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Ethics

Hunger is the best spice

Ghrelin is a hormone produced in the stomach that
appears to stimulate appetite. A recent paper in Cell Metabolism shows that
giving ghrelin to volunteers made their brains respond more strongly to food
images, reward systems in the brain became more active and they rated their
level of hunger higher. An immediate reaction in the blogosphere
was to consider the practical applications: Stomach hormone turns hungry people
into junkies (New Scientist), Fast Food Joints Add
Hormone to Food That Makes You Want to Eat More (Io9). Are we moving towards a future where
food will be literally addictive?

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The viability of fetuses and the abortion debate

A paper has been published online in the British medical journal today
suggesting that survival of extremely premature infants (less than 24
weeks gestation) has not improved in the last decade. This comes less
than a week before a debate in the House of Commons on the Human
Fertilisation and Embryo Authority bill. It has been claimed that this
paper “completely blows out of the water” the arguments of
anti-abortion MPs who hope next week to push for a reduction in the
cut-off for legal abortion (currently 24 weeks).

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Sleeping policemen and garden sheds

Big Brother, it seems, has been asleep on the job.  Even though it is said that we in the UK are more subject to surveillance than any other society, peered at by cameras wherever we go about our innocent business, today’s headlines tell us that this intrusion is not even fulfilling its purpose of catching the people whose business is not so innocent.   The police apparently don’t like watching miles of boring video (and who can blame them?), so they don’t do it much,  and the massive investment in equipment has brought street crime in London down by only 3%.  Perhaps that is some consolation to people whose objections to surveillance are not just those of cost.  Even if the cameras are there, at least nobody is bothering to watch us.

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The Apeman and the Scotsman: the slippery slope to humanzees

In the Scotsman this week there is an interview with a scientist who
has claimed that a loophole in the draft UK Human Fertilisation and
Embryology Bill is likely to lead to the creation of hybrid human-apes
or “humanzees”.

In essence this argument is a slippery slope objection to the proposed
changes in the powers of the UK regulatory authority for embryo and
fertilisation research.

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Reverse Prostitution: cognitive biases and conditional cash transfers

Stuart Rennie writes a thoughtful blog on bioethics.net, Can
you buy changes in health behaviours? on how the World Bank backs an anti-AIDS experiment paying
young people to not contract sexually transmitted infections. The basic idea is not new, conditional cash transfer
programs in poor countries have had successes in improving health and education but applying it to sexual health moves it into more
controversial territory. Is there anything wrong with “reverse prostitution”?

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New hope or false hope for vegetative patients?

A BBC documentary screening this evening on the ‘Inside Out’ program reports on what it describes as a breakthrough for patients in a vegetative state. It is based upon research by a group of neuroscientists in Cambridge, who have used sophisticated brain scans (functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)) to look for signs of consciousness in patients who have previously been thought to be completely unaware of their surroundings.

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The Dignity of the Carrot

What are you allowed to do to plants? At least in Switzerland you are not allowed to do research that deeply offend the dignity of plants. The Swiss federal Gene Technology Law stipulates that any scientific research should respect the "dignity of creation". All plant biotechnology grant applications must now state how they take plant dignity into consideration, confusing researchers.  The Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) have issued some guidelines (pdf) which make the situation even more confusing. Neither humans nor plants are likely to be helped.

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Do we own our bodies? Should we?

There was a sad story last week about a young woman who died unexpectedly at the age of 19.   She was on the organ donor register, and her own mother was on the waiting list for a kidney donation, but the mother was refused one of the kidneys.  Even the transplant coordinator was ‘crying her eyes out’, but there was apparently no escape.  Rules were rules.  Cadaveric donations must go impartially and anonymously to the most compatible people at the top of the waiting list, and the authorities decreed that these organs must go to three strangers – whose identity the mother will never even know.

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Trading on Testosterone: Doping and the Financial Markets

Two cambridge researchers have found that  found that the amount of money a male financial trader makes in a day is correlated with his testosterone level. The pair – John Coates and Joe Herbert – also found that a trader’s testosterone at the beginning of a day is strongly predictive of his success that day, suggesting that testosterone causes improved stock market performance, rather than the reverse.

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