blog.bioethics.net

Who Will Care for All The Little "Snuppies" If Hwang Woo-suk Goes To Jail?

After a three-year trial and international disgrace, South Korean prosecutors have announced that their desired punishment for the Korean stem cell researchers fraud and general discrediting, not just of South Korean stem cell research, but for a time of stem cell research more broadly, would be a four-year prison term, says Reuters.

Of course, no decision has been made yet as to whether Hwang will go to the slammer and his latest business venture of cloning Afghan hounds en masse will go under as a result of his time in the big house.

This news, of course, leaves one asking: what is the appropriate punishment for an unethical researcher who has been firmly discredited in the scientific community, but whom also broke criminal laws in his home country? Do recidivism, psychology, or the reputation of the researcher come into play or is it simply a criminal matter?

For my money, I believe Hwang Woo-suk should be punished to the fullest extent of the South Korean law because of the nature and obvious lack of concern for his crime. Other researchers who violate federal codes or research protections in other nations or the US may not have to be held to such a standard because they clearly "just goofed" or regret their mistake. However, there are some researchers that believe they are "above the law", that their research comes first, and that they answer to no one.

For those researchers, they must answer to someone--and that someone is likely to be a judge or a jury, and unfortunately, the walls of a jail cell for some period of time.

My prediction is Hwang will do some jail time, and the Snuppies will miss him, but in the end, he will go right back to doing stem cell research in South Korea, unless part of his sentencing prevents him from doing otherwise.

Summer Johnson, PhD

Perhaps Now You'd Prefer That Your Bioethics "Sound Bites" Come From Academics? Or Would You Prefer Octomom.

In truly unbelievable video from CNN.com today, "Octomom" Nadya Suleman weepily admits to only thinking of "the now" and "saving those 8 embryos when the made the decision to have her octuplets and confesses to realizing that she has "screwed up" her other two children.

A shocking revelation indeed! Who would have predicted such a thing!

In a completely self-serving and self-congratulatory preview to her upcoming television show, Suleman reveals how hard life raising octuplets really is (even with 2 4-seated strollers and what appears to be hired help by her side).

Ultimately, viewership of this video is certain to send tens of thousands of dollars to the Nadya Suleman Family website from the pro-life, conservative crowd who will feel her pain and support her choice to have saved those embryos even at the expense of her other children.

The video may tug at some heartstrings and open some wallets for the easily persuaded but ultimately, didn't we all know that this was coming?

Summer Johnson, PhD

Caplan: Health Care Debate Goes Beyond Awry When Nazi Imagery Is Invoked

If anyone has been paying attention to the news lately, they've seen vicious town hall meetings with Senators and Representatives around the country, and even the President, met by furious citizens attacking proposed plans for universal healthcare. Many voice their most deeply held fears of "big government", a loss of control over their health care "choices" (to the extent they have them now), or the incredible cost involved in a single payer system.

But for all the yelling and screaming that many of us have seen on television, it's another thing entirely to invoke analogies to atrocities as serious as the Holocaust. It's one thing to voice one's opinions loudly--rightly or wrongly--but another, as Arthur Caplan points out in his most recent MSNBC commentary to make a completely unrelated comparison that "distort(s) history, diminish(es) true evil of the Holocaust."

To read the entirety of Caplan's column, you can read it here below or click here on the link to read it at MSNBC.com.

Summer Johnson, PhD

Health care debate turns vile with Nazi analogy
Right-wing loudmouths distort history, diminish true evil of the Holocaust

Rush Limbaugh and those invoking the Nazi analogy to attack President Barack Obama's effort to reform health care in America are not "insane" as David Brooks pronounced on last Sunday's "Meet the Press." Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and the rest of the loud-mouthed right wing are, when they even hint at an analogy to the Nazis in talking about Obama's health reform effort, engaged in something far worse than insanity. They are engaged in the vile evil of Holocaust denial.

For some time now, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has held the title of the world's most dangerous anti-Semite due to his denial that the Holocaust occurred. Limbaugh and his ilk who have been throwing around references to Adolf Hitler, National socialism and Nazi medicine without hesitation have surpassed the danger posed by the Iranian president. They are offering a false view of why the Holocaust happened. Their flagrant, deliberate and invidious distortion of what happened to medicine in Nazi Germany must not be allowed to stand. Not just because health reform is too important an issue but also because the truth is too important to let ignoramuses destroy it.

At the end of April, 1945, my father found himself at the gates of a very awful place. Having been one of the first residents of Massachusetts drafted into the army, he had spent the past three years fighting his way through North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France and into Germany. Over the years I have heard a variety of stories about his heroic service in those campaigns. But he has had very little to say about what he saw or felt when, as a Jewish American soldier, he found himself staring at the few emaciated survivors of the Dachau concentration camp.

The only single comment he has ever offered about that experience was uncharacteristically curt, "We took no more prisoners for about two weeks." Those who know my father, who at 88 just spent an emotional weekend at the World War II Memorial, know that sentence is completely out of character for the man who spent his entire life as an admired and beloved healer -- a pharmacist in Framingham, Mass.

My father's war experience drew me to try and understand what had happened at Dachau. I have spent nearly 30 years trying to understand how the most scientifically and medically advanced nation of its day could have conducted the mass murder of so many Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians and pacifists.

Contrary to what Limbaugh and other Holocaust deniers would have you believe, German medicine and science were not brought into the Nazi party once Hitler took power. They fueled the fire for what became Nazism with bigotry proffered as science.

What distinguished the doctors and scientists of Germany pre-Hitler was that so many of them were firm believers in racial hygiene -- the view that the Aryan race's very existence was threatened by inferior peoples such as Jews, blacks and Slavs. They felt the only way to protect their "race," a concept that itself made little biological sense, was to prohibit reproduction with inferior people and, ultimately, to destroy them. It was racism masquerading as science that formed the basis for Nazi science and medicine right down to the gas chambers and ovens that my dad found himself staring at in 1945.

Racism was at the core of Nazi medicine. Racism and a bizarre form of genetics that saw all manner of human frailty and weakness from prostitution to alcohol abuse to petty theft as highly heritable. When Hitler set out to kill the handicapped and the mentally ill he did it to protect the genetic future of Germany. When the "useless eaters" were targeted for euthanasia it was because of the threat they posed to the genetic health of future generations. When Nazi doctors mandated abortion it was to eliminate "mongrel" babies. When Nazi doctors analyzed how many of your ancestors had to be Jewish for you to be a Jew or when they killed all manner of Slavs, it was to remove these dangers from undermining the public health of the Reich.

Limbaugh, Beck, Palin and other Holocaust deniers ignore the core racist evil of Nazism. They reach for preposterous analogies between counseling people about living wills and the forced, involuntary mass murder carried out in the name of racism in concentration camps.

When the right wing, in their distaste for the President's push to reform a heath care system that even the American Medical Association and the pharmaceutical industry recognize has to be fixed, suggest that the disabled will be targeted, or that the elderly will be killed or find themselves without health care due to rationing by government bureaucrats as happened in Nazi Germany, they marginalize the gross evil that was the racial bigotry that fueled Nazi programs to euthanize, sterilize, experiment upon and torture people in places that were in no way connected to hospitals, clinics or nursing homes.

There is plenty to debate about health reform. But there is nothing to debate about the contemptible introduction of references, direct or oblique, to Nazi Germany. To do so is to engage in Holocaust denial. To do that is, as those Americans of the greatest generation who died or were injured fighting the Nazi menace well understood, inexcusable.

Flu Vaccines: Who, Where, and How Much?

In the Globe and Mail, Francoise Baylis asks the tough questions about how much swine flu vaccine to produce and who should receive it.

In the US, our government has just decided that pregnant women should be among those to be included in the H1N1 flu vaccine trials (presumably because they will be among those who would receive it), but that group of persons is just one among many who are vulnerable and who will be eager to be first in line to secure protection from H1N1.

According to Baylis, "In Canada, the federal government has said unequivocally that "the current plan is to produce sufficient quantities of vaccine for Canadians who need or want to receive it."" This is easier said than done.

Baylis even goes so far as to argue that this prioritization of Canadians over those in other countries is "wrong-headed" and that because Canada has the capacity to produce vaccine beyond that of so many other countries they have a moral obligation to give it to countries that do not. Personally, I agree. Share the wealth.

But only once a clear prioritization scheme is in place for whom in Canada should first receive the vaccine, which will have to be a select few of....whom? The most vulnerable? The most essential personnel?

Baylis also makes the important distinction between those who will "need and want" the vaccine and those who may either need OR want the vaccine. Those who NEED it certainly should get in, in my view--those being the most vulnerable and essential personal such as healthcare workers, political leaders and others key to the functioning of society. Then, what vaccine remains for those who want it must be distributed in a way that is equitable--perhaps evenly geographically distributed on a first, come first serve basis?

But in any case, Baylis claim is that Canadian citizens need to give back to the world as well as take care of their own. This seems like a reasonable claim in theory, but the question is how can it be accomplished in practice.

Will the United States have the same goal? Time will tell. The general aim seems reasonable enough, but as always, the devil is in the details.

Summer Johnson, PhD

Bioethicist Charo Accepts Key FDA Post

University of Wisconsin law professor R. Alta Charo has accepted the post of senior adviser in the Office of the Commissioner of the FDA.

According to the Chicago Trib, as of August 30th, Charo will be part of an elite group of policy advisors asked the tough questions on food and drug policy. Knowing Charo, she will be able to give the agency practical, sound solutions to some of the most complicated questions facing our nation regarding regulating the public's health, food, and drugs in quite some time.

FDA is lucky to have one of the sharpest and most policy-oriented minds in bioethics in their inner circle. Congrats Alta!

Summer Johnson, PhD