blog.bioethics.net

Weekend reading: physician-assisted suicide, organ donation, paleovirology

NYT Mag: Death in the Family
Daniel Bergner writes about the effort of former Washington governor Booth Gardner, who has Parkinson's, to get a physician-assisted suicide referendum passed there in 2008:

“Why do this?” he asked, turning from the other tables toward me. “I want to be involved in public life. I was looking for an issue, and this one fell in my lap. One advantage I have in this thing is that people like me. The other” — his leprechaun eyes lost their glint; his fleshy cheeks seemed to harden, his lips to thin, his face to reshape itself almost into a square — “is that my logic is impeccable. My life, my death, my control.”

A good portion of the piece focus on objections to physician-assisted suicide, including thoughts from Susan Wolf about the role of gender and Patricia King about ethnic disparities.

Boston Globe: Match for Life
Michele Morgan Bolton profiles MatchingDonors.com, the non-profit online service that aims to connect people who need organs with donors:

The practice of living donors making arrangements directly with patients via the Internet has drawn critics.

Douglas Hanto, chief of transplantation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, wrote in March in the New England Journal of Medicine that soliciting organs the way MatchingDonors.com does threatens the fairness of how organs are allocated. He said he would like to see available donations directed to the top of existing United Network waiting lists, after the donor's family, friends, and preexisting relationships.

But over time, Dooley and Lowney said, more professionals are backing them.

"We have great ethicists on our side who say we bring people into the pool who aren't currently in the pool," Dooley said. The American Society of Transplant Surgeons, which initially opposed the public solicitation that MatchingDonors.com espouses, recently declared that it may make more organs available.

Interesting item from the article: MatchingDonor's co-founder Jeremiah Lowney says he doesn't think he'd ever be able to donate one of his organs to a stranger.

The New Yorker: Darwin's Surprise
Michael Specter looks at the efforts of "paleovirologists" to resurrect extinct retroviruses stored in our DNA:

Then, last year, Thierry Heidmann brought one back to life. Combining the tools of genomics, virology, and evolutionary biology, he and his colleagues took a virus that had been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years, figured out how the broken parts were originally aligned, and then pieced them together. After resurrecting the virus, the team placed it in human cells and found that their creation did indeed insert itself into the DNA of those cells. They also mixed the virus with cells taken from hamsters and cats. It quickly infected them all, offering the first evidence that the broken parts could once again be made infectious. The experiment could provide vital clues about how viruses like H.I.V. work. Inevitably, though, it also conjures images of Frankenstein’s monster and Jurassic Park.