Blog.
Author Archive: Jon Holmlund
06/08/2018
More on physician-assisted suicide
Recently, Dr. Arthur Caplan of NYU, on the Medscape service (subscription required), took on the question of whether physician-assisted suicide (PAS) should be allowed for old folks just because they are old, or because they want to die together. There have been reports of just that. While he supports PAS for terminal illness but objects that PAS for “suffering” in general is just too fuzzy,... // Read More »
05/25/2018
Coming home to roost
Hoo boy. Scientists who want to study human embryonic development have heretofore been self-limited by a 14-day rule: embryos can only be experimented on up to 14 days of age, when they start to develop a nervous system. This is an attempt to avoid censure for unethical experimentation on human subjects, and is seen as something of a concession, since it does not accept that... // Read More »
Readers of this blog probably saw this week’s news that a California judge blocked the state’s End of Life Options Act, the one that legalized doctor-assisted suicide in California. The law passed after apparent failure in a regular California Legislature session, when its sponsors brought it up again in a special session that was supposed to be about Medicaid funding. The judge said that inserting... // Read More »
04/25/2018
Raiding the CRISPR
The second installment from The Code, a series of 3 short documentaries on the internet about the origins of genetic medicine, addresses gene editing. The current approach to this exploits “CRISPR,” or “Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeats,” DNA sequences initially discovered as a sort of bacterial immune system but very efficient at editing out undesirable genetic features, such as disease susceptibility mutations in plants... // Read More »
04/05/2018
New short videos on genetic topics
This week, an email from the Hastings Center promoted The Code, a series of 3 short documentaries on the internet about the origins of genetic medicine. The three are being released one week at a time. The first, released this week, briefly (12 minutes) reviews the determination, or sequencing, of the entire human genome, a project conducted in the 1990’s, and completed in 2000, by... // Read More »
The March 22, 2018 edition of Nature includes two thoughtful, helpful commentaries about improving the public dialogue around “bleeding edge” biotechnologies. In this case, the example is gene editing, of which one commentator, Simon Burall from the U.K., says, “Like artificial intelligence, gene editing could radically alter almost every domain of life.” Burall’s piece, “Don’t wait for an outcry about gene editing,” can be found... // Read More »
03/23/2018
Resources regarding ethics of gene editing
Recently, two resources have become available regarding gene editing and the issues raised by it. First, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have made available an archive of its February 22 webinar about human gene editing. The home page for the Academies’ human gene-editing initiative is here. A link to the archived webinar is here. The slides can also just be viewed here.... // Read More »
The New England Journal of Medicine has two new “op-ed”-style pieces raising concerns about extending physician-assisted suicide (PAS) from people with end-stage terminal illness to people who may express a desire to die because of (non-terminal) mental illness. (Regrettably, both require subscription access.) PAS in these cases is being exercised in Belgium and the Netherlands, and is being considered in Canada In one article, the... // Read More »