blog.bioethics.net

The President. A Bioethicist?

David Skorton, the current President of the University of Iowa, has been officially confirmed as the new President of Cornell. A physician and expert on congenital heart disease, he holds appointments at iowa in the Departments of Internal Medicine, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering. But in addition he has a long history of interest in human subjects protections. As his bio at Iowa states:

"A national leader in research ethics, President Skorton is charter past-president of the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs, Inc., the first entity organized specifically to accredit human research protection programs."

Skorton is also a jazz musician, playing saxophone and flute. He even hosts a program on the University of Iowa's radio station calle "As Night Falls - Latin Jazz."

Just the kind of bioethicist we'd like to know.
- Paul Root Wolpe

Editorial Retraction

The January/February 2006 issue of The American Journal of Bioethics contains a report from Drs. Insoo Hyun and Kyu Won Jung describing in detail the oocyte and somatic cell donation consent procedures developed for the stem cell research program of Seoul National University (Hyun and Jung 2006). Drs. Hyun and Jung report that they were led to believe that these consent procedures were used by Dr. Woo-Suk Hwang and his colleagues to enroll all of the oocyte and somatic cell donors who provided the research materials reportedly utilized in the derivation of eleven patient-specific embryonic stem cell lines (Hwang et al. 2005).

Following the acceptance and online publication of that manuscript, allegations about the veracity of the research performed by Dr. Hwang’s team surfaced. On January 10, 2006, the committee empowered by Seoul National University to look into these allegations concluded that the data published by Dr. Hwang and his colleagues were fabricated (Investigation Committee Report 2006). A similar report, issued by Korea’s National Board of Bioethics (KNBB) following their investigation of the Hwang lab’s oocyte donation procedures, raised additional concerns about the consent process. For example, Dr. Hwang was found to have used a far greater number of oocytes than originally claimed in the Science article. The KNBB committee also found that a number of egg donors suffered side effects from the oocyte donation process, and concluded that the oocyte donors were neither given sufficient information about the risks of donation nor were they asked to sign the consent forms approved by the Institutional Review Board.

It now appears likely that the oocyte and somatic cell donation consent procedures described by Hyun and Jung, which, they report, were developed through what they described as close collaboration with Dr. Hwang and his team, were not used for donor screening and enrollment in the research that gave rise to the now discredited Science paper (Hwang et al. 2005). Neither Dr. Hyun nor Dr. Jung have been accused of any misconduct with respect to the contents of this paper, but the Editors of The American Journal of Bioethics nevertheless believe that a retraction of their manuscript is warranted. Both authors have agreed to a retraction.

Glenn McGee PhD

Editor-in-Chief

References

Investigation Committee Report, Seoul National University, 10 January 2006.

Korean National Board of Bioethics, 30 December 2006. Hwang, W. S., S. I. Roh, B. C. Lee, et al. 2005. Patient-specific embryonic stem cells derived from human SCNT blastocysts. Science 308: 1777-1783.

Jung, K. W., and I. Hyun. 2006. Oocyte and somatic cell procurement for stem cell research: The South Korean experience. American Journal of Bioethics 6(1): W19-W22.

"Nanoethics": The ELSI of 21st Century Bioethics?

$42.6 million.

In one year.

The Age of the Code of Codes

Let's put that in perspective. Altogether - all included - the whole kit and caboodle - of ethical, legal, and social research dollars spent by the NHGRI (national human genome research institute) of NIH from the beginning of the ELSI program until 2003 totaled $125 million. This was famously described by Art Caplan as the "full employment act for bioethics," because it resulted in the hiring of dozens of new people to work in bioethics in institutions around the country: philosophers, doctors, lawyers, social and natural scientists, public health people, religion faculty ... lots and lots of people who otherwise might have had little time or access to work on ethical, legal or social issues surrounding what at the time seemed like the most important new frontier in science and medicine.

There are plenty of critics of ELSI. I'm not one of them. I frankly think that the ELSI group has done an extraordinary job of accommodating new methodologies - who would ever have funded a philosopher to study genetics prior to the genome project? - as well as taking some important risks on studies that could very well have reflected poorly on efforts of the genome project itself: mapping of the genes of indigenous peoples, the impact of gene banking on members of disadvantaged groups, investigation of genes for "criminal tendencies." ELSI put bioethics to work and if it had not come into existence, bioethics as we know it today would probably not exist. We would still be reading about how "medicine saved the life of ethics."

Some folks who hate ELSI argue that it has made mercenaries out of philosophers and social scientists, that people followed the money. Others argue that research that might otherwise have been subtle or methodologically slower (more ethnographic studies published in books) was suddenly and woefully altered by the lure of filthy lucre.

But seriously, nobody ever got rich from ELSI money. And, of course, that isn't the way paradigm shifts work. Young investigators had to beg and plead dissertation directors to let them "bet their careers" on dissertations in genetics and society. Trust me.

The real story is more subtle. People whose interests were compatible with ELSI funding were able to do the sort of work they wanted to do by participating in endeavors that ELSI could reasonably fund - or merely by finding a way to work in places that were able to get ELSI funding from the genome project. University bioethics centers, in many places, became plausible targets for money even beyond the ELSI grants because a viable argument could be made that indirect costs from ELSI grants would sustain the efforts not only of ELSI grantees but of ethics committee chairs, research ethics people, a real faculty to teach medical ethics, etc. And indirect costs - half again the amount of the NIH ethics grant - paid for lights and coffee and air conditioning.

The Age of Bioethics 'Hub Cities'

But the genome project's agenda for ELSI has changed. First, there was the odd effort to do most ELSI research "internally" through groups run out of the ELSI program offices themselves. It was creative, but many wrote and argued that this was not a great success, and it angered just about everyone who had already said that the ELSI study sections were becoming inbred. Then, Francis Collins, as early as 2003, began to give interviews in which he would lay out the roadmap for a "new" ELSI:

"We clearly need to continue this in the most vigorous way," Collins told [one interviewer]. But NHGRI will be more assertive in steering ELSI grantees toward specific subjects, he said. "We're going to shift our emphasis more in the direction of topics that we know we need people to work on. We're also considering funding centers for ELSI research, as opposed to individual investigators." The point is to develop institutions with a critical mass of different disciplines.

Correct me if I am wrong, but my review of the 2004 and 2005 budgets for ELSI suggest the almost total aggregation of ELSI dollars by a set of Centers for Excellence in ELSI Research, sort of "hubs" for ELSI research, which receive huge hunks of money to accomplish lots of different projects. I participated in a working group at which the creation of these centers was discussed, and they have easily exceeded expectations. They are all great, and each is led by a researcher with a long track record of good ELSI research and other service to NHGRI and to science itself.

The Case Western site has projects in family studies, community, enhancement, commercialization, etc. The Stanford site studies "new models of deliberative, interactive processes that integrate ELSI considerations into the design and conduct of genetic research," and features projects on genetics and autism, a documentary film program, benchside ethics etc. The Duke program focuses on intellectual property, and ethics in society. The University of Washington site aims at: assessing the clinical utility of genomics, looking at the uptake for and impact on underserved communities, training, etc.

Get the picture? NIH has basically created four huge think tanks in genomics.

In other words, Collins has I think it is fair to say grown somewhat tired of ELSI as a free-for-all with hundreds of investigators competing willy-nilly for grants of all kinds. And there are reasons why that is problematic. It means that even though there is some significant research funding available for ethics and genetics, it is perhaps a third of the amount available for nanotechnology and society, and the amount of the NHGRI ELSI money that is left to build the investigators spread across the field of bioethics is miniscule once you pay for the CEER centers. And like other core grants of their kind, the CEER centers are expected to help their junior investigators write their own grants - the "R01 pump" model in which the big centers are responsible for - and at huge advantage for - helping the junior scholars in their program to suck up still more ELSI money in order to do still more research to make each CEER center still better at the objectives laid out in the roadmap. So if you are competing for the remaining ELSI money after the CEER checks are paid, you are probably going to be competing with someone amazing from a CEER center, and with zillions of other folks.

Funding in ELSI Genomics Can No Longer Save the Life of Bioethics

It is fair to say that for up and coming researchers in bioethics, ELSI money from NHGRI is no longer a viable support structure for a career, unless there is reason to believe that one can work in a CEER center. Having recently served as the U.S. reviewer for the equivalent of the CEER centers in the UK, funded by the ESRC there, centers that receive double or triple the amount of support, I can tell you that those who are training in ethics and genetics in the U.S. better start looking for jobs at Cardiff, Exeter, Lancaster or Edinburgh than trying to persuade an American university that there is ELSI money sufficient to support a funded trajectory through tenure track.

Now Comes the Age of Small

Every year, $42.6 million in funding for ELSI in nanotechnology [although I am now told that much of this is for "education"]. That's roughly the amount spent by the US genome project on ELSI in a decade.

What sort of funding is available, and what would pursuing it entail? What kind of person would build a career around nanotechnology and bioethics? Would it look anything like the bioethics scholarship that has grown up around genetics? Let's "follow the money:" just about everyone knows about the big programs in nanotechnology at the National Science Foundation, each of which requires some ELSI work by those who are funded with the big science grants. But there are other sources of funding: EPA: ORD: NCER offer funding, for example.

And there are journals coming, books, and of course new groups. Just last week this group was announced, comprised of those who have worked in some way or other on ethical legal and social issues in this, um, field. Ray Kurzweil. James Hughes. Vivian Weil. And there are places that work hard on this stuff, like Davis Baird's group at South Carolina funded with $2.8 million to study all sorts of stuff.

I have big big nanotechnology in my backyard - and the world's only college devoted to the stuff - and I have spent enough time there to get it that this is an interesting area of work with implications for public health and for enhancement.

But, oddly, the purveyors of scholarship about ethical issues in nanotechnology have been ultraskeptical about the idea of "nanoethics," and have in fact done a fair share of "ELSI bashing," even before Congress. Langdon Winner of the STS program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Insitute, e.g., testified to the House Committee on Science that:

Studies of this kind could be launched in a number of ways, including
funding truly cross-disciplinary programs in universities to scope out key
issues and policy alternatives. But I would not advise you to pass a
Nanoethicist Full Employment Act [emphasis mine], sponsoring the creation of a new
profession. Although the new academic research in this area would be of
some value, there is also a tendency for those who conduct research about
the ethical dimensions of emerging technology to gravitate toward the more
comfortable, even trivial questions involved, avoiding issues that might
become a focus of conflict. The professional field of bioethics, for
example, (which might become, alas, a model for nanoethics) has a great
deal to say about many fascinating things, but people in this profession
rarely say "no."

Ouch. And Baird, we noted, himself says that nanotechnology folks should avoid calling on ethicists "to patch things up as best as they can after the fact," preferring instead "humanists" and social scientists. Commentator and original guru of the Department of Defense's Energy's ELSI program Michael Yesley - don't ask why there was a DOD ELSI program in genetics; ask Michael if you are curious - disagrees, saying that bioethics is still in the mix for these guys. But he's wrong. The new nano ELSI people seem to be steering as clear of "bioethics" as they can.

Baird is smart, funny and nobody's tool but it is notable that to get at the nanotechnology issues he is aided considerably by the USC Nanocenter on his campus. Just like ELSI for genomics, the pride of place comes from proximity and funding; the "nSTS" group is nested right within the nanotechnology group itself. Nobody's arguing this is a bad thing, but it is hard to see how it counts as a move beyond cultivation of institutions in which "bioethicists can't say no," at least not on its surface. How long do you thing nSTS would be funded if they began to argue that USC nanotechnology is horrific? I just do not know. But neither does Baird.

Or maybe that isn't right. It is hard to tell. The program at USC is the paradigm case. It has tons and tons of projects - educational, scholarly, artistic. It answers to NSF, who have discussed their efforts in detail here.

Is There a There There?

I'm still quite clueless about what it is exactly that nanotechnology means, or to be clearer the sufficient conditions are for a thing to be correctly classed as the product of nanotechnology in as much as that moniker is opposed to something else. I have begun to read voraciously in the nanoethics literature, yet I do not understand the necessary or sufficient conditions for an activity to be nanotechnology.

I am not sure what it means for a scholar to have the special set of skills and knowledge to study social, ethical and legal issues in nanotechnology; are there "special" issues in nanotechnology that require the analog to the medical knowledge that a clinical ethics consultant must have in order to understand what it is that doctors are fighing about at the bedside?

But it is clear from reading just the 10% or so of the dozens of blogs and hundreds of articles that cross my desk in this area that there are interesting social issues here, and that they deserve serious consideration, whether they are special or not. They are there and even if the money devoted to "nanoethics" becomes much like that devoted to ELSI in its formative years at NHGRI, it is easy to see that careers built around the early study of the very small could yield very big scholarship, and new ways of communicating with the public. Even if at the end of the day the work these people do isn't primarily about nanotechnology.

And it seems clear too that the crowd who do nanoscience are just at the beginning of the curve when it comes to understanding the risks associated with making utopian projections for the future of bionanotechnology - projections whose analog in gene therapy resulted in huge misconceptions among research subjects. Just look to South Korea to see what happens when people believe that technology is earth shaking long before it can even shake the building.

New York Times Discovers Informed Consent

The Holocaust and Research Ethics

Put Your Money Where Your Ethics Are

No More Free Lunch

A physicians group called for new steps to sever ties between manufacturers and practitioners at academic medical centers. • Ban gifts to physicians from drug and device makers, including meals and payment for travel and continuing education.
• Bar direct distribution of drug samples to physicians. Replace them with vouchers for low-income patients.
• Exclude physicians with financial relationships to manufacturers from committees overseeing preferrred drug lists.
• Ban physicians from speaking at manufacturers' events or publishing articles ghost-written by industry employees.
• Post consulting and research contracts on a publicly available Web site.

New England Journal Sounds Off on Paying Egg Donors

Some bioethicists argue that egg donors should be compensated — on the basis of the time and discomfort associated with the process, not the number and quality of the eggs that are produced. According to Bonnie Steinbock, a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Albany who has studied egg donation, in the absence of a consensus that no egg donor should be compensated, payment for donations for research is ethically acceptable.5 In an interview, Steinbock explained: "Any time that we ask people to do things that impose significant burdens and some degree of risk, fairness may require that they be adequately compensated. At the same time, there's a general consensus that it would be improper to offer enormous sums of money to egg donors that could sway their judgment."

Yes We Love Quarantine. Please Don't Do It.

Most Americans favor the use of quarantine as a weapon against contagious diseases like SARS and avian flu, but that support dries up quickly when the talk turns to strictly enforcing and monitoring the quarantines. This message is contained in a new study, “Attitudes toward the Use of Quarantine in a Public Health Emergency in Four Countries,” that will be published 24 January on the Health Affairs Web site. While 76 percent of Americans surveyed said they favor quarantining those potentially exposed to serious contagious diseases, only 42 percent supported a compulsory quarantine under which those who refused to comply could be arrested.

Among residents of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, the threat of arrest also reduced support for quarantine, according to Robert Blendon of the Harvard School of Public Health and his coauthors, John Benson and Catherine DesRoches of Harvard and Martin Cetron, Theodore Meinhardt, and William Pollard of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). However, in these Asian nations, which recently experienced quarantines and other public health measures in connection with the SARS epidemic, the use of quarantine retained majority support even when the arrest sanction was included.

In the U.S., the threat of arrest reduced support for quarantine especially among African Americans. In phone interviews conducted between 18 November and 16 December 2004, 90 percent of blacks said that they supported the use of quarantine, compared with 76 percent of whites. But when told that quarantine violators could be arrested, only 33 percent of blacks stood by the use of quarantine, versus 46 percent of whites.

Toronto/Gates Bioethics Initiative

Oath Lite

Essentially it is the same, except for a few tiny modifications: that little bit about abortion and physician-assisted suicide? Out. The Greek Gods? God? Out. It's an oath. It's unoffensive. It's actually pretty good, and the new docs love it. But it is a far cry from the Hippocratic corpus:

Of the Cornell version, he said: "I think it's a wonderful oath, but it's not the Hippocratic oath."

He said about 80% or 90% of medical school administer some version of the original. He said the Cornell oath is so different he would not consider it a version of the classic.

Donation After Cardiac Death Increases

Organ donations from partially brain-dead patients - a controversial source - jumped tenfold in Colorado and Wyoming last year, the group that coordinates donations said.

This group of donor patients rose to 20 last year from two in 2004. Those 20 donors, each of whom is considered one donation, provided 36 organs - primarily kidneys and livers, according to Sue Dunn, chief operating officer of Donor Alliance, which oversees donations in the two states.

Pain Control, Abortion and the States

The same goes for abortion.

The War on Boys

Until we get closer to the 2006 election, the gay “Assault on Marriage” will remain on the back burner. Nothing gets elderly conservatives to the election booths like a fictitious attack on the bastion that is traditional marriage, but let’s not get them riled up too soon or their collective apoplexy may decimate the GOP voting rolls. Can’t let those minions of Satan (sorry, liberals) infringe upon the rights of Brittney Spears to have as many quickie Vegas weddings as she wants.

So then, what’s a good conservative to do? For social critics like John Tierney and Kate O’Bierne, the way to keep their acolytes happy is to complain about the “War on Boys” – the observation that the traditionally male-dominated fortress of higher education is becoming increasingly dominated by the fairer sex. Perhaps David Horowitz can add gender parity to his “Academic Bill of Rights”.

I’m so glad that they brought this onslaught on us Y-chromosomes to my attention, otherwise my victimhood might have failed to register in my pitiful little testosterone-addled brain. After all, I’ve been too caught up reading horrific stories about gender inequality in other areas of the world, such as the recent Lancet study that (conservatively) estimates that 500,000 female fetuses are aborted every year in India because boys are “more economically beneficial” to the family. This selective termination of fetuses on the basis of sex isn’t limited solely to India, or even so-called non-Western cultures. Nor will stricter enforcement of existing pre-natal screening restrictions by Indian and other authories resolve this problem. Just consider the fact that 95% of all children in Chinese orphanages are girls, a result of China’s one-child policy coupled with a cultural preference for male heirs. Heck, we don’t even have a good idea of how severe the problem of gender equality is. Hopefully some future, brainy, and most likely female academic will have the intelligence and wherewithal to address these problems.

And to all those individuals worrying about the “War on Boys”, let me give you a sage piece of advice that the coach of my boyhood soccer team once gave – suck it up and deal. Of course, my coach was a woman …
- Sean Philpott

But the Vatican. That Must Be the Product of Intelligent Design!

The official Vatican newspaper published an article this week labeling as "correct" the recent decision by a judge in Pennsylvania that intelligent design should not be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution.

Medicare Drug Plan Looks Like a Big Scam - Los Angeles Times

State Based Bioethics

The catch was that to make an "A" in the course you had to get the bill formally introduced into the state legislature of your choosing. It was a weird experiment that drew the attention of the Times at a time when I believe I might have been the only liberal out there who wanted to see states take the initiative on stem cell research. Lots of fascinating people helped teach the students about health policy and lobbying. A number of the bills from "A" students were actually passed, including several that are now actually law in the area of genetic discrimination and even cloning.

I don't teach that course anymore, but I have been more than persuaded that the motivation was right on the money: students and policymakers alike are clueless about the relationship between scholarly bioethics and state policy. And when it came time for big powerful states like California to deal with the matter of funding something on the scope of stem cell research, it showed.

Now comes Josh Braun, who gets it. In "The New Federalism" just out in Seed, he asks these questions of several other folks - what happens when science and bioethics goes to the states?

Your Blood's No Good Here

The issue of the ‘gay blood ban’ extends far beyond Africa’s borders. A few years ago, protests were staged in Hong Kong. In Australia, a gay man has recently filed charges against the Australian Red Cross. The ban has been the object of student protests from Ireland to Montreal. In the United States, while the scientific basis of the ban has been questioned a number of times, a proposal to relax the ban was narrowly rejected by a Food and Drug Adminstration committee back in 2000.

The FDA rules on blood donation are really the heart of the matter, because they form the basis of the donation criteria for the American Red Cross and the Red Cross in most (if not all) other countries. In 1985, the FDA proposed the rule that a man could not donate blood if he had sex with another man – even once – since 1977. The rule obviously harks to a time when HIV/AIDS was considered a ‘gay disease’.

But how should this rule be considered in areas of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV/AIDS is largely transmitted heterosexually? The WHO states that blood donations should come from groups with low risk of TTIs (transfusion transmissible infections) but seems to acknowledge that high risk groups may be different in different regions of the world. Should blood donation criteria be determined by the most current epidemiological data on HIV prevalence among social groups, or should one forget social groups altogether, and concentrate on the risk behavior of individuals who wish to donate their blood? In either case, it seems irrational -- if not unethical -- to exclude people from donating blood on the basis of their sexual orientation alone.
- Stuart Rennie, Our Man in Holland

You're Hooked. Face It.

The world's first face transplant recipient is using her new lips to take up smoking again, which doctors fear could interfere with her healing and raise the risk of tissue rejection.

"It is a problem," Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, who led the team that performed the pioneering transplant in France on Nov. 27, acknowledged on Wednesday.

The woman's French surgeons made their first scientific presentation on the partial face transplant at a medical conference in Tucson this week, the 6th International Symposium on Composite Tissue Allotransplantation.

Crow Is Served

Glenn and I got the name wrong. But we were not wrong about the fact that hyping adult stem cell research in the way that Smith and Doerflinger and many other critics of embryonic stem cell research have done is often rooted in research that has no more substance than that conducted by Professor Hwang with respect to cloning. Now comes the news--hardly surprising--that the crackpot Korean experiments so eagerly embraced and touted by Smith and Doerflinger - are complete and utter failures. Worse they actually have harmed most of those involved.

McGee and I await the prompt admission from those who touted this work that it is just as false, just as hyped and just as 'devastating' to the case that adult stem cell research is a proven alternative to embryonic stem cell research. Those who have paid for people from this group to show up and testify about the power of their 'cures' to legislators should make public their guilt by association with this immoral research.

As the critics know both of us have long counseled caution about 'breakthroughs' in embryonic stem cell research including Hwang's now discredited announcements. The critics now have some explaining to do about their hyping of Korean research that is just as immoral as that engaged in by Hwang. - Art Caplan

Where No Stone Has Gone Before

Dying British

Somebody Call Jon Stewart:
Hwang to Work with UFO Cult?

Although they claim otherwise, they are also the utter and total sponsors of a lunatic fringe cloning group called Clonaid, a Bahamas-based group that claims to have cloned "baby Eve. Clonaid is run by Raelian Brigitte Boisselier, the brainpower behind their decade-old quest to clone somebody, anybody. If you follow or work in bioethics you will recall that the Raelians kept everyone with any scholarly work in the area of reproductive genetics completely transfixed and horrified for the better part of three years until they failed to produce the baby Eve, and at last people started to realize that they were nutty.

Anyway they are hoping to recruit Dr. Hwang to join in their efforts. Please, someone send this story to Jon Stewart.
[thanks Art Caplan]

Embryonic Stem Cell Research in California

"A History of Broken Rules"

He has now served as counsel in many more legal actions involving medical research, and shared with us his recent chronology of research misconduct through his eyes: [PDF download].

The Best of the Best of the Best, Sir

Oregon Assisted Suicide Law Upheld by Supreme Court

The scope immediate impact for this decision is not obvious apart of course from the effect on Oregon. Nor is it clear how this decision interacts with SCOTUS' reversal several years ago of decisions involving physician-assisted suicide issued by the 2nd and 9th Circuit Courts of Appeals. We'll have to dredge up some lawyer to blog about that. Certainly there are plenty of bioethics experts ready to talk about the decision.

No surprise, the strategy of conservatives is beginning to gel, a shift to calls for concerted federal action by the experts on persistent vegetative state who rule the House of Representatives. The blue states meanwhile are likely to move toward more Oregonian positions on PAS.

[update: Womens' Bioethics Blog discusses this stuff today]

Caplan & McGee:
Rest in Pieces

When it comes to the body, they say you can't take it with you when you die. But they didn't say it should be sold from the back of a truck. Or that you should not have the right to give a fully informed consent for whatever it is that medical science wants to do with your remains.

Recently it was revealed that a group of criminals was stealing bones from bodies at crematoriums in New York. They were then sold to for-profit tissue banks in New Jersey and Florida. Among the victims was the late host of PBS television's Masterpiece Theater, British broadcaster and journalist Alistair Cooke. His bones were removed without his or his family's permission or even knowledge, and then sold for thousands of dollars. What happened to Cooke has happened to others.

Investigations across the United States have revealed a gruesome market in body parts made possible by a motley collection of grim reapers who sometimes secretly and illegally and with dubious consent harvest the skin, bones, tendons, organs, and even brains of those in funeral homes, burial sites and morgues. From Maine to California to Louisiana, unscrupulous brokers are removing tissues and selling them to tissue banks which then sell them to medical schools, hospitals, research institutes and testing facilities. The trade in tissues is a half-billion dollar industry and that is enough to get some who have access to body parts to put their ethics on the shelf.

There is a long and ignoble history of pseudo-medical mutilation of bodies: William Burke and William Hare in the 19th century murdered and robbed graves to supply bodies for examination to the school of medicine in Edinburgh. A pathologist present at the Princeton, N.J., hospital where Albert Einstein died, removed Einstein's eyes and his brain, despite his specific instructions that he be cremated. The brain went off to Philadelphia, was divided into dozens of slices and preserved; it then spent the next 40 years being lugged around ...

Glowing Pigs. No Comment Required.

Hwang in a Nutshell Take 5,982

And this is an equally clever take on Gerald Schatten of Pitt by Philadelphia Inquirer.

But perhaps the best piece about Hwang this week isn't about him at all. It comes from Scientific American who discuss all the little lapses that add up to more damage than the big ethical lapses ever could. Anyone who has ever made a little mistake in publishing and research - and seriously who hasn't - should read this piece about nipping and buds.

And easily the worst is this nonsense from Nigel Cameron slamming Peter Singer through the most oddball comparison to Hwang ever construed.

Columbo to Woo-suk Hwang: Don't Leave Town

Prosecutors raided eight more offices of Hwang's former associates, a day after they searched Hwang's home in southern Seoul, said Hong Man-pyo, the prosecutor in charge of the criminal investigation.

Disgraced researcher Hwang Woo Suk asked forgiveness Thursday from fellow South Koreans for his fraudulent claims of human stem cell breakthroughs, but blamed the scandal on junior researchers who he said deceived him.

The Coolest Bioethics Job Ever

Associate Director for Research Ethics Consultation

... (GELP) seeks to hire an Associate Director for Research Ethics Consultation. The Associate Director will work with research teams at Duke on large or complex research projects to ensure that ethical and policy issues are considered from the start of the research conception and study design, and throughout the course of research; his or her focus will be broader than issues related to IRB approval. The Associate Director will also link to other national bioethics centers developing a capacity for “bench to bedside” research ethics advice, and conduct independent scholarly research of his or her own, related to the themes of science, ethics, research and society

Start Spreading the News

Ordinarily, American`s rely on the federal government to fund biomedical research. With regard to stem cell research however, the federal govern- ment, for reasons other than the value of the science, has withdrawn its support. In response to the withdrawal of federal support for stem cell research, a number of States have initiated their own stem cell funding efforts. California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Massachusetts and New Jersey have all passed or proposed significant funding support for stem cell research. New York State is world-renowned for the excellence of its academic and medical institutions and the scientists who work there. Should New York not keep pace with the commitment that other States have made in support of stem cell research, we risk losing our competitive advantage. Additionally, biotechnology is an important element of our economy, and by encouraging and supporting growth in these industries, New York State could gain thousands of new jobs.

Sloooow Down in Blogdom

And a reminder that the polls are open at the Medical Blog Awards for best health policy and ethics blog; insert voter suppression here please don't vote if you hate us.

President Clinton's Plan for AIDS

Former US President Bill Clinton plans to announce today that his foundation has negotiated lower prices on AIDS tests and on two important AIDS drugs, reports The New York Times.

Four companies, from the United States, India and China, will offer rapid HIV tests for 49 cents to 65 cents, which will reduce the typical cost of a test in poor countries by half, Clinton said in a written statement.

Watch Out for Falling Bioethics:
Maryland Drop-Kicks Wal-Mart

Rabbit-Human Embryos

Learning the Lessons of Hwang? Nope.

"Scientists," responded Zach Hall, president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the funding entity created by Prop. 71. Warning that every industry has the potential for an Enron, Hall touted the American system of peer review as the best way to expose rogue scientists and bad science and to keep research-funding decisions apart from undue political, religious or geographic influences. "What will not stop this from happening is government oversight," he said.

Please, Please Take This One to the Supreme Court

Fetuses do not count as passengers when it comes to determining who may drive in the carpool lane, a judge ruled.

Candace Dickinson was fined $367 for improper use of a carpool lane, but contended the fetus inside her womb allowed her to use the lane. Motorists who use the lanes normally must carry at least one passenger during weekday rush hours.

Municipal Judge Dennis Freeman rejected Dickinson’s argument Tuesday, applying a “common sense” definition in which an individual is someone who occupies a “separate and distinct” space in a vehicle.

Resetting the Clock on Stem Cells from Nuclear Transfer

Research is being reset to "where we were before, where using somatic cell nuclear transfer to derive stem cells is only a theoretical possibility," added David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. "We're hopeful, but whether it's possible and how long it's going to take is something that is now a complete unknown. This really is a setback in a lot of ways."

Nevertheless, stem cell research with the potential for real breakthroughs continues. According to The New York Times, two labs at Harvard have been seeking approval for more than a year to clone human cells. Two institutions in England are moving down the same road, as are some private companies.

In a prepared statement, Dr. Irving Weissman, director of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, said his university intends to use dollars from California's Proposition 71 -- which earmarks state funds for embryonic stem cell research -- "to recruit scientists who will find ways to do nuclear transfer research, first in animal models and then with human cells."

Like a Virgin, Tested for the Very First Time

Virginity testing? Yes, virginity testing. Whereas some American teenagers make virginity pledges and self-report their own virtue, South African girls go a step further by submitting to a pelvic examination aimed at ‘proving’ their chastity. Especially among Zulus, it has long been thought important that girls keep themselves pure for their future husbands; a young woman who has pre-marital sexual relations is thought to show intemperance and brings shame on her family. This is why a confirmation of virginity is accompanied by celebration, while failing to pass the test can lead to stigma and social exclusion. In Uganda, girls can even get a scholarship for remaining virgins, i.e. if they manage to scrape through years of poverty without exchanging sex for money and security from predatory older men.

The devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic has increased the popularity of virginity testing throughout Africa. It has given traditional leaders a modern, medical justification for an ancient practice. If girls are encouraged to pass the test, the thought goes, they will not have sex and will not acquire or transmit HIV. On the other hand, a hymen may be torn by means other than intercourse, and the pelvic examinations are performed in conditions where the hygiene leaves a lot to be desired. As the US example suggests, young people committed to virginity may have sex in alternative ways (i.e. anal and oral) that leaves them open to HIV and sexually transmitted diseases. The practice also feeds into a powerful and tragic myth in South Africa: that a man with AIDS can be ‘cured’ by having sex with a virgin. And of course, there is the detail that the practice of virginity testing is widely condemned by human rights groups as gender discrimination. If there was a reliable biomarker for male virginity, involving an invasive and possibly contaminating procedure, would that be as popular? It is hard to imagine.

Condemning the practice of virginity testing outright, however, may be unwise. One of the biggest mistakes of HIV prevention in the past is the failure (or unwillingness) to understand and take seriously the sexual culture of Africans, and the place of that culture in a network of related social practices. Here’s yet another job for African bioethicists: to help negotiate an acceptable path here between HIV prevention, gender rights and cultural traditions.
- Stuart Rennie

Hwang Woo-suk Fabrication:
The Full Text of the Seoul National U. Report

The 2004 Science article is a tissue of lies:

The claim in 2004 article that the DNA fingerprinting pattern of NT-1 and that of the donor A match perfectly was a clear false report. Given that none of the alleged NT-1 derived cells or tissues match the donor A, the committee concluded that NT-1 ES cell line reported in Science in 2004 is not an ES cell line derived from a cloned blastocyst. In addition, claims that photographs of cells in 2004 Science article are those of MizMedi ES cells have also been confirmed to be true. Therefore, the committee concluded that results described in 2004 Science article including DNA fingerprinting analyses and photographs of cells have also been fabricated.

Egg donation ethics? Try this on:

Professor Hwang accompanied the student [who donating eggs, about which Hwang earlier claimed he had no idea] to the hospital himself. In May of 2003, Professor Hwang's research team circulated a form asking consent for voluntary egg donation and collected signature from female technicians. This is based on information provided by eight current and former lab members.

And there is the simple, clear statement by the committee as to the total nature of the fabrication, i.e., almost everything was utterly made up:

According to the records of Professor Hwang's research team regarding the stage of cell line establishment, the scientific bases for claiming any success are wholly lacking. The establishment of ES cell lines must meet the criteria of being able to differentiate through embryoid body formation or to form teratoma, for example. However, Professor Hwang's team regarded the initial formation of cell colony as the successful establishment of ES cell line, and no record of further confirmatory experiments could be found.

Taken together, Professor Hwang's research team possesses neither the patient-specific ES cell line described in 2005 publication nor the NT-1 ES cell line, the forerunner cloned cell line described in 2004 publication. The data in 2004 publication are also fabricated as can be seen by the non-match between the donor A and NT-1. Such act is none other than deceiving the scientific community and the public at large. Even the scenario based on switching cell lines cannot explain the parthenogenetically derived cell line and cannot undo the fabrication of DNA fingerprinting data.

Wanted: Bioethicist to Congress (Sort of)

The ANALYST IN GENETICS (Vacancy #050319) provides analysis of research, medical, and policy issues in the field of genetics, especially as they relate to an aging population. Key issues include the ethical, social, biologic, and legal issues involved in the application of genetic science to the development and regulation of gene therapies and pharmaceuticals; and the relation of this work to medical care, public health, biodefense, and associated public and private financing. The ANALYST IN GERONTOLOGY (Vacancy #050320) provides analysis of issues in the field of aging. Key issues include: 1) changes in the demographic and disability status of the aging population; 2) an understanding of the complexity of aging issues and the effects of aging policy on society; 3) the continuum of care needs of this population; 4) innovative strategies for integrating services the elderly need; 5) options for financing these services; and 6) the role of Federal and state governments and the private sector in the delivery, quality assurance, and financing of these services.

Positions are being offered at the GS-13 level ($77,353-$100,554); promotion potential is to the GS-15 level ($107,521-$139,774). To apply online (preferred), visit http://www.loc.gov/crsinfo or call (202) 707-5627 to request an applicant job kit. Please refer to the appropriate vacancy number in all correspondence. Applications must be received by January 31, 2005. CRS is the public policy research arm of the U.S. Congress and is fully committed to workforce diversity.

Disability Studies:
Please, Please Start Making Sense!

Davis makes several valid points – particularly in his critique of the disability movement’s position physician assisted suicide. He correctly points out that the movement’s sweeping arguments against choice in dying conflate dying with disability in a way that is both illogical and inconsistent with a movement dedicated to promoting independent living and free choice for its constituents. He writes:

Many disability advocates . . . claim that all people who are dying are, in fact, disabled, and that their identity as disabled individuals trumps their identity as autonomous beings. The faulty syllogism goes that dying people are disabled, and in an ableist society they naturally will be pressured to kill themselves; ergo disabled people are being put to death through physician-assisted suicide. …

There are at least two flaws in that argument. First, it is hard to shoehorn someone dying of cancer, for example, into the category of chronic disability. The aim of making it possible for disabled people to live full lives with their impairments and of ensuring a free and accessible society has little to do with someone who will be dead in six months (the requirement for receiving physician-assisted suicide in Oregon). Why should people have to accept disability status when they will be dead within a few months? Second, according to statistics provided by Oregon, most people seeking physician-assisted suicide are end-stage cancer patients who, by and large, are educated, middle class, and informed. While it is true that many seek physician-assisted suicide because they fear losing their abilities and their autonomy, they no doubt have the independent judgment to make that decision.

It seems illogical for some disability advocates to try to prevent dying people from choosing a humane way of ending their lives (as opposed to shooting themselves or wrapping a plastic bag around their heads) because those advocates see suicide as a critique of the disability perspective.

Davis concludes that a more nuanced approach, a biocultural one, would make distinctions between physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, and abortion – something the disabilities folks fail to do.

Yet some of Davis’s assertions themselves lack nuance. For example, he claims that the "left's" position (by left he seems to mean anyone who supported removal of Theresa Schiavo’s feeding tube) on Schiavo is "actually saying that we should assume that people who are disabled enough to be unconscious no longer have identities. According to that view, those people paradoxically no longer have the ability to have chosen to stay alive." Davis’s characterization of the position is simply wrong. The principal argument supporting removal a feeding tube in the Schiavo case was that Schiavo’s then-present identity (that of a person in a PVS) included and incorporated her identity as asserted before the onset of the PVS. That whole person, past and present, deserved respect. Had that person expressed a preference to stay alive, the so called left would have supported that preference.
- Alicia Ouellette

Polls Open for "Best Health Policies/Ethics Blog"

Weiss: "Stem Cell Legislation Is at Risk

It didn't bug me when Jeb Bush backed Hurlbut's nonsense.

It didn't bug me when Hurlbut used his mind-numbingly stupid theory to defend Tom Delay.

I was not surprised that having been castigated for the theory's stupidity by real scientists on the Hill and in New England Journal, and by basically every serious stem cell researcher in, um, the world, Hurlbut remained unfazed.

I admit to being a tiny bit annoyed that Slate's William Saletan not only dignified Hurlbut's idea but belittled Laurie Zoloth for questioning Hurlbut's science.

But anyone who has not figured out by now that Hurlbut's poorly thought out plan to make handicapped embryos is both disingenuous claptrap and utterly political in nature is probably not going to be persuaded by any sort of arguments to emerge in the upcoming battle on the hill about federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

So why not be grumpy about a statement from Senator Frist - whose support of embryonic stem cell research was the key break against President Bush just months ago - in which he essentially switches sides using the Hurlbut copout:

"The new science that may involve embryo research but not require destruction of an embryo is tremendously exciting," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said recently. "It would get you outside of the boundaries of the ethical constraints."

The stem cell debate in Washington is over. Whatever pittance that might be won were Democrats and reasonable Republicans to prevail in their push for additional US government spending would pale by comparison to what will be spent in the states.

It would be wonderful to see the US government spend additional dollars on stem cell research. For the price of a day's military activities in Iraq, the US could be at the lead of the most important medical research in the history of the world.

But instead, it seems clear now that cutting edge regenerative medicine is going to happen offshore and in a few enclaves in the US. What Korea didn't kill, those who published these silly "alternative" theories in Nature - none of whom want to use them - and their conceptual Godfather William Hurlbut - may have.

Stolen Bones and Skin Books

And our David Magnus makes the really disgusting point: "“It would be an awful shame if, in addition to the utter contempt and disrespect shown to the deceased, the patients at the receiving end become very sick,” said David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics."

But if you are worried about what's in your bones, afraid that you are infected by another, touched without permission ... don't go to Brown University to look up answers about body parts or how to think about death. See, the anatomy book there - and if you get really ambitious, the 19th century edition of Dance of Death, are literally bound in human skin.
[thanks Art Caplan]

Informed Consent for Scientology?

In September 2003, one of these Scientology release forms surfaced on the Internet. The form, which describes itself as a "contract," states that the signer opposes psychiatric treatment for anyone, particularly him or herself. Should some mental illness befall them, they authorize the Church of Scientology to "extricate" them from the clutches of psychiatrists who might seek to treat them. In lieu of psychiatric care, the contract says they agree to be placed on the "Introspection Rundown," a Scientology therapy invented by the Church's late founder, L. Ron Hubbard.

The release form reads: "I understand that the Introspection Rundown... includes being isolated from all sources of potential spiritual upset, including, but not limited to family members, friends or others with whom I might normally interact. As part of the Introspection Rundown, I specifically consent to Church members being with me 24 hours a day at the direction of my Case Supervisor." In addition, "...the Case Supervisor will determine the time period in which I will remain isolated..." And later in the same paragraph: "...such duration will be completely at the discretion of the Case Supervisor." The form ends with: "I further understand that by signing below, I am forever giving up my right to sue the Church... for any injury or damage suffered in any way connected with Scientology religious services or spiritual assistance."

And People Pick Scandanavian Sperm?

And if one day your child wants to find his biological father, "knowndonor" has made it easy:

Since this is a permanent website, I know I'll be easy to locate if there are any questions that only I could answer (e.g. medical history). That's one advantage of using a non-anonymous donor, even if future contact with the child is highly unlikely.

It is Very Hard, However, to Get Informed Consent

Life-support equipment can keep a cadaver's heart and other organs functioning until a research procedure is completed. Unlike clinical trials on living patients, there's no danger of harming a person with a risky experimental treatment.

For example, researchers could induce an irregular heartbeat in a brain-dead patient and see whether an experimental drug helped restore a normal beat. They also could test new ways to do joint replacement surgery or place breathing tubes.

"There are enormous potential benefits," said Mark Wicclair of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Bioethics and Health Law and West Virginia University philosophy department. "We're probably at a point where it's going to be done more frequently."

The guidelines, written by 15 researchers, ethicists, doctors and patient and religious advocates, were published recently in the journal Nature Medicine.

"Respect for persons, a pivotal principle in research ethics, should be extended to the recently dead," the guidelines state.

Quick Update on Stem Cells in the States

Who's Sorry Now?

Under a bill being considered in the House Judiciary Committee, defendants in lawsuits could not be punished for apologizing to plaintiffs before a trial. Other statements of sympathy, such as those expressing condolences or support, also would be blocked from liability...Current Indiana law allows communications of sympathy to be used as evidence in most instances.

Large Scale Review of Abortion Data

Tiny Ethics

We have a real opportunity here. Instead of calling on ethicists to patch things up as best as they can after the fact, if we start now, bringing social scientists and humanists to the table, our understanding of the social and ethical dimensions of nanotechnology can co-evolve with the technology itself. This will make for better, more socially responsive work in nanotechnology, and for fewer problems to patch up later. Nanotechnology can avoid the fate most recently of genetically modified organisms.

Delaware Goes Where Nebraska Dares Not

So Much for an Unbiased Examination of Hwang Woo-suk

So now, the head of the National Bioethics Committee has offered to resign. His law firm - and he - gave advice to Hwang to apply for an injunction that might prevent the broadcast of the first big television program aired by MBC that would bring Hwang down. Then after it aired, he helped Hwang think about his options. What a great guy to have in charge of the primary panel whom we are all listening to for final word on the investigation of Hwang Woo-suk.

At this point South Korea must call for an international investigation, lock up its current records, and await help in the matter. Anything further they do in the investigation will only make matters worse.

Risk vs. Risk: Obesity, Gastric Bypass and Other Methods

Another Study Contradicts FDA Advisory Concerning Newer Antidepressants

Yet another large scale study has contradicted the March 2004 FDA public health advisory warning that newer antidepressants are associated with worsening depression and suicidality. This new study of over 65,000 patients who were enrolled in the Group Health Cooperative and receiving antidepressants found no increased risk of suicide associated with prescription of newer antidepressants, including, notably, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) [Link]. Results of this study are consistent with results of a recent of study of 146, 095 patients receiving antidepressants in primary care in the United Kingdom [Link], as well as two meta-analyses of the results of clinical trials data.

Even at the time of its warning, the FDA conceded that available evidence did not indicate any increased risk of suicide associated with these drugs. [Link]. At the hearings leading to the FDA public health advisory, first personal accounts from the family members of victims of suicide and vocal representatives of groups who had never encountered a psychotropic medication they liked were favored over research data. The FDA's handling of the issue of risks associated with antidepressants gives a new dimension to concerns about how the agency makes decisions.

Controversies about how the efficacy and safety of antidepressants are promoted have played a defining role in the discussions of conflict of interest in the bioethics literature, even if there is little attention to whether the best evidence actually indicates a risk for suicidality. However, more than has been acknowledged in this literature, debates about the safety of antidepressants have been clashes of conflicting financial interests. No doubt the drug companies producing the new antidepressants want us to believe that these drugs are absolutely safe and as dramatically effective as seen in the television commercials. They will spend enormous amounts of money to get their message across, including by enlisting key opinion leaders in psychiatry. Yet, there is big money behind the other side as well, though often undisclosed. For instance, take David Healy, whose "Normal Volunteers Study" of employees at his hospital given antidepressants has become the primary source for claims that even nondepressed persons became suicidal when they take SSRIs. He has widely been portrayed as a "self-effacing" hero fearlessly challenging the drug companies for the public good [Link]. Yet, at the time of his study, he was actually receiving substantial financial support, from Pharmacia a drug company attempting to capture a share of the SSRI market with a nonSSRI antidepressant [Link]. And the results of his study had immediate application in Healy's work as an expert witness in civil litigation, from which he has been making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Healy had made his own contribution to the meta analysis of data concerning the safety of SSRIs, claiming to find that SSRIs were over 7 times more likely than other antidepressants to be associated with a fatal suicide attempt [Link]. This figure is comfortably over the odds ratio of 2.0 arbitrarily needed in the post-Daubert era to establish general causation in product liability. Unfortunately, readers showed that Healy's claims were contradicted by the data in his own article, and a correction was issued that acknowledged a lack of any differences between SSRIs and older antidepressants in terms of rates of fatal suicide attempts [Link]. Maybe financial interests sometimes do lead to distorted presentations of data.

Now that research data are available concerning SSRIs and suicidality, it might be time to revisit some of what has been said in the bioethics literature concerning the controversy in terms of conflict of interest and bias. A re-examination of the literature could lead to a more nuanced and sophisticated discussion of COI than has occurred so far.

The Worst

How Google is Changing Medicine

Design, More Intelligent Every Day

Thanks to a recent court decision, children in Kansas will learn that the fossil record of our planet holds evidence of "irreducibly complex" traits, biological wonders that seem too sophisticated to be products of natural selection. Advocates of intelligent design argue that such complexity of biological life reveals evidence of a designer.

... A different sort of designer is working in the nascent filed of synthetic biology. These scientists generate novel biological functions through the design and construction of living systems (see "Is This Life", p.30). Synthetic biologists manipulate the most complex biological interactions using the tools of engineering and computer science. It has borne fruit in the design of genomes, proteins, devices, integrated biological systems, and even cell-circuit hybrids. Synthetic biologists use evolution as a method. That seems pretty intelligent.

Art Caplan on MSNBC on Hwang:
The End of Stem Cell Research? Hardly

At the end of the day the system worked. Hwang was outed. Cloning was shown to be as tough a strategy for obtaining stem cells as most experts had thought it was. Still, Hwang almost pulled off his great charade.

Science like all other human endeavors such as the professoriate, the priesthood or the military is only as strong as its weakest links. And that will be true long after the critics and the proponents of embryonic stem cell research find out whether it really can do anyone any good.

Woman Forced By Hwang to Donate Eggs?
2004 Paper a Fraud?
Time to Move to Nebraska

This expose is by far the most serious in the short but ignoble history of Hwang's fraud:

An investigative program is set to air today and is expected to report that one of his junior researchers was coerced into donating her eggs.

The researcher, Park Eul-soon, wrote in an e-mail that she was forced to contribute her eggs after mistakenly spilling ova used for experiments in 2003.

"I regret that I did not stand up to Dr. Hwang," MBC television station quoted her as saying in the e-mail.

We have followed Park's odd history for some time - she was by all accounts instrumental in the research, and was hanging out in the Schatten lab when the scandal broke - with Schatten announcing that he suspected that there were issues with egg donation (which anyone from planet Duh might surmise he learned from Park).

And then, you'll recall, she failed to show up at the airport in Seoul to meet the other South Koreans who were all forced to leave Pittsburgh immediately for South Korea, in a rush, immediately after the Schatten announcement and just hours before Seoul National University released a statement implying that Schatten was merely retaliating against Hwang because Schatten SNU would not let him have power, position and money. So SNU and some sketchy government people showed up - apparently, we later learned, bearing a cash bribe as well - to "check on her," with one newspaper in Korea actually stating that they were trying to make sure she didn't steal away with intellectual property from the project

She has still not resurfaced and is no doubt setting up an illegal cloning operation in Nebraska.

In other reports, the 2004 paper, which every reporter with an IQ above 100 has been describing as "now in doubt," is still under investigation. But guess what. It really doesn't matter anymore. See,

Hwang's team claimed to have used 242 and 273 eggs, respectively in its research in 2004 and 2005 to clone human embryos derived from ova and somatic cells.

However ... the number of human eggs "far exceeded" the number presented in the paper - possibly about 2,000.

At any rate, the Hwang implosion is huge for Newcastle, which appears to have moved as far as Hwang, and with every bit as much care - publishing their accomplishment by press release rather than peer review.

The next step in damage control for nuclear transfer-based stem cell research has nothing to do with Hwang. It's the good guys in the field. My cloning ethics collaborator and pal Ian Wilmut is doing great things, but he and Robert Lanza in particular have gone on somewhat poorly timed media campaigns, to discuss in Wilmut's case how important it is to hurry up and get into clinical trials, and in Lanza's case to suggest that Hwang will slow things down enough to kill thousands.

If part of the problem here is overheated rhetoric about stem cell research, the answer is not only slightly less overheated rhetoric about stem cell research. Let's turn our attention to the question of funding all of stem cell research and use that opportunity to fiat some rock solid rules that any researcher who wants to work or sell products in the US will have to follow.

And from the "awakened from deep slumber" department, the President of Seoul National opened his New Year's address to the campus by promising that he will take "serious disciplinary action against the university’s disgraced cloning expert Prof. Hwang Woo-suk over findings by an SNU panel that the veterinary professor fabricated groundbreaking research." Given recent events one might ask whether or not he means it - after all, shortly after Hwang resigned from the world stem cell bank - as popular opinion swelled in his favor - he was essentially offered the chance to pull his resignation. But in this case, Hwang already quit. How do you discipline someone who has already quit? It is time for severe disciplinary action at SNU, but the President is optimistic if he thinks he will be the one doling it out.

Becker and Posner Agitate for Organ Sale

The World Waits Breathless as Nebraska Considers Banning Cloning

Akin to South Dakota, Nebraska is despite its excellent university in Lincoln and medical school hardly a place likely to attract scientists who want to work on nuclear transfer. Before you flame us, yes we get that they do research. But the bit of stem cell research underway there is on "Bush approved cells" and is not funded by the NIH. And the other pieces that would have to be in place to do major embryonic research are just not likely to come to Nebraska, ever. So why is a very, very red state debating a ban on stem cell research?

Wait ... did anyone check to see whether Dr. Hwang has left the country? Perhaps the legislators in Nebraska know something about where the South Korean stem cell team is going. Anyway, where the matter of rogue cloning is concerned you can never be too careful.

The Scientist Becomes Something Different

Our own Glenn McGee will be writing a bioethics column in every issue beginning in the first issue with a column called "Design Gets More Intelligent Every Day" about synthetic biology and what it proves about intelligent design.

Infected with Intelligent Design

the case of H5N1 is a perfect example for why students, the public, and our politicians need to be taught clearly - without obfuscation by creationists - that evolution is a scientific fact. Evolution through natural selection is not simply a slow process creating over eons the wonderful biodiversity seen on the planet and the extinctions found in the fossil record. Evolutionary processes also constantly propel some microorganisms to become more virulent and dangerous.

In the long run, denying students the facts about evolution will put the public health at risk because it is the foundation of biomedical research. The search for cures, vaccines and prevention methods is solidly built upon the principles of evolution and their corollaries in the fields of genetics and microbiology. Denying evolution happens not only stifles the scientific thinking of students but also sets them back as would-be researchers in the biological sciences and public health.

Dr. Hwang Enters the Twilight Zone

Prof. Hwang Woo-suk plagiarized his subordinate’s work on the first-ever cloned human embryonic stem cells that was featured in the U.S. journal Science in early 2004, some scientists argued Friday.

The scientists contend a stem cell photo featured in the 2004 paper partially overlaps that of an article in another journal Stem Cells that was authored in 2003 by Kim Son-jong, a member of Hwang’s team.

This means the 2004 paper may also have been fabricated and Hwang’s team has no original technologies in therapeutic cloning, a process that opens the possibility of curing currently incurable diseases.

In fact, some scientists both at home and abroad have already raised questions about the 2004 paper, contending the DNA fingerprint traces documented in the article were fabricated.

And as we discussed earlier the role of the Korean government in what amounts to a coverup on behalf of Hwang began early and reached a fever pitch just last week, with an agency pushing Seoul National University to suppress information about the ongoing investigation.

I am interviewed at length for a wire service piece on the importance of the collusion in this case, though I am misquoted bigtime: "The Korean investigators were able to work in this complicated field where there's no federal money only because they could persuade venture capitalists that their investments were safe with them." Uh, no. The point I actually made was that American researchers who have no access to federal dollars and are thus funded by VC are at new risk because the VC people will see the Korean matter as evidence that this is an even riskier investment than was otherwise obvious. But otherwise it is a decent piece about the real issues here - not simply telling the truth but setting up a system in which mistakes can be more easily averted.

UMDNJ Under Fire