Pellegrino to Ali G: "No, It's Not the Youth in Asia. And Breast Reduction? Well..."

There are those three or four people you see on television all the time pontificating about bioethics, whether about 67 year-old mothers or children consigned to permanent childhood. For shame. Ah for the days of yore when philosophers and physicians refused to give sound bites. Where are the great ones, those academics who would never do media. Wait. They're on HBO.

And Now, Michael Moore on Drugs

Wait - we didn't mean it that way. It's just that the "Fahrenheit 9/11" guy is doing his next documentary on the health-care industry, and six American pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, are telling their employees to watch out for what a Pfizer spokesman called "a scruffy guy in a baseball cap." If he approaches you, you're supposed to tell him to peddle his papers over at corporate communications. (How about just dosing him with Vioxx?) "Being screwed by your HMO and ill served by pharmaceutical companies is the shared American experience," Moore has said. When his film, to be called "Sicko," comes out a couple of years from now, it ought to spread the pain around more equitably.

The rumors have started already. Moore sightings have been reported at multiple locations*at the same time*and he's having to deny paying doctors to help set up hidden cameras. ("I didn't need to. So many doctors have offered to help, for free.") As a flack for AstraZeneca puts it, "Michael Moore is becoming an urban legend." - Armand Antommaria (Utah)

A Sleepy Look to 2005

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly isn't one of my favorite PBS efforts; all too often PBS eschews new bioethics programming because it is "covered already" by this budget discussion and debate program. R&E often has skimpier ethics reports than the major news networks, and that is truly saying something; its approach to bioethics has the feel of a star-struck church member. The program takes this look to what will happen in 2005 with an eye toward religion.

Transhumanism: Has Fukuyama Made it a Bad Word?

Bio•IT World describes the role of Presidential Bioethics Commission member and recent adventurer in bioethics Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement that human enhancement - in its aggregate, transhumanism - is awful, evil stuff. It has become clear that Fukuyama has done more to bring transhumanism into the public debate than any of its proponents, giving lots of space for public discussion of the ways in which human enhancement might make sense, and of ways in which that process can be understood and managed. No doubt this was not Fukuyama's plan, but the result has been great articles like this one, "More than Human."

Bioethics' New Media: Online Streaming Video

Just in - a perfect little distraction for a bit of non-work-like-bioethics-surfing during the holiday break. It is called 'Yahoo! Video', and according to MIT's Daily Recycler, which tracks the most cited links among all three million english language blogs, it is literally everywhere.

Why is it such a big deal? Because Yahoo! Video allows you to search from millions, yes MILLIONS, of video clips all over the internet in order to turn up clips in your area of interest. Beyond "ego searching" for clips in which you appear, the teaching and research uses for Yahoo! Video - and those engines that follow it - are expansive and interesting. Just think about all of the ways in which you might use a tool like this and you'll begin to see why, like Google Scholar, which in my opinion will revolutionize scholarly information, this is a major technological breakthrough for our field. For example, here is a search for video with stem cells in it. - GM

The Best Euthanasia Movie?

I vote for The Sea Inside, reviewed here by Time Magazine.

Mel Gibson, Stem Cell Advocate

Ok, he's not suffering from anything, nor does he have any other personal stake in the matter. But like Michael J. Fox, he is famous. And that seems to be enough for Mel, who shared with Good Morning America's viewers his passion for embryonic sanctity. Debating, well, me (McGee) with a self-described bioethicist by his side, he argued that there's nothing an embryonic cell can do that an adult cell can't. He'll be publishing that finding soon. UPDATE: Already the Southern Baptist Press is joining a growing chorus of conservatives in celebrating the first anti-stem cell celebrity.

Scientists Highlight Bad Science in (Often Bad) Movies

Science news reports that scientists are trying to teach the public about bad science by using the science found in popular movies. The American public is notoriously ill-informed about science and medicine. Why not use their love affair with the movies to try and educate them? That is exactly what some scientists are trying to do, using popular movies as a vehicle to illustrate what science can and cannot do, what is good science and what is bad. While most of the examples in the article are about physics and geology, bioethical issues are commonly portrayed on television and the in cinema, and movies can sometimes be the best vehicle for raising discussion -- as Jurrasic Park did for genetic engineering of endangered and extinct species.

All Science, All the Time

This morning the first all-science television network launches, leading with a bioethics of stem cells program. The network is financed broadly and will soon be on many cable networks and all of satellite. Zoloth is quoted.

Harvard Team Seeks to Clone Embryos

The Washington Post is reporting this morning - mistakenly as best one can determine - that Harvard is attempting to create the first cloned human embryos for medical research in the U.S. The piece mentions that UCSF tried and failed to harvest stem cells from embryos. But as early as 1996 a team at the University of Massachusetts was working on identifying cells for harvesting from cow-human embryos, whose nucleii were human, embryos which were created using somatic cell nuclear transfer. Previous reports of cloned human embryos from both China and Korea have also resulted, albeit much later and in one case in Chinese, in publications ... Weiss reports that another such attempt at ACT failed, but that misses the point: Harvard hasn't done it either, so the only news here is that someone ELSE is trying. The question of whether it can migrate into "the private sector" has already been answered! Rick Weiss reports that the group at Harvard is waiting on approval from Harvard's ethics "boards" by which he means IRBs, but as Rick knows very well the IRB doesn't review "ethics" in the sense in which he is describing "ethics boards." It's an important piece spun to be more important - and it illustrates the problem with creating accurate reporting about the most complex political issue to hit science in a long time.

MCW Pediatrian's Arrest Described in Terms of Suspect's Ethics Connection

In what is becoming a widely distributed story, the Milwaukee Sentinel has flagged as major news the arrest of a pediatric geneticist on child pornography charges. It would have been news in Milwaukee and among pediatricians just because of the professional role of the suspect. But the story is receiving wider play because it is cast in terms of the role of the suspect in teaching bioethics at MCW. No MCW bioethics faculty member is quoted, nor is there any clear identification of the specific role of this physician in bioethics. It's a new twist on the "ethicists' accountability" argument and it will make the evening news and, no doubt, the 1st year undergraduate medical curriculum.

GATTACA Bioethics Edition

Sony Pictures has recently produced a high resolution version of GATTACA, the ubiquitous reprogenetics movie. But we now know that next week they go into the mixing booth to produce a "bioethics version" - yep - of the DVD, which will include a bioethics documentary and possibly a bioethics commentary dub.