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…

How much would I love to have been on the ethics committee that was faced with this?

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania were interested in a method of treatment for leukaemia that made use of modified versions of white blood cells.  Cells were taken from leukaemia patients and genetically modified in two ways: first, they were adapted to target the cancer cells; second, they were adapted to reproduce like crazy.  This second modification is important, because attempts to make use of the first have hitherto fizzled out as the modified cells died off.  Or, in slightly more scientific language, the New England Journal of Medicine explains that

[f]irst-generation chimeric antigen receptors had limited clinical activity, primarily because in vivo activation of the chimeric antigen receptor T cells induced only transient cell division and suboptimal cytokine production, which failed to produce prolonged T-cell expansion and sustained antitumor effects. These deficiencies were overcome by the addition of a costimulatory signaling domain in second-generation chimeric antigen receptors, which enhanced the proliferation, survival, and development of memory cells — features that appeared to be the hallmarks of successful therapy with EBV-specific T cells and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes.

And this approach, based on preliminary results, seems to be very promising, having exceeded expectations.  The paper reporting the experiment is available here.

But how do you get the modification into the cells to begin with?  The team

used HIV-derived lentiviral vectors for cancer therapy, an approach that may have some advantages over the use of retroviral vectors.

And that, of course, is where things get interesting. more…

Continuing my recent theme of the impact of language on ethics and decision making I’m presently writing a paper on the use of claims based on justice to object to new technologies such as human enhancement or synthetic biology. In the process of writing this paper I’ve encountered a rather odd gap in our language. It is the case when discussing future technologies that the harms involved are more properly thought of as risks (that is uncertain harms where the probability of the harm is predictable) and hazards (that is uncertain harms where the probability of the harm is not predictable). The same applies to the benefits of future technology but we don’t have the language to directly describe them thusly, ie there is no obvious counterparts to risk and hazard in regards to benefit. This seems odd given that benefits can be just as uncertain as harms.

And while we might think of this as just a linguistic oddity it may actually have an impact on decision making. For example in research ethics it is common to talk about the risks and benefits of research – but this creates

Any suggestions of appropriate terms would be gratefully received!

In spare moments, I’ve been wondering about the Advocate-General of European Court of Justice’s recent recommendation that patents involving human embryonic stem-cells be prohibited, and the response that it’s generated.  One of the best-publicised responses was the letter from Austin Smith et al that appeared in Nature, which complained that the recommendation would be bad for European science:

Scientists working in stem-cell medicine will not be able to deliver clinical benefits without the involvement of biological industry. But innovative companies must have patent protection as an incentive to become active in Europe.

The advocate-general’s opinion therefore represents a blow to years of effort to derive biomedical applications from embryonic stem cells in areas such as drug development and cell-replacement therapy. If implemented, European discoveries could be translated into applications elsewhere, at a potential cost to the European citizen.

At the same time, there’s a number of pro-life organisations and blogs that have welcomed the recommendation as a straw in the wind, and for just the same reason.  Where the pro-lifers and Smith agree is in the supposition that not being able to patent hESC-derived procedures will remove the commercial incentive to try them out; which means that they won’t get tried out; which means the hESCs won’t be used.

I may be missing something, but I don’t see it that way. more…

This workshop looks potentially interesting.

Public Dialogue Wednesday 9 March

Lindisfarne Centre, St Aidan’s College, Durham University

5pm Wednesday March 9th

Programme

5.15 pm Introduction to the Meeting – Dr Patrick Steel (Durham University)

5.20 – 6.45 pm A series of short talks from experts in the field providing a personalised view of synthetic biology and its future impact:

Dr Ray Elliott, Syngenta Ltd, “What Synthetic biology can do for agriculture”
Prof Mark Harvey, Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation, University of Essex, “Energy, food, materials and climate change: the 21st century challenge to biological science and technology”
Prof John Ward, Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology, University College London, “What synthetic biology can offer for bioengineering”
Prof Robert Song, Department of Theology Durham University, “Synthetic Biology: Some ethical issues”

6.45-7.00 Refreshments

7.00-8.30 pm Open Discussion Between Panels and Audience Chaired by:

Prof Robert Edwards, Chief Scientific Officer for the Food Environment Research Agency
Prof Phil Macnaghten, Institute of Hazard Risk and Resilience, Durham University

8.30 Buffet – free for all registered participants

SPPI-NET is a BBSRC funded network which has the objective of promoting interdisciplinary collaborative ventures, involving both academics and industrialists, to explore the potential for producing synthetic plant products for industrial applications.  The IAS (Institute of Advanced Study) is Durham University’s ideas-based Institute which brings together some of the world’s finest researchers from every discipline to examine themes of major intellectual, scientific, political and practical significance.

pace my earlier post about theological ethics, I’m assured by people whose opinion is sound that Song is a decent ethicist; I’ll suspend my grumbles in his case.

Ilora Finlay and Rob George* have a new paper in the JME that takes issue with Battin et al‘s 2007 paper, concerning who makes use of physician assisted suicide in Oregon and Holland.  Battin’s claim had been that there was

no evidence of heightened risk for the elderly, women, the uninsured (inapplicable in the Netherlands, where all are insured), people with low educational status, the poor, the physically disabled or chronically ill, minors, people with psychiatric illnesses including depression, or racial or ethnic minorities, compared with background populations. The only group with a heightened risk was people with AIDS.

These findings were, unsurprisingly, used by defenders of PAS to soothe worries among the antis that legalisation would put the vulnerable at risk.

Finlay and George, by contrast, claim that there’s a number of methodological oddities with Battin’s paper, such as to mean that those reassurances mayn’t be as convincing as all that. more…

This is interesting: researchers in Texas are reporting that they’ve generated viable mice with two genetic fathers.  The science makes my head hurt, but PZ Myers gives a decent précis (although it’s still a bit long to reproduce here, and I’m not going to attempt even to give a précis of the précis).

The technology isn’t directly applicable to humans because of a difference between humans and mice that means that to use the same jiggery-pokery with human cells would result in infertility – it’s all to do with having XO, rather than XY chromosomes: apparently an XO mouse is fertile.  All the same: the point has been proven that you can get a mammal with two male genetic parents.  And that at least legitimises speculation about what would happen if we could get human cells to behave in the same way as mouse cells.

On the face of it, this is all very good news for gay men who want to have a child with their partner that is genetically related to both.  I don’t doubt that there’ll be the entirely predictable objections from some quarters… but I don’t see any moral problem with the technology.

Yet I’m not convinced that this report has automatically to be treated as a great advance; scientifically, it’s impressive – but ethically, there’s a lot of loose ends.  Not that I want to be the wet blanket, but… oh, all right then: I do.   more…

Hostile as I generally am to surveys as a tool in ethics, they are able to give us interesting anthropological insights on topics of moral concern.

Jeremy Stangroom has been conducting a poll of people’s beliefs about the permissibility of abortion; and, though online polls are not wholly reliable, there seems to be some interesting results thrown up.  Unsurprisingly, religion seems to be an important demographic consideration; more surprising, perhaps, is that men seem to be more supportive of abortion rights than women.  The data are available here.

For a little over a year now I’ve been tinkering with a paper on the brain drain – that phenomenon by which expertise migrates from poorer to wealthier areas – and how we should think about it from a moral point of view.  Earlier drafts have been inflicted on attendees at the “New Directions in Bioethics” conference in London last summer, the conference of the Political Studies Association in Edinburgh at Easter, and an iSEI seminar here in Manchester just before Christmas.  I’m glad to say that the paper’s approaching completion, but the demands of space have forced me to leave out a potentially interesting avenue of investigation.

I’ve been working with a simplified model.  My hypothetical world is one in which there are only two economies – an deeply undeveloped economy called South and a developed economy called North – and the flow of expertise is a flow of medical expertise from South to the North.  For the sake of simplicity, I ignored (at least to begin with) considerations like the cost of education.  So the basic picture is this: as soon as anyone gains any kind of transferable skill in South, he has a good economic reason (and perhaps moral reason) to move to North, where the rewards for him and his family are much greater.  This means that South never gets the benefit of expertise, and so we can expect its development to be hindered, while the gap between it and North widens.  And, of course, the wider the developmental gap, the greater the incentive to migrate.

But there was a midnight thought that went like this: maybe the exodus of expertise isn’t all that bad for South after all.  While more doctors is better than fewer, it doesn’t follow that few is a disaster.

more…

In an excellent paper published in the most recent edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics Gefenas et al make the point that types of research which impose similar burdens of risks and harms appear to be being regulated disproportionately at the moment in the Baltic States.

more…