All Hail Sagan. A Lot.

Carl Sagan is being "blog-a-thoned" and the result is a tribute he'd doubtless appreciate - because it is not only built around the sort of media he imagined in Cosmos twenty plus years ago, but also because it isn't filled with the kind of UFO nonsense that plagued him every time he gave a speech.

Sagan arguably created the space (no pun intended) in which public intellectuals came to function as part of PBS, and suffered mightily for it among astronomers despite his considerable publication record and research. He was a showman, but as a showman he was also a great teacher and reached millions with what I think (and this is where I admit he's a hero of mine) was the single most important and coherent (as opposed to the manic "Connections" series) introduction to the relationship between human social and political life and the cosmos.
[hat tip: Greg Dahlman]

Perfect People: the Grudge Match

Perfect people: is it a good aim? Art Caplan and Carl Elliott debate in Public Library of Science. It is fun to read but the argument is pretty much what you expect. Caplan discharges the debate as somewhat silly:

Beating up on the pursuit of perfection is silly. As Salvadore Dali famously pointed out, “Have no fear of perfection—you'll never reach it.” Critics of those who allegedly seek to perfect human beings know this. While often couching their critiques in language that assails the pursuit of perfection, what they really are attacking is the far more oft-expressed—albeit far less lofty—desire to improve or enhance a particular behavior or trait by the application of emerging biomedical knowledge in genetics, neuroscience, pharmacology, and physiology.

And Elliott responds that it isn't a conservative defense of human nature that motivates him, rather he is concerned about misplaced energies devoted to enhancement instead of more important aims; in particular Elliott is as always primarily fighting against big pharma's promotion of enhancement:

Caplan does not defend medical enhancement so much as attack its critics. Or rather, he attacks a small group of conservative critics who want to preserve “human nature.” He dispatches those critics with admirable precision, but I am not sure why he believes that group of critics includes me. My worry about enhancement technologies has little to do with human nature. My worry is that we will ignore important human needs at the expense of frivolous human desires; that dominant social norms will crowd out those of the minority; that the self-improvement agenda will be set not by individuals, but by powerful corporate interests; and that in the pursuit of betterment, we will actually make ourselves worse off.

Still, it is a fun read. And maybe it will get a few more copies of Better than Well and The Perfect Baby into circulation. Come to think of it, maybe we could stage a series of these wrestling matches ... yeah ... that's the ticket ...

Neuroethics Profile

Martha Farah of Penn is profiled in Science Daily.

The Voice of Bioethics at Berkeley

This profile of Guy Micco is really touching and gives a sense of what bioethics is like in the San Francisco bay area. Micco is a recently retired internist who for some time chaired the ethics committee at Alta Bates. Today he teaches students in the UC Berkeley/UCSF Joint Medical Program, who take basic science and electives at Berkeley and get clinical practice at UCSF. He heads the UC-B School of Public Health’s Center on Aging and its Center for Medicine, the Humanities, and Law (CMHL). One anecdote from the profile:

A former patient of Micco, Laqueur tells the story of the renowned ethicist Bernard Williams, who often went head to head with Micco, during the years he taught at Berkeley, over philosophical questions. “I can’t bear Micco and all his nonsense!” Williams was known to say of Micco’s belief in the capacity of the arts and humanities to “humanize.” But then Williams got sick, and none of the doctors at Oxford University, where he was then teaching, could diagnose his ailment. He asked to be seen by Micco — “who figured it out in 30 minutes,” Laqueur says. “He’s a brilliant diagnostician.”

And what is he like in his role?

Laqueur views him as an “unsung hero of campus” — a faculty member whose contributions don’t lie in the realm of publication, scholarship, or administrative acumen, but who nonetheless has made an “enormous impact on students and the ethical environment. In another age he would have been a religious leader or one of these doctors who would have had a cultish following.”

In this age, however, in Micco’s more modest estimation, he’s one man doing his bit in the interval between birth and death. “Every so often, when medicine gets too biomedical, too heavy into the technological,” he says, “someone calls for a corrective: ‘we need to turn back to the human element, the doctor-patient relationship.’ That’s happening now around the country, and the humanities play a key role…. I feel I’m a small part of that movement.”

The Most Influential Philosopher Alive?

Marvin Olasky says it is Peter Singer. Boy does he ask Singer some strange questions.