blog.bioethics.net

Choosing to go gray

The most recent issue of The Economist features an interesting article about Japan's struggles in adapting to a population that is both aging and shrinking (average lifespan is now 82 years, fertility rate is 1.32). Firms are scraping to find young workers, farm towns are disappearing, and policy analysts are fretting about the government's long-term ability to support the increasingly top-heavy pension system. Japan has looked in the mirror and all the gray hair is starting to freak it out a little bit.

The Japanese aren't alone in facing the prospect of a graying population. Countries all across the developed world currently have below-replacement-level fertility rates and life expectancies that approach, and even exceed, 80 years. For the moment, the populations in many of these countries are still growing thanks to immigration and those stretching lifespans. But the situation in Japan may be a preview of what's to come.

It's interesting that the population drama in these countries doesn't look like what we'd been promised by sci-fi or Malthus. It's not an action movie plot, propelled by a virus or ecological disaster. Rather, it's one of those limited-release pictures where people sit around the whole time talking. We're actually making the conscious choice to have fewer children -- whether it's to focus on a career, stay solvent, or just because having kids kind of sounds like a drag. That's the plot twist we didn't see coming -- that an affluent society usually equals fewer children.

Maybe technology and prosperity will eventually send the narrative in another direction. Egg freezing and other reproductive technology could make the career-and-kids combo more attractive, as could family-friendly policies (for mothers and fathers) at successful information-age corporations. (Interesting nugget from that Economist article: the Japanese language doesn't have a phrase for "work-life balance.") Or maybe not. France is supposed to be some kind of parents paradise (and its fertility rate is increasing), but even among the French there's discontent.

So maybe it's time to for a different kind of blockbuster. Here's the pitch: Bruce Willis finds a successful young married couple, takes them out to dinner... and tries to convince them what a joy is to be a parent. Can he win them over before dessert?

-Greg Dahlmann

Start clearing space for the Oscar now

It came to our attention this week that not only is there a film in development called Repo! The Genetic Opera (apparently based on the stage show of the same name), but that Paris Hilton will play a starring role. Here's how Variety describes Ms. Hilton's part and the storyline:

Hilton will sing in a futuristic thriller framed around musical numbers that range from opera to rock. The setting is 2056, when a plague nearly destroys the human race and survival is dependent upon being able to finance a pricey organ transplant.

Hilton plays a daughter of the organ transplant magnate ([Paul] Sorvino) who is the villain of the piece.

"This movie has become my life," said [Darren Lynn] Bousman. "I have auditioned at least 30 actresses for this role -- Paris came in and owned it. She is this role."

If the idea of Paris Hilton singing about organ transplants doesn't get you lining up at the multiplex, you should know that Repo! the film will be directed by the guy behind a few of the Saw horror films, of which a critic for USA Today commented, "Whether we're talking this go-round, the original or the second sequel the finale seems to promise, I'd rather try standing drunk on a see-saw (though maybe not over dirty syringes) than see Saw."

-Greg Dahlmann

Stem cells fatigue?

The graph above depicts the trend in US Google searches for the phrase "stem cells" over the last 3.5 years. An annotated graph and a little discussion follow the jump.

(read the rest)

Weekend reading

WP: Future of Stem Cell Tests May Hang on Defining Embryo Harm
Rick Weiss reports that NIH has so far refused to fund research on new stem cell lines created by means that are said not to harm embryos (e.g., ACT's blastomere method):

With the active encouragement of the Bush administration, U.S. scientists in the past year have developed several methods for creating embryonic stem cells without having to destroy human embryos.

But some who now wish to test their alternatively derived cells have found themselves stymied by an unexpected barrier: President Bush's stem cell policy.

The 2001 policy says that federal funds may not be used to study embryonic stem cells created after Aug. 9 of that year. It is based on the assumption that the only way to make the cells is by destroying human embryos -- a truism in 2001 but not any longer.

"Do you know many lesbian couples?" he asked, and then: "What made you donate?"

"People wanted children," I said. "I was available at the time." I took a sip, then elaborated, since he seemed to want more. "An ex-girlfriend called and said a nurse friend of hers was looking for a donor for her clinic. I thought about it and even went to a counselor. She told me to go for it and to think of it as sharing light."

The waitress approached for our order. I asked for a vegetable omelet with dark rye. He ordered pancakes with strawberries and cream. Typical kid food, I thought.

After the waitress left, he asked, "Are there any medical issues in your family?"

"None that stick out. Except for a little accident proneness on my part."

I told him about my more glamorous accidents from when I was closer to his age, bumps and broken bones from parachuting and hang gliding. What I didn't bring up was an accident I'd had just before I started donating sperm; I'd been painting a house with a friend when a platform collapsed, crushing my right leg. It took a few years to learn to walk again, and during this time I donated sperm because I needed extra income.

NYT: The Real Transformers
Robin Marantz Henig looks at the challenges faced, and questions raised, in the development of sociable robots:

I had been seduced by Leo's big brown eyes, just like almost everyone else who encounters the robot, right down to the students who work on its innards. "There we all are, soldering Leonardo's motors, aware of how it looks from behind, aware that its brain is just a bunch of wires," Guy Hoffman, a graduate student, told me. Yet as soon as they get in front of it, he said, the students see its eyes move, see its head turn, see the programmed chest motion that looks so much like breathing, and they start talking about Leo as a living thing.

People do the same thing with a robotic desk lamp that Hoffman has designed to move in relation to a user's motions, casting light wherever it senses the user might need it. It's just a lamp with a bulky motor-driven neck; it looks nothing like a living creature. But, he said, "as soon as it moves on its own and faces you, you say: 'Look, it's trying to help me.' 'Why is it doing that?' 'What does it want from me?' "

When something is self-propelled and seems to engage in goal-directed behavior, we are compelled to interpret those actions in social terms, according to Breazeal. That social tendency won't turn off when we interact with robots. But instead of fighting it, she said, "we should embrace it so we can design robots in a way that makes sense, so we can integrate robots into our lives."

New podcast: male pregnancy

Last week we posted about a piece in The Stranger about male pregnancy (this was the one in which Glenn said he'd thought about becoming pregnant). Jen Graves, the author of that piece, was nice enough to take some time this week to talk with us about asking her partner, Patrick, to carry a bay and the reaction she's gotten from other people. The podcast runs about 20 minutes.

Following up

Here are a few updates and extensions to recent posts on blog.bioethics.net:

Judge orders return of placenta to new mother
Art Caplan's post referring to a story in which a mother had sued to recover her placenta so she could ingest it prompted an interesting comment from Annemarie Jutel:

The placenta is routinely returned to patients in New Zealand, as both the tangata whenua (Maori) any many Pacific Island peoples have ceremonial routines around the management of the placenta. The placenta is usually buried, with a nice plant on top of it (although sometimes it sits in the freezer for weeks/months, next to the ice-cream, awaiting the arrival of grand-parents from places afar to bury the placenta "en famille"). There's no yuck factor at all. It's just what we do here. The word "whenua," in NZ Maori, means both "land" and "placenta."

The language of "wrongful birth"
Our Tuesday post about the Estrada case in Florida was picked up by BuzzFeed, a site that tracks, well... buzz. It seems the case wasn't so buzzworthy, though. Out of ten topics tracked by BuzzFeed that day, wrongful birth was second-to-last in clicks -- it just beat out pregnancy nutrition. The top three clicked buzz items that day? Topless Protests, Signs of the Apocalypse and Baseball Player Boyfriends, in that order.

You're wonderful. Now change.
Extending our post last week about how the media influence our standards of perfection... Newsweek cites a study in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in reporting that plastic surgery reality TV shows are prompting people to go under the knife. That prompts the magazine's Mary Carmichael to ask:

Are these shows just harmless entertainment -- the sort of thing that people who are open to cosmetic procedures would seek out anyway? Or are they bad medicine?

Barry Bonds and enhancement's strike zone
Bonds is now just two homeruns away from tying Hank Aaron for the all-time career record. Baseball commissioner Bud Selig announced this week that he will in fact be present when Bonds breaks the record. Also this week, the leader of the Tour de France was booted from the race on suspicion of doping. This year's race has lost two teams, the winners of four stages and the overall leader to charges of illegal performance enhancement. NYT reported that there's been talk of canceling the race, but tour organizers say they'll continue to pedal ahead.

-Greg Dahlmann

Steven Pinker on "dangerous" ideas

The Harvard psychologist lays his out his case for asking what he describes as "dangerous" ideas in a piece that originated with Edge and came to our attention through the Chicago Sun-Times. Some of Pinker's "dangerous" questions that might be of interest here:

-Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?

-Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?

-Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?

-Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?

-Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?

So, according to Pinker, what makes an idea "dangerous?"

One factor is an imaginable train of events in which acceptance of the idea could lead to an outcome recognized as harmful. In religious societies, the fear is that if people ever stopped believing in the literal truth of the Bible they would also stop believing in the authority of its moral commandments. That is, if today people dismiss the part about God creating the Earth in six days, tomorrow they'll dismiss the part about "Thou shalt not kill." In progressive circles, the fear is that if people ever were to acknowledge any differences between races, sexes or individuals, they would feel justified in discrimination or oppression. Other dangerous ideas set off fears that people will neglect or abuse their children, become indifferent to the environment, devalue human life, accept violence and prematurely resign themselves to social problems that could be solved with sufficient commitment and optimism.

All these outcomes, needless to say, would be deplorable. But none of them actually follows from the supposedly dangerous idea. Even if it turns out, for instance, that groups of people are different in their averages, the overlap is certainly so great that it would be irrational and unfair to discriminate against individuals on that basis. Likewise, even if it turns out that parents don't have the power to shape their children's personalities, it would be wrong on grounds of simple human decency to abuse or neglect one's children. And if currently popular ideas about how to improve the environment are shown to be ineffective, it only highlights the need to know what would be effective.

Pinker goes on to argue that we're better off as a society when we face these questions head-on.

Does he have a point? Or are there some ideas or questions that should be off-limits?

-Greg Dahlmann

The language of "wrongful birth"

A jury awarded $23.5 million today to a Florida couple in what's been touted as a "wrongful birth" case. Amara and Daniel Estrada filed suit after a geneticist at the University of South Florida failed to diagnose Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome in their first son and assured the couple there was no risk to future children. The Estradas went ahead and had another son, who also turned out to have Smith-Lemli-Opitz (it's a disorder in which the body has trouble synthesizing cholesterol). The couple argued they wouldn't have gone ahead with the second pregnancy if the first son had been correctly diagnosed and the risk to the second child identified.

As the New York Times Magazine reported last year, the number of cases involving "wrongful birth" are increasing and about half the states recognize it as an area of malpractice. These cases prompt a whole string of ethical questions about abortion, disability, the use of genetic testing and so on. But here's a non-rhetorical question that only focuses on language: Is "wrongful birth" the best term to use in these situations? In this most recent Florida case, wouldn't "missed diagnosis" have been a more accurate term? According to the court, that's exactly what happened -- a doctor failed to identify a genetic disorder. He missed it. Then again, the Estradas' decision to not end the second pregnancy was based on the advice of their geneticist. It was one event in a chain that led to birth, so maybe the phrase "wrongful birth" does have a role here.

The language we use can have a powerful effect on how our society works through issues. (If you believe people such as George Lakoff, it's the reason one political party has dominated the other over the last decade.) So it would seem like everyone would benefit if we can find the most accurate words to talk about these situations. Of course, accuracy is sometimes in the ear of the beholder.

Back in the legal world, this Florida case could become even more complicated. Because the University of South Florida is a public institution, state law caps the damages it can pay out at $200 thousand. The Estradas will now have to petition the state legislature to pass a bill authorizing the payment of the full $23.5 million. But as the Tampa Tribune reported, the potential role of abortion in this case could affect the proceedings. As the state senator who heads up the committee that will oversee the payout told the Trib, "In the 15 years I've been in the Legislature, I haven't seen that kind of issue. This has a potential moral question that could become a potential political issue. I don't know what the Legislature will do with that."

-Greg Dahlmann

Clinic accused of misappropriating eggs

Trouble appears to be brewing again in the same neighborhood where more than a decade ago an embryo theft scandal was discovered.

-Art Caplan

What are those beady little eyes watching?

Via the Washington Post and the BBC, apparently, comes a story that's just too good to check. The Post cites a BBC translation of an article in the Iranian newspaper Resalat:

"A few weeks ago, 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems of foreign intelligence services were captured by [Iranian] intelligence forces along the country's borders. These trained squirrels, each of which weighed just over 700 grams, were released on the borders of the country for intelligence and espionage purposes. According to the announcement made by Iranian intelligence officials, alert police officials caught these squirrels before they could carry out any task."

OK, the chances of this story being factual are, um, not good. But the idea of surveillance rodents isn't as far out there as you might think. There was a 2002 paper published in Nature that described rats that could be remote controlled from up to 500 feet away. Sanjiv K. Talwar, the lead author of that paper, told National Geographic that the rats could be used for land mine detection, collapsed building searches and other situations deemed too dangerous for humans.

Still, there's no way this story of spy squirrels could be true... right? I mean, everyone knows the cutting edge of animal weapons systems is the ill-tempered badger.

-Greg Dahlmann

photo used for illustration above: USFWS

The period of choice

Very soon in pharmacies across the country, the contraceptive Lybrel will become available to those women with a prescription. Instead of menstruating once a month, as with traditional oral contraceptives, or once every three months, as with the more recent Seasonale and Seasonique, women will be able to eliminate menstruation altogether.

Wyeth hails Lybrel as the great liberalizer (hence the name). Advertising from the manufacturer stresses the drug's practical benefits -- less time off from work, higher productivity, and healthier relationships.

Unfortunately, this marketing strategy has created a backlash in a community of women still reeling from the Supreme Court's most recent holding on abortion. Instead of framing the decision to use Lybrel as one of choice, the marketing campaign has been accused of being paternalistic ("use it because it will be better for your husband or your boss"). Whether or not the marketing team was composed of more men than women is unknown, but the consensus is that the advertisements indeed emphasize how wonderful Lybrel is for those surrounding the woman, as opposed to the woman herself.

Ever since the advent of the pill feminists have been concerned with the implications of treating menstruation as a disease as opposed to a natural occurrence. By characterizing the process as an ailment in need of treatment, such drugs only further enforce the view that a woman's body needs to be "controlled." At the same time, the multi-million dollar industry clearly indicates many women see the personal benefits of regulating menstruation, particularly those women who suffer from severe premenstrual syndrome.

So what's savvy Big Pharma to do? Focus on the benefits Lybrel will have for the woman on a personal level. Not only will this strategy serve the useful function of informing potential patients, but it will also emphasize what many women feel is threatened today - choice.

-Roopali Malhotra

Judge orders return of placenta to new mother

Here is a wonderful case of the vindication of patient rights coming right up against a whole lotta yuck factor!

-Art Caplan

Transgenic fish bust in New Zealand

Via Art Caplan comes word that authorities in New Zealand recently seized more than 300 of those fish that have been modified to produce a fluorescent red protein (their "brand name" is GloFish). As Art points out, it's still not clear which regulatory agency in the USA has authority to regulate genetically engineered animals. Not so for New Zealand.

photo: glofish.com

He's having a baby

Jen Graves recently wrote in Seattle's The Stranger about her desire to have a baby with her partner, Patrick -- and she wants Patrick to carry the baby:

Sure, Patrick would be a great father, I've always thought. But he'd be an even better mother. Meanwhile, I am career-driven, impatient, and overbooked. I would work. He would stay home at least part-time. He would be the 51-percent parent, the one on speed dial for the doctor and the school, the one who passes along the German language he grew up speaking, the one who knows about science, seafaring knots, button sewing, making a sauce from roux, and inventing ways to build handmade gifts like wooden kaleidoscopes and coat racks (these are real specialties of his).

We also learn in this piece that our own Glenn McGee has considered becoming pregnant. Here's what he told Graves:

"Having reviewed all the science, what we know is this," says McGee, now director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute in Albany, New York. We talked a couple of weeks ago on the phone. "These little creatures are very much self-determining, much more than we knew even 10 years ago. So could they be born? Yeah, probably."

How would a man get the hormones he needs?

"The embryo sends signals that change the hormone levels in the body; males are capable of producing almost enough of the required hormones necessary to carry a baby on their own. If they didn't, they'd take some pills -- so not an issue."

Would taking the baby out cause hemorrhaging?

"In the time since this issue was hypothesized in the '70s and '80s, based on research in the '50s, lots of things have changed. One is there've been many, many, many, many more successful births in women where the baby was in the gut -- upwards of 200 recorded in the medical literature. That means that for a man, it's the same sort of thing."

The science isn't the problem.

"I would have been first in line, I really would have," McGee tells me. "I actually thought it would be kind of cool to be pregnant -- I was jealous, in a way."

We may have to follow up on this.

-Greg Dahlmann

cover photo from The Stranger

You're wonderful. Now change.

Most of us are just beginning to become acquainted with the age of enhancement, but there's one group that's already very familiar with it: celebrities. Famous people have been tweaking their appearances -- both physical and virtual -- since, well, probably forever. And while those of us who are merely hoi polloi know that the stars "get work done," it's easy to forget how much of the mediated world of celebrity isn't actually real.

The blog Jezebel recently exposed how wide this gap is between reality and representation. They posted a bounty for before-and-after pictures from the cover of a women's magazine. This week they scored when someone floated them a recent Redbook cover featuring singer Faith Hill. (The clips above are from those pictures.) Go check it out. If you've never seen something like this before, you'll be amazed.

So what's this have to do with bioethics? When we talk about enhancement we're stating that we can somehow be better than our current condition. But what does it mean to be "better?" What's the target? For better or worse, our standards of beauty are in large part formed by what we see in the media. But as the photos above demonstrate, much of what we see in the media doesn't actually exist. You want to look like Faith Hill? Well, Faith Hill doesn't look like Faith Hill. How does Katie Couric stay so skinny? She doesn't. And Heidi Klum may be a (lovely) genetic freak, but she's not immune from gravity.

In the future maybe we all will be able to look as good as the virtual Faith Hill. But it seems like we're setting ourselves up to be disappointed.

If you're interested in seeing more of the before-and-after world, The Art of DeTouch pulls back the curtain.

-Greg Dahlmann

Magazine cover photos from Jezebel

The Stem Cell Blog

The constellation of bioethics blogs continues to grow. Stanford's Program on Stem Cells in Society recently launched The Stem Cell Blog. Obviously, there's no shortage of topics to discuss regarding stem cell research. We're looking forward to reading Christopher Thomas Scott and company's take on the subject.

When doctors and parents disagree

The Treuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics at Seattle Children's has posted video of its recent conference "Navigating Conflicts When Parents and Providers Disagree About Medical Care." There are a bunch of interesting topics, including "Parental Requests for 'Futile' Treatment," and "Should Developmentally Delayed Children be Listed for Solid Organ Transplants?"

AJOB in The New Yorker

Margaret Talbot's piece in The New Yorker about the pursuit of effective lie detection contains a bunch of interesting facts and stories -- the creator of Wonder Woman and her lasso of truth was also one of the creators of the polygraph, the scientist who cracks a joke about criminals getting metal implants so they can't be scanned in an MRI machine. It also includes a mention of AJOB and a number of regular contributors to the journal:

Judy Illes and Eric Racine, bioethicists at Stanford, write that fMRI, by laying bare the brain's secrets, may "fundamentally alter the dynamics between personal identity, responsibility, and free will." A recent article in The American Journal of Bioethics asserts that brain-scan lie detection may "force a re-examination of the very idea of privacy, which up until now could not reliably penetrate the individual's cranium."

Legal scholars, for their part, have started debating the constitutionality of using brain-imaging evidence in court. At a recent meeting of a National Academy of Sciences committee on lie detection, in Washington, D.C., Hank Greely, a Stanford law professor, said, "When we make speculative leaps like these . . . it increases, sometimes in detrimental ways, the belief that the technology works." In the rush of companies like No Lie to market brain scanning, and in the rush of scholars to judge the propriety of using the technology, relatively few people have asked whether fMRIs can actually do what they either hope or fear they can do.

The AJOB article cited by Talbot is from March/April 2005.

Thanks to Tod Chambers for spotting the article and passing it along.

-Greg Dahlmann

Worth reading from the weekend

One piece about the genetic present, the other on the genetic future.

First, in the NYT Magazine Peggy Orenstein explores the questions and concerns prompted by egg donation:

It was weird to look at these pictures with Becky. I inevitably objectified the young women in them, evaluating their component parts; it made me feel strangely like a guy. Becky clicked on a photo of a 22-year-old brunette with a toothy grin. Each profile listed the donor's age (many agencies consider donors to be over the hill by 30), hair color (there seemed to be a preponderance of blondes), eye color, weight, ethnicity, marital status, education level, high school or college G.P.A.'s, college major, evidence of "proved" fertility (having children of their own or previous successful cycles). Some agencies include blood type for recipients who don't plan to tell their child about his conception. Others include bust size and favorite movies, foods and TV shows. One newly pregnant woman told me she picked her donor because the woman liked "The Princess Bride." "Some donors chose 'Pulp Fiction,' and their favorite color was black," she said. "That's just not me. If I have the choice between someone who likes 'The Princess Bride' or someone who likes 'Pulp Fiction,' everything else being equal, I'm going for 'Princess Bride.' "

And in the second piece, Freeman Dyson argues for do-it-yourself, decentralized genetic technology in the New York Review of Books:

I see a close analogy between John von Neumann's blinkered vision of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto. The public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for poisonous pesticides into food crops, just as we distrusted von Neumann because he liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen bombs secretly at midnight. It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations.

-Greg Dahlmann

Should we all have a spotless mind?

While we often rue our difficulty remembering things, the ability to let memories fade is a feature of our brains, not a bug. Memories of emotionally traumatic events can be debilitating. So it's of great interest to researchers how our brains actually go about forgetting the nasty details of difficult memories.

Two recent papers suggest that effective therapeutic memory suppression may very well be possible. In the first paper, researchers at McGill demonstrated that giving the beta blocker propranolol to people after they recall a years-old traumatic memory can help those people moderate their response to that memory. (There was already evidence that propranolol can work this way, but it was for memories of events that had occurred within hours, not years.) And in the other paper, researchers at Colorado used an fMRI scanner to identify regions of the brain that seem to be actively involved in suppressing memories (some of the scans are above). Their research suggests that, with practice, people can actually learn how to forget traumatic events. The suppression process may even be open to pharmaceutical manipulation.

There's still a lot of research on this topic ahead, but this is definitely good news. Millions of people suffer from traumatic memories and better therapies could literally be a life saver.

That all acknowledged, let's look at this research a little differently (because isn't that what we do here?). If our ability to suppress memories advances enough, it could become awfully tempting to start treating memories that are not exactly what we'd consider traumatic. They might just be uncomfortable. If convenient forgetfulness came in a pill, would that be a good thing? (Even if it's not "technically brain damage.") Or to put the question a little bit differently, are there some things we shouldn't be allowed to forget?

-Greg Dahlmann

fMRI image courtesy of Science

Barry Bonds and enhancement's strike zone

The second half of the major league baseball season starts tonight and so continues Barry Bonds' pursuit of the career home run record (he needs four more to tie Hank Aaron). Normally such a chase would prompt enthusiastic attention, but in this case fans and media members are somewhat ambivalent. Even baseball's commissioner seems conflicted. The reason, of course, is the widespread belief that Bonds has used illegal steroids. And if he has, does that mean one of baseball's most hallowed records will soon mean less? It's a question worth thinking about for us all -- sports fan or not -- as we enter the age of widespread enhancement.

(read the rest)

The first podcast from bioethics.net

It was our to pleasure to be joined by Hank Greely and Francoise Baylis for bioethics.net's first podcast. We got connected with Hank and Francoise to talk about chimeras and the ethical questions prompted by animals that are, in some part, made up of human cells. The jumping off point for the conversation was the May 2007 AJOB target article about the human neuron mouse (thus our playful use of Pinky and the Brain above). The discussion runs just about 30 minutes. It's available as a download, or you can listen right through your browser.

The evolution of blog.bioethics.net

So, we've done a bit of remodeling around here. We put some fresh paint on the walls and reorganized some of the closets. But the new look is just the beginning. Among the new features: a smoother commenting process, older posts organized by topic, and we're podcasting. It's all part of our effort to open up the journal and discussion of important bioethical issues to the curious public.

And there's even more to come in the next few weeks, including the addition of a compelling group of new bloggers. We're excited about what's next and we hope you are, too.

We very much welcome your thoughts. If you have questions, concerns or suggestions, please send them along:

contact |at| blog |dot| bioethics |dot| net