" There is no rigorous evidence from randomized controlled trials that it increases survival; testimonials of breast cancer patients who have survived longer than average while taking Avastin do not amount to evidence of a causal connection between taking the drug and mortality. Additionally, the drug carries substantial risk and costs approximately $88,000 per year to treat one patient. "

" The government agency tasked with funding crucial life science research needs to focus more attention on ethical quandaries and nefarious business practices that often obscure the path from discovery to public benefit, says a strongly worded letter to Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), signed by more than 100 biomedical researchers, journal editors, and health care administrators in the US.

" "...we ask that you acknowledge the research gap on the effect of conflicts of interest and commercial influence on medical decision making," the letter reads, "and set in motion a process that leads to recognition of the importance of funding studies on research ethics, the beliefs and behaviors of researchers and clinicians, and the effects of industry-academic relationships on the generation and dissemination of medical knowledge." "

" In another break with the past, Obama has chosen not to appoint bioethicists to lead the commission. Instead, it will be chaired by political theorist Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and its vice-chair will be materials scientist James Wagner, president of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Gutmann's work deals with deliberative democracy, and using reasoned argument to depolarize politics. Wagner served at the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Devices and Radiological Health for a decade, and now, as Emory's president, stresses that ethical engagement is integral to the university's strategic vision. "

" The most obvious question one must ask when reading the membership list of the commission is, "Where are the bioethicists?" By even the most generous accounting you could count 3 (if you consider University of Pennsylvania's Anita Allen a bioethicist for her affiliation to the Penn Center for Bioethics). Otherwise, there is are 2 - Christine Grady from the NIH and Dan Sulmasy from the University of Chicago. You don't have to have commission chucked full of bioethicists to have a good bioethics commission. What you need to have, however, is some sense of what the commission is going to DO in conformity with the charter. From this line up, I'm left scratching my head. "

links to PDF files

" The Chair, Vice Chair and Members are:
* Amy Gutmann, Chair, President of the University of Pennsylvania; PhD Political Science, Harvard; professor at Princeton, 1976–2004; former president, American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy; founding member of the Association of Practical and Professional Ethics; "a prominent national advocate for equity in higher education," well-known for her theory of deliberative democracy, and work on group identity.
* James Wagner, Vice-Chair, President of Emory University; an engineer by training, including Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins and the FDA.
* Lonnie Ali, Parkinson's advocate; wife of Muhammad Ali; connected with the Michael J. Fox Foundation as well as the Muhammad Ali Center; a supporter of embryonic stem cell research, who has also testified before Congress for Parkinson's funding.
* Anita L. Allen, University of Pennsylvania Professor of Law & Philosophy; Chair, Hastings Center Fellows; has focused on privacy issues, including feminist & race-related concerns; former Human Genome Project Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues project member; has described herself as "ambivalent about reproductive innovations, from surrogate gestation to preimplantation screening for gender selection."
* Barbara Atkinson, Dean, University of Kansas School of Medicine; formerly at the University of Pennsylvania; MD; pathologist; research on tumors & cytopathology; argues that human reproductive cloning should be banned, but therapeutic cloning should not.
* Nita A. Farahany, Vanderbilt University, Associate Professor of Law and Philosophy; background in genetics, then law; "focuses on the legal, philosophical, and social issues arising from biosciences, particularly related to behavioral genetics and neuroscience." Concerned that technologies are challenging our society and Constitution.
* Alexander G. Garza, Assistant Secretary for Health Affairs and Chief Medical Officer for the Department of Homeland Security; MD, Masters in Public Health; a long record of military & civil service, with a focus on emergency medicine.
* Christine Grady, Acting Chief of Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center; Vice-Chair, Hastings Center Fellows; nursing background, then philosophy; focus on research subjects & clinical trials.
* Stephen L. Hauser, University of California, San Francisco, Chair of Neurology since 1992; formerly Harvard Medical School; focused on the genetic basis, immune mechanisms, and treatment of multiple sclerosis.
* Raju Kucherlapati, Paul C. Cabot Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School; has worked on mouse ESCs and mouse models for human cancer; interested in personalized medicine & genetic testing for targeted therapies.
* Nelson Michael, Director of the Division of Retrovirology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research; MD & PhD; a long career in HIV research.
* Daniel Sulmasy, Franciscan Friar; Kilbride-Clinton Professor of Medicine and Ethics in the University of Chicago Department of Medicine and Divinity School; MD, PhD in Philosophy; focused on end-of-life issues; opposes ESC research and all human cloning; author of "Promethean medicine: spirituality, stem cells, and cloning" -- "The illusory quest for immortality through the practice of regenerative medicine using stem cells is a gross violation of that virtue."


" This Commission seems likely to be pragmatic and to seek and perhaps try to mold consensus. The members have written little about the topics on which CGS focuses. "

" the new bioethics commission, like the bioethics council that President Bush appointed, has not drawn its members from the mainstream of professional bioethicists. Please notice the names that are absent from the commission — prominent mainstream bioethicists like George Annas, Tom Beauchamp, Dan Brock, Arthur Caplan, Alexander Capron, Alta Charo, James Childress, Ruth Faden, Hank Greely, Patricia King, Ruth Macklin, David Magnus, Glenn McGee, Jonathan Moreno, Thomas Murray, Erik Parens, Robert Veatch, LeRoy Walters, Susan Wolf, and Paul Root Wolpe. "

" A proponent of deliberative democracy, Gutmann (along with her collaborator, Harvard professor Dennis Thompson) advocates a set of ethical principles for the conduct of debate and the formation of policy in the face of moral controversy. In brief, Gutmann has thought long and hard – and, I believe, creatively – about the challenges that she, Wagner, and their fellow commissioners will face when they get down to business. "

"(i) identify and examine specific bioethical, legal, and social issues related to the potential impacts of advances in biomedical and behavioral research, healthcare delivery, or other areas of science and technology; (ii) recommend any legal, regulatory, or policy actions it deems appropriate to address these issues; and (iii) critically examine diverse perspectives and explore possibilities for useful international collaboration on these issues. "

" Presidential advisory groups in bioethics go back to the 1970s. President Carter appointed the first such commission in 1978 ... to study issues such as brain death, informed consent, genetic testing, and disparities in health care between socio-economic groupings. "

" But Robert George, a professor of the Philosophy of Law and one of the current Council members, is not convinced by Obama’s talk of a more practical Council. “I don’t think Obama has any intention of appointing a commission that is more practical,” George said. “He intends to appoint a commission that is more uniformly liberal than philosophically diverse.” "

" President Obama will appoint a new bioethics commission, one with a new mandate and that “offers practical policy options,” Mr. Cherlin said. "

responding to Kyle Munkittrick's characterization of the Bush II President's Council on Bioethics: " This is the assessment a reasonable person would have of the Council’s work after reading any of its reports, all of which were philosophically deep in their attempts to understand difficult bioethical issues, but generally went lightly on the policy recommendations — so one gets the sense from this post that Mr. Munkittrick is wholly unfamiliar with the reports issued by the body he so quickly dismisses. "

Moral/ethical arguments against embryo research are not a function of scientific ignorance. "To end one human life for the sake of another, even when the former is microscopically small and the latter is someone we know and love, is to play a dangerous game of utilitarianism. We shouldn't end lives to save lives. This practice violates one of the most basic ethical principles: The ends do not justify the means."

"The issues raised by the use of assisted reproductive technologies take on an increased level of complexity in Ireland, which has a constitutional amendment acknowledging the “right to life of the unborn.” Ratified in 1983, the eighth amendment was passed to prevent the legalization of abortion. Its vague language, however, does not define the meaning of the word unborn. This ambiguity has led to controversy surrounding assisted reproduction in Ireland."

"In Beyond Bioethics, Fukuyama and Furger go beyond social critique and focus on the details of human biotech governance. The study broadly follows the approach used by two previous landmark documents: the 1984 Warnock Report that motivated the establishment of the United Kingdom's Human Fertility and Embryological Authority in 1991, and the 1993 Baird Report that informed Canada's 2004 Assisted Human Reproduction Act."

deployment of the "eugenics" frame (loosely) toward a mostly-secular anti-abortion argument

describing the argument of Paul Griffiths: "But curiosity can also distract men from secular obligations by so occupying their minds that there is no room left for other considerations. These men (and women) fail to register the pain of animals subjected to experiments in the name of knowledge, pay no heed to the social consequences of their investigations, and take no heed of the warnings issued in Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus,” Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (not to mention the myth of Pandora and the Incredible Hulk)."

"the tools of eugenics are alive and well in Europe - but for an entirely new reason all together. Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, is lobbying for the use of involuntary chemical castration for sex offenders in Poland. ... Yet, it would seem that there are other ways of protecting innocent persons from sex offenders. While rates of recidivism are high, perhaps greater resources should be put into effective therapy programs, community based groups and resource centers for sex offenders released into their community."

Subext: Men who have sex with children should be sure to father plenty of children in the community.

"Food? Family? Is there a difference?" - Kaarvoc

"While critics on the right and the left fret about the morality of stem-cell research and genetic engineering, prominent Western scientists have been going to Asia,... new labs, fewer restrictions and a different view of divinity and the afterlife."

"we need to start now to strongly encourage the development of moral sentiments that are broad enough encompass within the sphere of moral concern sentiences that are constituted differently from ourselves."

"The world community quickly needs to reach a compromise that outlaws reproductive cloning or prepare to protect the rights of cloned individuals from potential abuse, prejudice and discrimination, according to authors of a new policy analysis"

"Objections to such scientific advances have been voiced by many, including Kass, Sandal and Fukuyama. But perhaps the most famous and influential voice is that of the German philosopher and social theorist Jurgen Habermas."

"I look forward to our genetically enhanced post-human future, frightening as the possibility of profound biological change may be. However, pounding on Habermas's arguments isn't very challenging."

"The Vatican is organizing a bioethics conference on the origin and development of the human embryo. ... The conference is a response to current debates about embryonic stem cells, cloning, genetic manipulation, and assisted fertility treatments."

"The key aim of this paper is to facilitate informed debate amongst doctors, scientists, policy-makers, and members of the public about the future development and use of cognitive enhancements."

"If we are to be destroyed, I am now convinced that it will not be a neutral or malevolent force that will do us in, but one that is benevolent... he has issued the ultimate challenge, I believe, to our entire concept of the meaning of humanness."

"the prospect of human enhancement is being taken increasingly seriously. The World Economic Forum discussed it at its most recent meeting in January. The US NSF and the UK OST are investigating the issues it raises. Even President Bush has been briefed"

"nanotechnology, being embraced the world over as the panacea for all that ails... is being utilized in ways that at the very least could be described as reckless or, at the worst, harmful to the public perception and the progress of these technologies."

"But progressives, at their best, have a special concern for the different, the struggling and the weak. When it comes to eugenics, they face not only a tension but a choice -- and they should choose human equality over the pursuit of human perfection."

and other articles re: biotechnology and neoconservative critiques