Bob Novak Did Not Take Science in College

Hurlbut is back again. The science is bad. The ability to 'prove' to a prolifer's complete satisfaction that a disabled embryo is truly disabled is non-existent (they do not believe that now about cloned human embryos or genetically defective embryos that can be identified today through PGD as incapable of development). But, still this sort of pseudoscience is receiving attention. Stranger still, note McCugh's absolutely bizarre argument against Hurlburt:

The only clear criticism on the council came from Dr. Paul McHugh, psychiatry department chairman at Johns Hopkins University. He warned that Hurlbut could be making a "hybrid which would be super-human in some kind of way." Hurlbut responded: "You create an entity that never rises to the level of what can properly be called a living being." McHugh suggested Hurlbut was making "a doomed hybrid" that would not be permitted to become a human being. "Not doomed," responded Hurlbut, "Only doomed if it's alive first."

This whole discussion is straight out of a the Salem witch trials. - Arthur Caplan

New England Journal Editorial: Good Luck Dodging Stem Cell Science with the Hurlbut Trick

I've already been awfully critical of William Hurlbut's idea that the stem cell debate can be obviated by an artful dodge in embryo creation. I noted too that just a few days after Hurlbut's idea was celebrated by the superconservative religious scholars whom he had bless his idea, they turned on him. Today the circle is truly complete, as scientists put to rest the idea that Hurlbut has figured out what counts as an embryo: New England Journal of Medicine has today published an editorial entitled "Altered Nuclear Transfer in Stem-Cell Research * A Flawed Proposal" by Melton, Daley and Jennings, that reads in part:

Hurlbut's argument for the ethical superiority of altered nuclear transfer rests on a flawed scientific assumption. He argues, on the basis of supposed insights from systems biology, that it is acceptable to destroy a CDX2 mutant embryo but not a normal embryo, because the former has "no inherent principle of unity, no coherent drive in the direction of the mature human form." But these are ill-defined concepts with no clear biologic meaning, and an alternative interpretation would be that embryos lacking CDX2 develop normally until CDX2 function is required, at which point they die. Philosophers may debate these and other interpretations. We see no basis for concluding that the action of CDX2 (or indeed any other gene) represents a transition point at which a human embryo acquires moral status.

-GM

The Enemy of My Enemy is ... My Enemy

Panos Zavos is on everyone's list of the top five, um, eccentrics in the human cloning race. He's fooled millions - twice - with promises that the first human clone's birth is imminent, and with preposterous claims about his own skills at cloning. He would be funny, if he weren't so dangerous. The emergence of Zavos has done more than anyone to convince the world that scientists who work with nuclear transfer are crazy. For example, today's British papers are all reporting that "cloning pioneer" Zavos is accusing Britain of "promoting infanticide." You'll love this:

[Zavos] branded UK rules governing reproduction as “super-conservative” and warned they were forcing many adults into having multiple abortions because it was illegal for them to choose the sex of their baby. He said British couples were visiting his clinic for “family balancing” treatments, having terminated a number of pregnancies because the gender of their unborn baby was not what they wanted. At the Kentucky Centre for Reproductive Medicine and IVF, where Zavos is associate director, treatments offered include pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, where the sex of embryos can be screened to ensure couples have a child of the desired sex.

You just know sex selection advocates want to stuff this guy into a small, dark closet ...

Professor Hurlbut, Your 15 Minutes are Up

LifeSite is a sort of barometer for the day to day pulse of the anti-abortion community, and from the very moment that William Hurlbut floated his dramatic new plan to save us all from the terror of destroying frozen embryos it was clear that, as we foretold, the clock had started on his poorly thought-out "work-around" for stem cells: intentionally producing disabled embryos. True, for a bit it looked like Leon Kass would push Hurlbut's idea into the fore, with his announcement that the President's bioethics commission would be discussing it (and other ideas), and with his subsequent claim that Hurlbut's idea could save us all from having to debate stem cell ethics any longer. Catholic and protestant fundamentalist leaders jumped for joy. But it was only a matter of time before even the 'pro-life' community would wake up to realize that embracing Hurlbut's half-baked neoscientific plan meant doing all sorts of things that amount to what they typically term "playing God."

And so, exactly eight days after it showered Hurlbut with adoration for saving the tiny people, the pro-life lobby has officially turned on Professor Hurlbut for crimes against the little embryos. One biologist interviewed for the "hang hurlbut" piece in LifeSite today puts their indictment of him squarely: "...the process would not create an unknown 'new entity,' but a severely disabled, cloned human being." The anti-abortion people even have an excuse for embracing Hurlbut: they were too dizzied by all that complicated science stuff: "Possibly due to the extremely rarified nature of the technical language, few reservations were raised at the meeting, even by the pro-life Catholics present."

Reports of Bioethics' Demise Seem a Bit Premature

Writing in the November 13th issue of The Lancet (Vol. 364, no 9447, p.1749) Roger Cooter of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London offers an amazing assessment of the field of bioethics;

“Hardly wet behind the ears, bioethics seems destined for a short lifespan. Conspiring against it is exposure of the funding of some if its US centres by pharmaceutical companies; exclusion of alternative perspectives from the social sciences, retention of narrow analytical notions of ethics in the face of popular expression and academic respect for the place of emotions; divisions within the discipline (including one over its origins and meaning); and collusion with, and appropriation by, clinical medicine. To many its embrace of everything bearing on human life renders it, paradoxically, bankrupt."

I could go on (and he does a bit more) but you get the point. We are all familiar with the sad state of British University life as cut after cut decimates the ranks of the professoriate there but have things really degenerated to the point where a hack is offering this sort of loony assessment as serious analysis (and getting it published to boot)?

Every so often British physicians and university purists and their publications try to pronounce bioethics dead. This latest declaration seems to have been penned by someone who cannot, however, diagnose the difference between a field (not a discipline!) entering into middle age with all its attendant crises of self assessment and self-doubt and a field that has never been more firmly entrenched within colleges, medical schools and other institutions not only in North America but, if the numbers showing up for the International Association of Bioethics meeting in Australia are any indication, worldwide.

Just to put things right in case Professor Cooter is having a hard time seeing what is going on in the field by what must be a very dim light underwritten by the laundered drug money funding that provides his full career support;

there are no academic bioethics centers in the United States funded by pharmaceutical companies, the only centers/programs/persons funded by private sources involve right to life or political orientations inclining to the right;

it is fairly easy to find out which centers/programs, persons have accepted grants or contracts or gifts by asking them (no EXPOSURE –insert Cooter’s heavy breathing here—required),

no academic bioethics center or medical ethics program has received more than a tiny percentage of funding from drug companies (some think they ought to be providing more funding in the way of general, unrestricted gifts),

the social sciences are not excluded from bioethics and, in fact, there is some danger that empirical bioethics may come to dominate all other modes of inquiry although quantitative social science may lie outside Cooter’s ken,

there is no intolerance of the emotions on the part of bioethicists—there is however an intolerance of using emotional responses as a form of argument (what I many years ago dubbed the Yuk factor) as well there should be,

there are divisions within the field (again not discipline) as again well there should be—it is a sign of intellectual vitality perhaps not recognized among the few remaining British historians of medicine,nor is there collusion with academic medicine unless talking to one’s colleagues if one works in a medical school happens to constitute cooptation or collusion.

Cooter’s worry about bioethics' “embrace of everything bearing on human life” I leave to more level-headed students of the sexuality of intellectual life than myself.

Cooter’s bizarre screed follows hard on the heels of Carl Elliot’s discovery of a new form of argument in a just out piece in the Hastings Center Report—arguendo ad Pfizer. By intoning Pfizer repeatedly Professor Elliot seems to think he can confirm Professor Cooter’s contention that bioethics has sold itself out to Big Pharma.

Cooter, Elliot and others seem so irritated by bioethics or some bioethicists that they either have to pronounce the field finished or irrevocably tainted. My hunch is that this sort of nonsense is a sign that whatever else it is doing, bioethics is being appropriately irritating to pedants everywhere. - Art Caplan

Euthanasia = Kevorkian?

Wesley Smith thinks so.