It would seem that it depends what country you’re in.  I suspect it’s only a matter of time before someone suggests that it’s sales, rather than science, that determines newspapers’ editorial policy.  Heaven forbid.

This from the bioethics.net blog:

A woman’s 21-year-old son dies in a Texas bar fight. The bereaved mom wants the son’s clearly virile and tenacious genes to live on in the next generation and fights to have his sperm collected and stored so that someone may carry his seed. She says, on the one hand, that it was always his wish to have children and wants his wishes to be carried out. When the physicians refuse, mother Evans goes to the judge to get her son’s sperm out of his body and into a surrogate. She wants someone to carry her grandbaby. Now!

It has been reported today in Live Science, that a judge has ruled that the mama’s wishes (and purportedly son’s) have carried the day.

According to Livescience, a part of the judge’s reasoning was that

[t]here were other body [that is, body parts] harvesting that was going to take place, and I didn’t see why this additional body harvesting shouldn’t take place.

This is, indeed, a very strange case.  But I don’t think I agree wholly with the implicit sentiments of the anonymous bioethics.net blogger who comments on it:

My soap opera characterization above notwithstanding Nikolas Colton Evans’ death was a tragedy, but it does not justify harvesting his sperm so that his mother can create a replacement child and mislabel it as her son’s wishes to have his own children some day or her own wishes to be a grandparent.

Nikolas Colton Evans’ life was cut tragically short in a bar fight and he will never get to exercise his own reproductive choices in life. This does not mean his mother gets to exercise those choices for him after his death.

For sure, Colton’s death doesn’t justify anything.  But neither is it immediately clear what, exactly, is problematic about the procedure: as far as I can tell, he had wanted to have children, and so extracting and using his sperm is not contrary to any particular wishes he’d expressed.  Moreover, even if it had been, Colton himself somewhat drops out of the picture anyway - being dead means that he’s not an agent, and so doesn’t obviously pack the same moral punch as an agent.  His mother might have had all kinds of strange reasons for wanting to created a child with his sperm - and it’s quite possible than none of them is even remotely a good reason - but, unless she was harming or wronging anyone, it’s hard to see precisely why we should stop her.  (I don’t know: maybe her request sprang from grief and emotional turbulence.  That’s understandable.  Maybe it’s a silly request.  But silly doesn’t mean morally problematic…)

On the other hand, of course, I also don’t see that there’s any enormously good reason to force the doctors to go along with her wishes, or how the verdict would be enforceable anyway.  It seems that the way is legally clear for the procedure to go ahead if someone is willing to perform it - but, in the absence of any such person, then it’s rather a formal matter.

I’ve just been pointed in the direction of this YouTube gem, which ostensibly demonstrates why condoms don’t offer protection against Aids.  It’s a little experiment involving a glass, a tea-strainer, and some out-of-date soya milk.  The rest you can work out for yourselves.  It has to be a piss-take, doesn’t it?  (Actually, I’m not so sure.  I’ve watched a couple of the poster’s other videos…  I think he means it.  Have a look at his film on why homosexuality is wrong: heterosexual sex within marriage gives you children, while homosexual sex gives you - yep - AIDS!)

Anyway: as is the way with these things, the OP has generated a response.  It’s puerile, of course… but funny all the same.  And it’s much more intelligent than the OP.

UPDATE: Naaaah.  I’ve changed my mind.  The OP must be a spoof - have a look at this, specifically from about 2:20.

Cancer’s the sort of thing in respect of which a lot of people are very, very earnest indeed.  It’s a pleasure, then, to discover Cancerous Capers, a blog about cancer by someone with cancer, that is light and funny and… well, not earnest:

I’m Jamie Ross.
I’m twenty, and I was an English student until last August when my doctor threw a giant cancerous spanner in the works. This blog tracks my little fracas with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and is a reading experience that will make you laugh, cry and possibly physically sick as I mention my testicles more times than social convention deems acceptable.

What’s particularly pleasing is that Ross has been picked up by The Independent and the Scottish Sun - and that he’s apoplectic with rage about the latter, because they didn’t ask (which is among the reasons why I’m not linking there).  There’s something very right with the world when a cancer patient can record in public that, notwithstanding his illness, being ripped off by The Sun is still among the worst things that can have happened to him:

They led with the stomach-turning headline of ‘Blog of Courage’ and tediously droned on about what a “brave teen” I am. I’m astonished that it didn’t come with a huge cut-outable photo of my smiling, pale face for housewives across the country to hold their shriekingly oversentimental candlelit vigils next to - most likely with ‘Kinross Princess’ emblazoned in massive lettering across it. There seems to be some insane belief amongst idiot headline writers that having cancer instantly makes you brave. It doesn’t. It makes you bald, podgy, ill and bored - ‘Blog of Sheer Tedium’ would have been a far more appropriate headline. I had to wake up my Mum at 4am last week specifically so she could remove a below-average sized spider from my room - that‘s your sodding megahero, The Sun.
It’s not just the sheer, horrific tweeness of the article that makes it amongst the worst things ever to happen to me either…

Now, that’s what I call a sense of perspective.

Meanwhile, Tim Ireland sticks it to the Sun here and here.

Okay - since everyone else on teh t’interwebz seems to be blogging about Watchmen, I thought I might join in.  Especially because, if I don’t, David will: I think he’s more of a geek than I.  (Most people are.)  So, yeah.  Long, violent, extraordinarily faithful to the book except for the improved dénouement, I’d've shot the final scene differently, and so on.  But what struck me was the way in which the lead characters seem to embody certain moral archetypes almost perfectly.

***I don’t think that there are any spoilers ahead, but if you’ve not read the book or seen the film, you might want to take care…***

more…

It’s so confusing.  One day the newspaper tells you that - oh, I don’t know - orange juice causes cancer, the next the radio tells you that it cures it.  One news sources says one thing, another the opposite, all of them citing the same studies.  How to cut through the thicket?

Fret no more.  http://www.thiscausescancer.com/ would seem to be the one stop shop here.  Of course, it won’t tell you how to avoid a nasty blastoma - but it does seem to keep a log of what the media are pimping or scared of on a given day…

Take with a pinch of salt after food.  Unless salt causes cancer - in which case, wait until tomorrow, when it proably won’t after all.

Enough with one child per family, already - let the kids smoke themselves into population control…

Apologies for having to link it: I can’t seem to get LiveLeak to embed.  I fail at computer.

(Thanks to Garen FD for the pointer.)

The headline get your attention?

There’s recently been an appeal put out that more people should donate their organs - brains in particular - to science.  In a similar sort of vein, it’s apparently National Pathology Week (I’ve booked my autopsy for Thursday morning: it’ll be ACE!), and there’s a series of podcasts to go with it.  Follow this link to find out more…

EDIT: The address in the URL says that it’s 2008.  Don’t worry: the site is for 2009.

EDIT (2): OK - I think I get it now.  National Pathology week was in November.  The podcasts are new now, though.  I’m so terribly, terribly confused.  *sigh*

EDIT (3): More nice links in the replies.

(There’s a few things I want to mention here today, but I’m also quite busy, so I fear that all my entries will be tiny little gobbets like this.  Ho hum.)