tisiwoota

Via Women’s Bioethics Blog, an article from the Guardian:

A clinical trial into the effects of allowing couples to choose the sex of their babies has been given the go-ahead at a US fertility clinic. The controversial study was given the green light by an ethics committee after nine years of consultation. The purpose of the study is to find out how cultural notions, family values and gender issues feed into a couple’s desire to choose the gender of their child.

For the first time, a study has tallied up the number of human genes that have been patented. And the figure is surprisingly high– nearly 20 percent.

According to the research, 4382 of the 23,688 human genes are claimed as US intellectual property in 4270 patents owned by 1156 institutions and companies. About 63 per cent belong to private firms.

A Wall Street Journal article adds that this figure could even be an underestimate “because the analysis didn’t look at patents claiming rights to proteins and which might have omitted the gene sequence”. Meaning that the actual number could be double the initial count.

Last week The Women’s Bioethics Project Blog made mention of a book which contends that:

‘baby boomers and their offspring have become the most medicated generation ever, devoted consumers from cradle to grave of every manner of pharmaceutical imaginable - pills that not only cure real diseases, but that also promise…’ to ‘do everything from guarding us against our excesses of drink, food and tobacco, to increasing our children’s performance at school, to jump-starting our own productivity at work, to extending our very time on this mortal coil.’

I probably wouldn’t have thought anything of this claim, had I not also somewhat recently attended one of my grandmother’s historical monologue performances as Lydia Pinkham, a very successful 19th-century herbal home-remedy entrepeneur.

If you’ve ever seen old turn-of-the-century(-before-this) magazine ads, you’ll remember that they’re often populated with Snake Oil medicines making claims that are every bit as broad (nay, broader!) as those cited for today’s pharmaceuticals.

On the other hand, one could argue that today’s dubious and/or excessive medical treatments are more potent, and therefore perhaps more dangerous. And it is true that our limited understanding of the neurochemical pathways that drugs for depression, etc. work on render our modern treatments the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to pound in a nail.

Then again… surgical removal of ovaries, the 19th-century medical establishment’s cure-all for a variety of “female ailments”, sounds a tad blunt as well… what with the 40% mortality rate, and all…

It would be interesting to know, then, whether a comparison has been done between percentages of the population taking regular medication in various time periods (and cultures).

And likewise, on percentage of income spent on medicinal remedies (we may just have a lock on that one)…

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In defense of your probably-nascent impression of Lydia Pinkham, I should point out that despite partaking of the broad advertising language of the day, she wasn’t just another snake-oil peddler. First, her elixirs were packaged as an alternative to aforementioned brutal surgery. Second, it turns out that one of her ingredients– black cohash– has proved to be effective in treating the symptoms of menopause, so is actually still widely marketed today.

As it happened, the first lunch seminar for students admitted to the joint degree program was on the same day as the first Constitutional Law class.

In the former, we discussed the ethics of gene patenting,* and how the United States, unlike Europe, does not provide for objection to patents on the grounds of “public morality”.

In the latter, we discussed Congress’ use of the interstate commerce clause to justify a federal law against medical marijuana.

Until this accidental juxtaposition, I’d never thought to compare these issues. But how interesting, that in one case our legal system should be so leery of taking moral concerns into account, yet in the other is perfectly willing– indeed, eager– to stretch legal concepts quite far** in order to regulate morality.

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* Specifically, we met with the author of the study addressed in this article– which I now remember having read when it came out (It’s always a treat to have the chance to get a fuller perspective on people and issues in the media). And thanks to this experience, I’ve now been pointed to a letter in Science in which the authors refute one of the common criticisms that appears at the end of the Economist’s account. ((Basically, the authors were well-aware of the USPTO-guideline change that occurred in 1999; and assert that therefore the genre of patents they chose to analyze did not include any of the problematic kind that led to the policy alteration))

** The ground for invoking the Interstate Commerce Clause is that patients growing medical marijuana for their own use MIGHT sell it to persons in other states. Might? Methinks there must be some situation out there, involving permitted use of controlled substances, where application of a standard of _mere possibility_ of misuse to justify Congress stepping in to ban the activity would be clearly absurd and unthinkable. (Research on diseases that could conceivably be used by terrorists? I’m not immediately coming up with an equivalent involving the activities of private individuals…)

“Are we to be leeched, bled, blistered, burned, douched, frozen, pilled, potioned, lotioned, salivated… by Act of Parliament?”

With these words, the anti-vaccination movement of the nineteenth century was born, as related in this month’s London Review in an article that provides tinder for several interesting questions:

1) How can one distinguish legitimate fears about new advances in science and technology from the histrionic chaff, a la the below?

Vaccination was deplored not only because it was risky or unsanitary but also because it contravened deeply held beliefs about the integrity of the body and its fluids. ‘Pure blood’, anti-vaccinators insisted, was the key to health: adulterating blood, like adulterating food, was a form of poisoning. Children, it was feared, would become dehumanised or cowlike on contact with calf lymph; if treated with paupers’ lymph, they could become degenerate and immoral.

Notice how objections to vaccination were not driven by safety concerns (although that was a factor) so much as by (popular interpretation of) spiritual beliefs. These objections seem obviously silly in retrospect, but the theme of “purity” is one that continues to pervade concerns about new technologies– especially genetic engineering. There are some lines in this field (ie, the creation of human/animal chimeras) that would clearly be morally repugnant to blur– but which lines, like the mingling of material between species induced by vaccination, might come to be seen as justifiable over time?

2) How should society balance interests in deciding whether to recognize conscientious objection?

In this day and age, compulsory vaccination seems like a no-brainer: we no longer fret about the impingement on personal freedom or belief, because the value to society and safety of the procedure has now been so firmly established. But it wasn’t always so:

In 1896, when the royal commission appointed in 1889 finally reported, it stated that while vaccination should remain compulsory, parents who were ‘honestly opposed’ should be immune from prosecution, and in 1898 any parent who could satisfy two justices or a police magistrate that he or she ‘conscientiously believed’ that vaccination would be harmful to their child was granted exemption from the Act.

Within a few months, more than 200,000 certificates of conscientious objection had been issued. This hardly satisfied the anti-vaccinationists, who found magistrates arbitrary in their rulings and wanted vaccination made entirely voluntary, but if they never achieved that aim, in 1907 a new Act allowed parents to obtain exemption by simple attestation. Within a few years, 25 per cent of newborns avoided vaccination through their parents’ conscientious objection. Practically, the era of compulsion was over.

…What the state conceded, after all, was that an individual could, on the basis of ‘conscientious belief’, opt out of that obligation to tolerate minimal personal risk in exchange for collective social protection which is the foundational social contract of the modern democratic state.
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A new-to-me issue in bioethics, via the IP-health listerv: that patients involved in ongoing clinical trials may be using their experiences with a drug to guide their stockmarket decisions.

Evidence was anecdotal but sufficient for concern. Should patients in trials use their personal knowledge of a drug’s success or failure to guide their own stock choices? Do patients chatting in online cancer forums unintentionally release information that can affect stock prices?

One of the most disturbing possibilities is also the least likely—a patient falsifying trial results to drive up a company’s stock, Dr. Ratain says. Patients who purchase stock from the drug’s manufacturer may withhold information about side effects.

From patenting entire plants, Monsanto has apparently moved on to patenting pigs?

In today’s news I learned of a project to genetically alter cottonwood trees to help clean the environment by taking up mercury from surrounding contaminated soil. As well as contributing an environmental service, if successful this removal method would slash clean-up costs from about $2 million per acre to $200,00 per acre. Trees are also being engineered to remove selenium deposits and boost carbon retention to combat global warming.

While I hope this is effective, it’s impossible not to notice what a PR-savvy move this is for the industry. It will be much harder to raise significant resistance to GM crops as the technology becomes ever more deeply insinuated into necessary/politically popular causes…

Researchers at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York have developed a new cancer treatment using a genetically engineered oncolytic Herpes simplex virus (oHSV) to selectively kill cancer cells while sparing normal tissue.

If I could make days last forever, If words could make wishes come true, I’d save every day like a treasure and then– darn. Wrong ‘T’ word. We still haven’t invented a way of storing Time in relivable increments… but researchers have figured out how to put trust in a bottle– or more precisely, the hormone with regulatory control over that particular emotional response.

Researchers found that individuals who sniffed oxytocin were significantly more trusting with their money in an investment game than those exposed to a placebo.

The positive implication of this research is that it could lead to treatments to help people with conditions such as social phobia and autism, who are often overly suspicious and apprehensive in their interactions with other people.

On the flip side, there are concerns that such trust-inducing technology could be misused for political or commercial ends.

Though this study dealt only with trust in bartering contexts, since oxytocin is one of the hormones most closely associated with pair-bonding, there are also implications for how such a treatment might affect responses in dating situation (And if voles are a good indicator, women are likely to be somewhat more responsive to the treatment than men).

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[More on the neurobiology of love here]

Honestly, now:

What sort of parents give their child a name like Percy?

Could there be a name more likely to destine its bearer to play the scrawnier role in a David vs. Goliath story?

The saga of Percy Schmeiser began in 1998, (more…)