blog.bioethics.net

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.

NYT: I Made Him What He Is, but Who Is He?
As part of the Times' ongoing "Modern Love" feature, Thomas Anthony Donahue writes about being contacted by a child for whom he served as a sperm donor:

"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."