These short explorations of contemporary bioethics issues first aired on Moody Radio.
Connor Scheidts was born in Philadelphia on May 18. When he was a five-day- old embryo, doctors plucked off a few cells and sent them to a lab in Oxford, England. Using a brand-new process called next-generation sequencing (NGS), they read Connor’s whole genome to make sure he had the right number of chromosomes. He was the first baby ever tested this way. Connor has two embryos siblings in frozen storage, and the other ten embryos that were created . . . well, they didn’t pass the genetic test.
Why do people attend conferences? For many people, it’s work related. They attend to improve their skills, to expand their knowledge base, or to network with other people in their field. Some professionals, such as doctors, nurses and lawyers, have to keep up with continuing education requirements. Others may be presenting their research in a paper or a poster. But why go if it’s not work related?
If I were to ask you to define “health,” what would you say? How do you know when you’re healthy? I’d like to talk about definitions of health, and why it matters. The New Oxford American Dictionary is pretty straightforward: “the state of being free from illness or injury.”[1] That concept of health is changing.
In her early 20s, Anna donated her eggs four different times to infertile couples. But the fourth time, within hours, she was vomiting and her abdomen began to swell.
What if we could prevent mass shootings by giving a pill to young men who had “bad genes”? Not the denim kind, but genes linked to sociopathic behavior and violent tendencies. Would it be our moral responsibility to find a way to turn those genes off? What about cheaters and liars? Perhaps we can prevent another Bernie Madoff situation by requiring people to take something like a truth serum.
Mr. Cifuentes migrated to the U.S. on a work visa at the age of 49, hoping to earn money on a watermelon farm in California to send back home to Guatemala. His daughter had been badly injured in an accident and the cost of her medical care was skyrocketing. Cifuentes also worked as a painter, a landscaper, and a tree pruner, continuing to send money home to his daughter, who began to walk again.[1]
If you could find out today that there’s a good chance you would have Alzheimer’s disease in the future, would you want to know? Would you take the test?
You’ve heard me say that bioethics presents us with dilemmas. Well, here’s one I’ve had a hard time sorting out. It involves the conflict between informed consent and medical research in the emergency room.
Do you remember the DES scare of a generation ago? DES was a drug given to pregnant women to prevent miscarriage. Even without clinical evidence to prove it would work that way, DES was prescribed “off-label” for over 30 years. DES exposure in the womb caused infertility and cancer in some of the offspring.[1]
Don’t you love a good story? One of my favorite satellite radio channels is PRX, which is filled with captivating stories about people’s life experiences. Did you know that journalism involves storytelling? According to the Pew Research Center, the job of a journalist is “is storytelling with a purpose.”[1] That purpose—the framing of the narrative—can have a significant impact on how we perceive controversial bioethical issues.
Last time, we talked about “scientists behaving badly” when they fail to report negative problems in clinical trials of drugs. With enormous pressures to get cancer-fighting drugs to market, there’s a big temptation to take shortcuts. Today, let’s talk about pressures of a different sort: publish or perish.
We’re told science is reliable because of the hypothetical experimental method. Everything can be objectively tested, measured, reported, and—this is key—replicated by other scientists. But what if you can’t trust all the scientists? What if some scientists are “behaving badly”?
Many of you rely on us for bioethics news and analysis, and last week, you heard me mention the top bioethics stories of 2012. While ethical analysis can be challenging, identifying bioethics news is something you can do. Bioethics stories are all around us.
I often receive emails with the subject line: ICYMI. It stands for “In Case You Missed It.” Here’s my ICYMI to you, the top bioethics stories from 2012.
Christmas is a delight for children. Many parents may sacrifice so that their children can have Christmas gifts, whether small or large. I remember some late night Christmas Eve’s with Jay, assembling and wrapping toys for our children. But what if we had said, Let’s skip the gifts. Kids aren’t worth it.
It’s December. We’re thinking about giving gifts. Sometimes it’s as easy as a few clicks online. What would cause you to give a truly costly gift, one that could save someone’s life? That’s the gift of being a living organ donor.
My husband is a Certified Financial Planner®, and he’s an expert in helping people manage their money. One of his biggest frustrations is clients who think they know what they need, reject his advice, then blame him for the poor performance of their portfolios. We can do the same thing to our doctors.
What does it mean to be “normal?” How do you measure it? In medicine, doctors use percentiles, such as “your child is in the 90th percentile for height.” These statistics are measured relative to a norm. These norms can be helpful for detecting health problems. But they can also be used by parents to compare their children to everyone else’s kids. Expressing relief that their child is “normal,” what they really want is better than normal.
How can you mend a broken heart? As you might guess, I'm not going to talk about the BeeGees pop hit from the 70s, failed romance, or the latest Nicholas Spark's novel. Let's talk about heart failure. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, responsible for one in four deaths every year.[1]
TV shows can powerfully reshape cultural attitudes about a controversial subject. Their seduction lies in the ability to persuade rather than inform. Well, the surrogacy comedy The New Normal offers a glimpse into the market realities of assisted reproduction. Two gay men decide they would like a child, requiring both a surrogate and an egg donor. After deciding they would like a blonde, skinny, intelligent child, the future parents choose an egg donor looks remarkably like Gwyneth Paltrow. This all sounds like a Hollywood exaggeration, but many real world prospective parents go through a similar process.
Does your doctor tell you to be sure and finish all of your antibiotic? You might think, well, I’m feeling better so I’m not going to put more of that stuff in my body.
For most of us answering questions about our family is easy. However, for some children ,the best answer they can give to questions like “How many siblings do you have?” is “I don’t know.” These children are the offspring of anonymous sperm donors, conceived through artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization. No one knows, because of the secrecy surrounding sperm donation, but there could be as many as 60,000 children conceived through anonymous sperm donation every year.[1]
I’d like to tell you a story about a girl named Sushma Pandey. She worked at a scrap depot in India earning 4,500 rupees a month, about $80. To earn extra money, she sold her eggs for in vitro fertilization, earning more than five times her monthly wages for each donation. After her third visit, she was hospitalized for abdominal pain. The next day, Sushma died with “congestion in the ovaries and uterus.”[1] Sushma’s tragic story is not unique, nor is it limited to India. Thousands of young women worldwide are being induced to undergo a procedure that is not safe and may have serious long-term complications.
In my last commentary, I discussed “brain death,” and whether a patient is “mostly dead”—like Westley, the character from The Princess Bride—or truly dead. WE don't want to call someone dead who is not. Prior to the development of the “brain death” standard, a person was declared dead when their heart stopped pumping blood and they quit breathing.
When is it okay to refuse your child something they want? What if it you refuse something that will save their life? Last year, Kirsten LaBrie, a single mother in Massachusetts stopped giving her son his home chemotherapy to treat his leukemia. Jeremy, who was severely autistic and developmentally delayed, died.
