has a survey running on Nozick’s experience machine thought-experiment.  Go and have a look.  Better yet, pour yourself another drink, and then go and have a look.

Right now, physicists are pondering the fallout from the collision of high-energy particles.  (Probably.)  And I, for my part, am pondering the fallout from the collision of high-energy nonsense.

Having had this brought to my attention, I’m led fairly quickly to this, then this, and, finally, this Mail on Sunday piece.  All the links refer to a story in which a hospital is apparently using £200k or so of Lottery money to fund research into spiritual healing based on Reiki.  I’m willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that the research finds that spiritual “healing” is utterly ineffective, except when it means people don’t avail themselves of real medicine – in which case, it’s very effective and its effects are undesirable.  Spiritual healing is bunk; one could reasonably think that a trial into it is a waste of money.  We oughtn’t to waste money, so, modus ponens, we oughtn’t really to be doing this kind of research.

In fact, there’re likely to be big problems with spiritual healing research of any sort, simply because participants may feel that there’s less need to continue using established treatments, and thereby end up worse off.  And when others continue with conventional treatments, it’s going to be hard to tell which of their outcomes was attributable to which – so the research’ll likely tell us nothing.  Hence I wonder whether the research will yield anything publishable: if not, then the whole thing will have been in vain, and there’s something problematic about enrolling people in trials that stand a chance of being, from a publication point of view, barren.

I’m not actually going to go down that route here, though. more…

Channel 4 is currently mid-way through a series of short talking-head films on the question of whether organ donation should be compulsory: as I write this, two have been broadcast, with another five to come.

The first one is by John Harris, rehearsing familiar arguments about the permissibility of mandated donation (as he did here) and live-donor organ sales (as he and Charles Erin did here).  I find myself thinking that he’s probably right, and straightforwardly so.

But I’ve really enjoyed Derek House’s contribution; sadly for him, my enjoyment is almost entirely of the pointing-and-laughing sort.  House objects to mandatory donation – or, by the sound of it, any donation at all – and explains this in terms of his being a Jehovah’s Witness.  He has two lines of argument against transplantation, and one really strange line that he thinks is an argument but is just bizarre.

Let’s get the bizarreness out of the way.  He has a couple of anecdotes about people whose personalities have changed after an organ transplant.  So, er…

Hmph.

OK.  Moving on.

The first of the more substantial arguments – comparatively more substantial, you understand – is an appeal to the Bible.  He basically says that an organ donation is “very close” to what the Bible says about blood.  (I’m not going to give time references: the whole thing’s only 110 seconds long.)  A heart transplant, he claims, is very like blood being given.  Why is that a problem?  Well, a quick scout around Google takes me to the Watchtower Society; it would appear that there’s a few verses in the Bible that refer to blood, and these are interpreted as referring to transfusion as well.  So the argument would seem to be that transplantation is a bit like blood transfusion, and that that’s a bit like a few things that worried a small group of ancients.  Or, put another way: if (1) you’re satisfied that a small group of ancients was correct to be worried about A, and (2) you’re satisfied that A is similar to B, and (3) you’re satisfied that B is similar to C, then that’s enough to show that (4) we ought to be worried about C.  And if C is the receipt of a transplanted organ, (5) we ought to be worried about D, the donation of an organ for a life-saving transplant.  No, I don’t understand the leap from receipt to donation either.

I don’t doubt that House is sincere in his beliefs.  But: really.  That’s just lamentably poor reasoning by anyone’s standard.

The second argument is that transplantation “is clearly against nature”.  Presumably, being against nature makes something wrong.  Let’s just ignore that this message is delivered by means of a device fabricated from materials not found in nature that allows instant communication with people thousands of miles away.  It’d be petty to point that out.

(Thanks to Aeron Haworth for the pointer.)