Category: Biotechnology
Art Caplan: In Defense of GMOs
Bill of Health contributor Art Caplan has a new opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In “Genetically Modified Food: Good, Bad, Ugly,” Caplan argues for the unrealized promise of GMOs:
[…] commercial farming of oranges and grapefruit is in dire peril from an insect-borne bacteria that causes a disease known as “citrus greening.” An uncontrollable fungal blight is destroying the banana crop around the world. Coffee rust is knocking out plants in Central and South America. Diseases like rice blast, soybean rust, stem rust in wheat, corn smut in maize, and late blight in potatoes destroy at least 125 million tons each year of the world’s top five foods. The damage done to rice, wheat, and maize alone costs global agriculture $60-billion per year. The effects are especially catastrophic in the developing world, where 1.4 billion people rely on these foods.
There is a way to get rid of such otherwise unstoppable plant diseases, which waste scarce resources, bring about malnutrition and starvation for hundreds of millions, and cost the world economy billions of dollars. Genetically modified organisms.
Specifically, engineering plants to resist the diseases. So why don’t the folks bearing the bad news about GMOs make a connection to the huge problems that could be fixed by genetic engineering? The answer is the bungling mismanagement of a potentially useful breakthrough technology by the GMO industry, alongside market forces that produce GMOs friendly to pesticides rather than hostile to fungi. [….]
Bad management thus turned a technology that should have been greeted as a way out of chemically based farming into a public-relations nightmare.
Read the full article here.
Of Data Challenges
Cross-posted from the HealthLawProfs blog.
Challenges designed to spur innovative uses of data are springing up frequently. These are contests, sponsored by a mix of government agencies, industry, foundations, a variety of not-for-profit groups, or even individuals. They offer prize money or other incentives for people or teams to come up with solutions to a wide range of problems. In addition to grand prizes, they often offer many smaller prizes or networking opportunities. The latest such challenge to come to my attention was announced August 19 by the Knight Foundation: $2 million for answers to the question “how can we harnass data and information for the health of communities?” Companion prizes, of up to $200,000, are also being offered by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the California Healthcare Foundation.
Such challenges are also a favorite of the Obama administration. From promoting Obamacare among younger Americans (over 100 prizes of up to $30,000)–now entered by Karl Rove’s Crossroads group–to arms control and identification of sewer overflows, the federal government has gone in for challenges big time. Check out challenge.gov to see the impressive list. Use of information and technological innovation feature prominently in the challenges, but there is also a challenge for “innovative communications strategies to target individuals who experience high levels of involuntary breaks (“churn”) in health insurance coverage” (from SAMHSA), a challenge to design posters to educate kids about concussions (from CDC), a challenge to develop a robot that can retrieve samples (from NASA), and a challenge to use technology for atrocity prevention (from USAID and Humanity United). All in all, some 285 challenges sponsored by the federal government are currently active, although for some the submission period has closed. Read More
What Is (Not) Wrong With Doping – Part II
By Cansu Canca
[In Part I, I considered, and rejected, arguments that doping harms the athletes and treats human nature wrongly.]
Spirit of sport
Let us now turn to the third objection: the use of PEDs destroys the spirit of sport. Of course, “spirit of sport” is a rather nebulous concept. Here is what the WADA has to say about it:
The spirit of sport is the celebration of the human spirit, body and mind, and is characterized by the following values: Ethics, fair play and honesty; health; excellence in performance; character and education; fun and joy; teamwork; dedication and commitment; respect for rules and laws; respect for self and other participants; courage; community and solidarity. Doping is fundamentally contrary to the spirit of sport.[1]
Even if one agrees with this not-very-useful definition, it remains a mystery how the WADA deduces that doping (if allowed) is contrary to this spirit so defined.
I think it is better to put the WADA’s statement aside and see if there can be a better use of this concept of the “spirit of sport.” To demystify it, one may ask two questions: what is the purpose/aim of professional sports, and why do we cheer for an athlete. Once we clarify what we mean by the spirit of sport, we can inquire how doping corrupts this spirit.
What Is (Not) Wrong With Doping – Part I
By Cansu Canca
Sports news has a permanent section now: the doping news. Less than a month ago, Gay and Powell (“the second and the fourth fastest men of all time”) also tested positive for banned substances. What used to be a scandalous piece of news (maybe with its final anti-hero being Lance Armstrong) became more of a curiosity item. The problem of doping became so wide-spread (tainting even curling!) that it is casting doubt on every medal we have ever seen in sports history. The war against doping seems to be a failure and even those who previously fought against doping now start to re-consider their views.[1]
Under the current rules, the ethical problem with doping is obvious: fairness. Those who cheat the system have an unfair advantage. However, the cheating argument is valid only when doping is prohibited. If the use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) were allowed, there would be no cheating since every sportsperson would be equally entitled to use them.[2]
Then, why not just allow doping?
Three objections are common:
1. It is dangerous/harmful for the athletes.
2. It treats human nature wrongly.
3. It violates the spirit of sports.
None of these objections are strong.
Racism in Transplant Denial? Or Too Few Hearts To Go Around?
Anthony Stokes, a fifteen year old kid from Decatur County, Georgia, is expected to die in a matter of months, according to his doctors at the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Maybe, they say, he will live for six months. Who knows? Anthony suffers from an enlarged, increasingly less functional heart. His condition is not unusual, and a reasonably effective cure is at hand: a heart transplant. (Learn more about Anthony’s story here.)
However, Anthony has become the latest victim of a dysfunctional U.S. transplantation system, which tempts Americans with a transplant waiting list, but kicks them off if they become too sick or too old. The problem is that there are too few organs to meet demand, and this perennial problem receives far too little attention from Congress. Indeed, the U.S. transplantation list, coordinated by the United Network for Organ Sharing, UNOS, (a private organization that coordinates significant aspects of the U.S. transplant system) is so overcrowded that patients increasingly turn to black markets in India, China, Pakistan, South Africa, and other countries if they hope to survive. (Learn more about that here.) Congressional hearings document Chinese prisoners dying and shortly thereafter Americans receiving organs.
Anthony’s family and some local organizations claim that racism is behind doctors refusing to place the boy on the transplant list. Anthony is African American. They ask, what is the harm in letting him on the list?
“How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Test Tube Meat (and Started Thinking It May Be Immoral NOT to Eat It)” Or “Hooray For Chickie Nobs!!??!!”
If you were watching television this week you may have seen this clip of a taste test for hamburger meat grown in a “test tube” in London discussed here. The meat was grown from stem cells from existing cows used to grow 20,000 strands of tissue. Costing more than $330,000 to make, with funding by google Co-Founder Sergey Brin, the day where this will be available at your grocery store or served at your fast food franchise is far away. But it may come sooner if we conclude that there may be a moral duty to develop and eat this kind of meat rather than animal-grown meat and press our governments to start funding this work. What is the morality of test tube meat consumption?
Sometimes narrative can be a way into ethics so consider this bit from one of my favorite novelists (and Canadian public intellectuals) Margaret Atwood from her novel Oryx and Crake. She imagines a dystopian future that includes the the consumption of “Chickie Knobs” in one scene:
“This is the latest,” said Crake.
What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.
“What the hell is it?” said Jimmy.
“Those are chickens,” said Crake. “Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They’ve got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.
“But there aren’t any heads…”
“That’s the head in the middle,” said the woman. “There’s a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don’t need those.”
To be clear the test tube meat unveiled earlier this week is not a Chickie Nob, it is grown from stem cells rather than being a cow with extra parts and brains missing (Atwood is silent on some characteristics of the Chickie Nob that may matter ethically such as whether it feels pain or is sentient), but I think many will react to the test tube meat the same way: disgust. Some in bioethics, like Leon Kass, think there can be a “Wisdom of Repugnance.” In my own work I have been a persistent skeptic on this theme. For me repugnance and disgust are good and should be cultivated as reactions for that which we deem immoral, but should be broken down and overcome for those things which we conclude are morally worth pursuing. Thus repugnance is a tool whose proper deployment depends on prior moral conclusions. In the case of test tube meat, whatever repugnance we feel is one we should get over and media, government, etc, should help us do so.
You must be logged in to post a comment.