lkc22: Archive

Bioethics commission condemns Guatamalan syphilis research as unethical - August 30, 2011

Researchers knowingly violated ethical boundaries when they intentionally infected Guatamalan prisoners, mental health patients, and prostitutes with sexually transmitted diseases in a 1940s research project, a presidential commission concluded yesterday. When the harrowing experiments came to light (see ‘A shocking discovery’), President Barack Obama charged the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues with investigating the matter. After picking through 125,000 pages of historical documents, the committee determined that the experiments were unethical even by the prevailing norms of the era, and that those who conducted the research actively sought to keep experiments out of the public eye.

It was also no accident that the research was performed in Guatemala, argued Amy Gutmann, chairwoman of the commission and president of the University of Pennsylvania. “Some of the people who were involved in this experiment explicitly said, ‘We could not do this in our own country’,” she said. “It was a foreign population that was seen as ethnically, racially, nationally different.”

“The only way you could continue doing this is to think of what you were working on as material as opposed to human subjects,” Gutmann added.

The work was also in clear opposition to ethical standards of the time, argued Nelson Michael, director of the US Military HIV Research Program. “I’m not aware of any standards that would have said, ‘it’s ok to go offshore to do this kind of research’,” he said. “They did it because they found a doorway that they found darkened and they went through it.”

Sexually transmitted diseases, including gonorrhea and syphilis, were among the biggest threats to public health at the time. It was estimated that 20% of the people living in psychiatric institutions were there because of the neurological effects of advanced syphilis. The researchers in the Guatemalan study, which included John Cutler, an architect of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, were looking for a way to prevent the spread of such diseases. But despite that sense of urgency, the studies carried out in Guatemala were poorly designed, poorly executed, and entirely unethical, the commission concluded.

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Sep 1, 2011

In this blog post by Mark Bittman, the Obama administration trend of profits over environmentally sound policy is criticized.

Excerpt:

Sacrificing the environment for profits didn’t stop with Bush, and it doesn’t stop with genetically modified organisms. Take, for example, the Keystone XL pipeline extension. XL is right: the 36-inch-wide pipeline, which will stretch from the Alberta tar sands across the Great Plains to the Gulf Coast, will cost $7 billion and run for 1,711 miles — more than twice as long as the Alaska pipeline. It will cross nearly 2,000 rivers, the huge wetlands ecosystem called the Nebraska Sandhills and the Ogallala aquifer, the country’s biggest underground freshwater supply.

If Keystone is built, we’ll see rising greenhouse gas emissions right away (tar sands production creates three times as many greenhouse gases as does conventional oil), and our increased dependence on fossil fuels will further the likelihood of climate-change disaster. Then there is the disastrous potential of leaks of the non-Wiki-variety. (It’s happened before.)

Proponents say the pipeline will ease gas prices and oil “insecurity.” But domestic drilling has raised, not lowered, oil prices, and as for the insecurity — what we need is to develop wiser ways to use the oil we have.

They say, too, that the pipeline could create 100,000 new jobs. But even the Amalgamated Transit Union and the Transport Workers Union oppose the pipeline, saying, “We need jobs, but not ones based on increasing our reliance on Tar Sands oil.”

Sounds as if union officials have been reading the writer and activist Bill McKibben, who calls the pipeline “a fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent,” and NASA scientist Jim Hansen, who says the oil Keystone will deliver “is essentially game over” for the planet.

Game over? No problem, says the State Department (read the rest below:

Source: NYTimes

Sep 1, 2011119 notes

#Keystone XL pipeline #climate change #environment #food #james hansen #mark bittman #monsanto #nasa #nytimes #obama #politics #global warming #science #Greenhouse gas #tar sands

lkc22

September 2011

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August 2011

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