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Wrongful Death Suits for Frozen Embryos: A Bad Idea

September 14, 2018

Last March, 4,000 frozen eggs and embryos were lost at University Hospitals Fertility Center when the temperature in cryogenic tanks spiked due to human error. Officials have apologized repeatedly to the affected patients, and say that they are working to provide refunds, free services, and “emotional support.”

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Wrongful Death Suits for Frozen Embryos: A Bad Idea

Friday, September 14th, 2018

Last March, 4,000 frozen eggs and embryos were lost at University Hospitals Fertility Center in Cleveland when the temperature in cryogenic tanks spiked due to human error. Officials at University Hospitals have apologized repeatedly to the affected patients, and say that they are working to provide refunds, free services, and “emotional support.” A similar incident also occurred last March at Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco when a storage freezer malfunctioned. These incidents have resulted in dozens of lawsuits. The most controversial seek to have embryos classified as “persons” in order to sue the clinics for wrongful deaths.

Unfortunately, courts almost always refuse recovery in cases of reproductive negligence. The problem is that our legal system does not accommodate remedies for the actual harm in such cases: the deprivation of the chance for wanted pregnancy or parenthood . Deeming embryos to be persons is not necessary to address that harm, and could have devastating consequences for fertility patients.

First, I want to reject one line of argument against the personhood approach, namely, that embryos are not legal persons in U.S. law. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court held that live birth has always been a condition of legal personhood. Moreover, fetuses are not persons within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, and do not have a right to life. Although Roe did not address the status of extracorporeal embryos, it’s reasonable to think that if fetuses are not persons, neither are embryos. However, it cannot be concluded from the fact that fetuses are not legal persons in the context of abortion, that fetuses cannot be considered persons for the purpose of wrongful death actions. To see why, we need to know a little about the nature and purpose of wrongful death suits.

…continue reading ‘Wrongful Death Suits for Frozen Embryos: A Bad Idea’

Image: By USDA Gene Bank – USDA Gene Bank, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49115483

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Colorado Approves $41m Settlement

September 14, 2018

Settlement ensures care of 2,200 state prisoners with hepatitis C. Inmates will no longer be required to undergo drug or alcohol treatment as a precondition for care

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Dependence Isn’t Addiction, But It’s Still A Problem

August 9, 2018

Dependence is a special type of drug-related harm. It’s an adaptive phenomenon resulting from exposure to a centrally-active drug and defined by the development of withdrawal symptoms when the drug is removed or the dose lowered too quickly

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Dependence Isn’t Addiction, But It’s Still A Problem

Thursday, August 9th, 2018

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There are two ways in which dependence can create trouble for patients:

It can make stopping drugs hard

The most obvious problem occurs when the time has come to stop a drug, but withdrawal symptoms make doing so difficult. This doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happens, and you’ll have a hard time finding a more vivid description than that provided by Dr. Travis Rieder, an Assistant Professor of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins. For those without access to the Washington Post, he also has a TED talk, but here’s the summary: A young man is seriously injured in a motorcycle accident. Over the course of three hospitalizations, his mangled foot is saved by a series of operations. Two months after the accident, his surgeon tells him (regrettably, with a hint of tsk tsk) that he’s on a high dose (about 115 milligrams of oxycodone per day) and that it’s time to come off. Lacking further guidance, he decides to taper by 25% per week. He soon becomes miserable: crippling insomnia, inability to function, low mood with bouts of spontaneous crying, and—within a matter of weeks—thoughts of suicide.

This story should be required reading for any clinician who prescribes opioids. Seriously, spend the five minutes. You owe it to yourself and your patients. You can read about dependence all you want in textbooks and articles and blog posts hastily written by pointy-headed academics, but it takes an account like this to hammer home just how malignant dependence can be. I mean, here’s a smart young professional with a promising career, a family and a very good indication for opioid analgesia who literally contemplated ending his life because of what two months of opioids had done to his neural circuitry. Just imagine if he’d been less resilient, had fewer supports, or more in the way of life’s other challenges.

…continue reading ‘Dependence Isn’t Addiction, But It’s Still A Problem’

Image via Flickr Some rights reserved by KSRE Photo

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Tox and Hound

Ethical Considerations in the Manufacture, Sale, and Distribution of Genome Editing Technologies

May 16, 2018

Authors, including our Jeremy Sugarman, offer a call to action, ‘Companies that develop and distribute tools for genome editing have a responsibility to construct and implement policies and procedures to protect the integrity of science, to educate their employees to make certain that all research conducted within the company adheres to the highest ethical standards’

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Ethical Considerations in the Manufacture, Sale, and Distribution of Genome Editing Technologies

Wednesday, May 16th, 2018

by Jeremy Sugarman MD MPH,MA, Supriya Shivakumar PhD, Martha Rook PhD, Jeanne F. Loring PhD, Christoph Rehmann-Sutter PhD, Jochen Taupitz PhD, Jutta Reinhard-Rupp PhD, Steven Hildemann MD PhD

New genome editing technologies are playing an increased role in an array of advanced research and development efforts in the life sciences. In tandem, there has been broad recognition of the need to address the ethical issues associated with the use of these genome editing tools. Although many uses of genome editing technologies do not raise novel ethical concerns, some have rightly attracted considerable attention, especially regarding the possibility of manipulating the human germline (Baltimore et al. 2015; Lanphier et al. 2015). Such concerns have prompted a substantial body of scholarship and high-profile efforts to address these ethics and policy matters (Bonas 2017; German Ethics Council 2016; La Barbera 2014; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Committee on Human Gene Editing: Scientific, Medical, and Ethical Considerations 2017; National Akademie der Wissenschenschaften Leopoldina 2015; Ormond et al. 2017; Reich et al. 2015). While the outcomes of these deliberations offer useful high-level advice, there has been little discussion of the critical ethical issues involved with the practical processes of manufacture, sale and distribution of genome editing technology products that enable this research. Here, we describe these issues and practices being developed and implemented to address them.

Our discussion builds upon the recent experience of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt Germany, a multinational corporation that operates as MilliporeSigma and EMD Serono in the United States and Canada, which is actively involved in discovering, developing, producing, selling and using genome editing tools and technologies.To develop approaches to anticipate and manage the ethical issues emerging in its work the company consulted with its existing Bioethics Advisory Panel (MBAP) that includes an international panel of external experts in bioethics and senior corporate leaders.

… continue reading ‘Ethical Considerations in the Manufacture, Sale, and Distribution of Genome Editing Technologies’

Image By National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) from Bethesda, MD, USA – CRISPR-Cas9 Editing of the Genome, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52360100

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Bioethics.net

His College Knew of His Despair. His Parents Didn’t, Until It Was Too Late.

May 14, 2018

In the days after her son Graham hanged himself in his dormitory room at Hamilton College, Gina Burton went about settling his affairs in a blur of efficiency, her grief tinged with a nagging sense that something did not add up

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Facebook, Big Data, and the Trust of the Public

April 13, 2018

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg recently appeared before members of the United States Congress to address his company’s involvement in the harvesting and improper distribution of approximately 87 million Facebook profiles —about 1 million of them British— to data collecting app Cambridge Analytica

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Facebook, Big Data, and the Trust of the Public

Friday, April 13th, 2018

In brief, Cambridge Analytica is a British political consulting firm, which uses online user data (like Facebook profiles), to construct profiles of subjects, which can then be used for what it calls ‘behavioural micro-targeting’; advertisements tailored to the recipient based on their internet activity. In 2016, Cambridge Analytica was contracted by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, as well as the ‘Leave EU’ campaign prior to Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union.

The controversy involving Facebook concerned how Cambridge Analytica was able to acquire 87 million profiles, seemingly without user consent. According to Facebook’s policy, user data may be provided to third-parties, provided it is for academic use. Cambridge Analytica was able to acquire this data through Alexander Kogan, a psychologist at Cambridge University, whose app ‘thisismydigitallife’ gave him permission to access the profiles of about 320,000 Facebook profiles, and all of their friends’ profiles. Because this original use of the data was allegedly for academic purposes, Facebook allowed it to occur. And when it became clear that Cambridge Analytica had obtained this data illicitly, Facebook requested that Cambridge Analytica simply delete the data.

After news of the scandal broke, Zuckerburg issued a statement, in part saying that the policies which allowed for the misuse of data were “a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it.” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg also called it “a major violation of people’s trust”.

… continue reading “Facebook, Big Data, and the Trust of the Public”

Image: Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson

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Practical Ethics Blog

The First Pedestrian Has Been Killed by a Self-Driving Car. Now What?

March 20, 2018

In Tempe, Arizona, an autonomous Uber struck and killed a woman crossing a street at night. The incident is likely to test the public’s tolerance of AVs on real-world roads

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AI Can Be Made Legally Accountable for Its Decisions

November 16, 2017

Computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars say AI systems should be able to explain their decisions without revealing all their secrets

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Wrongful Death Suits for Frozen Embryos: A Bad Idea

Wrongful Death Suits for Frozen Embryos: A Bad Idea

Colorado Approves $41m Settlement

Colorado Approves $41m Settlement

Dependence Isn’t Addiction, But It’s Still A Problem

Dependence Isn’t Addiction, But It’s Still A Problem

Ethical Considerations in the Manufacture, Sale, and Distribution of Genome Editing Technologies

Ethical Considerations in the Manufacture, Sale, and Distribution of Genome Editing Technologies

His College Knew of His Despair. His Parents Didn’t, Until It Was Too Late.

His College Knew of His Despair. His Parents Didn’t, Until It Was Too Late.

Facebook, Big Data, and the Trust of the Public

Facebook, Big Data, and the Trust of the Public

The First Pedestrian Has Been Killed by a Self-Driving Car. Now What?

The First Pedestrian Has Been Killed by a Self-Driving Car. Now What?

AI Can Be Made Legally Accountable for Its Decisions

AI Can Be Made Legally Accountable for Its Decisions

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