Featured Resource of the Month — In this edition of The Bioethics Podcast, we bring you the second in an ongoing series entitled CBHD Classics, where we periodically revisit classic audios from our CBHD archives. In this particular edition,  Nancy Pearcey presents her paper “Technology in Biblical and Historical Contexts.” In this piece Ms. Pearcey explains the inability of most people to justify their moral intuitions about technology, and the conversational opportunity that creates.

Part 1
Part 2

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Quote of the Month —

"This is a wake-up call that really does catch people's moral imagination," he said. "The whole notion of manufacturing human or semi-human life for experimentation and destruction goes to the core of human dignity."

— Nigel Cameron, President of the Institute on Biotechnology & the Human Future, commenting on hybrid embryos in "Hybrid Test Drive: Advances in stem-cell technology cheer and alarm ethics watchers," Christianity Today, November 16, 2007. 

Babies by Design: Redefining Humans?
UCLA Center for Society and Genetics Sixth Annual Symposium
January 27, 2008
Sunset Conference Center, UCLA

New Zealand Bioethics Conference
February 1-3, 2008
Dunedin, New Zealand
Email: sally@events4you.co.nz

Stem Cells World Congress
February 12-13, 2008
Marriott San Diego La Jolla
La Jolla, CA
Tel: 858/ 587-1414, email: Mathias.Kuo@marriott.com

Emerging Issues in Embryo Donation and Adoption
May 29-31, 2008
Marriot Crystal Gateway
Arlington, Virginia

The Invincible Man
Aubrey de Grey may be wrong but, evidence suggests, he’s not nuts. This is a no small assertion. De Grey argues that some people alive today will live in a robust and youthful fashion for 1,000 years. (Washington Post)

Nascent stem cell company raises ethical and medical issue
A San Carlos startup is offering to create “personalized” stem cells from the spare embryos of fertility clinic clients on the chance that the cells, frozen and stored away, may some day help a family member benefit from medical breakthroughs. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Op-Ed: Cherry Garcia and the End of Socialized Medicine
The new pharmacopoeia offers people too much knowledge and control for one-size-fits-all health care to cope with. (City Journal)

A Proposal for Modernizing the Regulation of Human Biotechnologies
In 1995, according to the Centers for Disease Control, over 280 fertility programs operated in the United States. Ten years later, in 2004, this figure had grown to 411, a 47 percent increase over a ten-year period – although since these figures do not include nonreporting clinics, the actual numbers may be even higher. Should this trend continue, procreation by technological means is likely to become a serious option for a significant fraction of the public. (Hastings Center)

New Jersey Voters Defeat Stem Cell Measure
In a stunning defeat for Gov. Jon S. Corzine, New Jersey voters on Tuesday rejected a ballot measure that would have permitted the state to borrow $450 million for stem cell research. (New York Times)

American Vampire
When Malaka, an Indian tsunami refugee, agreed to sell her kidney, the organ broker told her she would receive $3,500. But after the operation, he gave her only $700 - for an organ that a wealthy foreigner likely paid $40,000. While free-market types have talked up Transplant Tourism as a nifty way for the world’s poor to barter their way out of poverty, National Geographic Channel reporter Lisa Ling told me that after visiting organ donors from two villages in India - one known as Kidneyville - “the overwhelming majority of them did not get the money they were promised.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Couples Win the Right to Use IVF to Create 'Spare Parts Babies'
Parents of sick children will be allowed to use IVF to create “spare part babies” under controversial laws published yesterday. The legislation will dramatically relax rules on IVF clinics creating “saviour siblings” - who can help cure their older brothers and sisters of medical conditions such as leukaemia. Experts said that one day they could create a “designer baby” with kidneys which are perfectly compatible with a sibling suffering renal failure. (The Daily Mail)

Dolly Creator Prof Ian Wilmut Shuns Cloning
The scientist who created Dolly the sheep, a breakthrough that provoked headlines around the world a decade ago, is to abandon the cloning technique he pioneered to create her. Prof Ian Wilmut’s decision to turn his back on “therapeutic cloning”, just days after US researchers announced a breakthrough in the cloning of primates, will send shockwaves through the scientific establishment. (Telegraph)

Race-based medicine?
A recent study on the effects of a hypertension drug in African Americans has shone the spotlight on the value of single race studies in medicine. While some praise such studies for reaching out to groups disproportionately affected by a disease, others say grouping trial participants by race attributes health disparities to the wrong cause. (The Scientist)

Editorial: Stem-Cell Success Story
Today’s papers bring news of an enormous advance in stem-cell research. Scientists in the United States and Japan have managed to turn regular human skin cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells — achieving what they’ve sought until now through the destruction of embryos, but without the need to use embryos, to use cloning, or to use eggs.

It is, to begin with, an extraordinary scientific achievement, with immense scientific potential. The new technique is much easier and cheaper than the use of embryos in research, and will likely bring about an explosion of new work on pluripotent stem cells and their applications. . . . (National Review Online)

Gene Therapy Study Is Allowed to Resume
The Food and Drug Administration has given a Seattle company permission to resume its human tests of an experimental, gene-based arthritis treatment whose safety came into question this summer after a 36-year-old study participant died. (Washington Post)

Op-Ed: Why Science Can’t Save the GOP
No one is happier than I am about the latest development in stem-cell research. Scientists in Japan and Wisconsin have independently figured out how to turn ordinary human-skin cells into something like pluripotent stem cells. These are the cells that have caused so much excitement in recent years because they are like a biological gift certificate that can be turned into other kinds of cells as needed. These cells have also produced much controversy because they are derived from human embryos. I have the disease—Parkinson’s—for which stem cells hold the most immediate promise. The hope is that they can be turned into the type of brain cells that produce dopamine, the missing ingredient in Parkinson’s patients. (TIME)

Are teens old enough for life/death decisions?
Meyer decided Wednesday to allow 14-year-old Dennis Lindberg of Mount Vernon to refuse blood transfusions — based on his religious beliefs — in his fight against leukemia. Lindberg died later that evening. (Seattle Times)

Each week the top news stories, as determined by the staff at The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity are sent out via email.

[Note: News stories and events do not represent the Center's views. For additional commentary on many of the issues they raise, please see the CBHD web site at www.cbhd.org.]

Please visit http://www.bioethics.com for daily posts on bioethics news and issues.