Questions FEB 22

Beyond 7-8; Premonition 10. PRESENTATIONS: 1. Claire, The ethics of vaccine mandates; 2. Kirolos, The ethics of eugenics and reproductive technologies... 

Premonition
1. What did Joe DeRisi tell the governor about his lists?

2. Why were local public health officers so slow to accept Biohub's offer of free testing?

3. What were the big takeaways from the test results?

4. In February '21 the US was doing less of what than any other industrialized country?

DQs

• Are you surprised at the response to Biohub's call for volunteers? 243
• Why does financial ambition interfere with science and progress? 246 
• How do we fix the screwed-up incentive structure of the medical-industrial complex? 249
• How can the Strategic National Stockpile be made more functional and responsive to a crisis? 
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Beyond

1. The advent of what common metric made it possible to calculate the efficacy of selling?

2. What was lacking in the '60s that Principlism offers to provide?

3. What was the final impetus for government intervention in research ethics?

4. What would be the key problem of letting each Institutional Review Board determine its own principles?

DQs

• Has feminist theory been successful?
• Do you agree with Simone de Beauvoir that women are made (by objectifying societal expectations), not born? 
• Are most surgeons really "uncaring"? Why do so many patients say they feel "abandoned"?
• Is the culture of business healthy, on balance, for healthcare?
• Why is the medical profession so slow to respond to whistle-blowing like Henry Beecher's "Ethics and Clinical Research"? What might make it more responsive and generally more vigilant in policing itself?
• Is the culture of mistrusting authority in our society good for healthcare and the regulation of healthcare?
• Is there a general problem with individuals and aggregates of individuals (committees, boards, states...) determining their own principles of conduct? Is there a problem with them not doing so? Is there a solution to the dilemma?
• Have you ever questioned the "system" of a committee of which you were a member? How did that go?  92
• Can you give an example of gender bias resulting in unethical behavior by health practitioners?
• Have we moved significantly away from androcentrism in your lifetime? Will we move further?
• Can the medical profession, or any particular profession, become less gender-biased if the larger society remains relatively moreso? As women increasingly join the ranks of physicians, will that happen?
•  What do you think of the stereotypical "association of women with emotion and men with reason"? 100
• Do you associate emotion more with the body than the mind? How in general does the classic mind-body problem relate, in your thinking, to gender issues (if at all)?
• Do you think sex selection and disability deselection are ethically equivalent or commensurable? Is any stipulated difference between them arbitrary or "hierarchical"?
• How do you define "cosmetic" (vs. "medical")?
• How do you define "disease"?
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Health news... Health news quiz...
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‘The Unwinding of the Miracle’ Is About How to Die — and Live

She didn’t know it then, but Julie Yip-Williams began her memoir, “The Unwinding of the Miracle” — which enters the list at No. 8 — in July 2013. That’s when the 37-year-old mother of two, in the E.R. with stomach pains and nausea, learned she had Stage 4 colon cancer.

The next month, she started a blog, partly as a record for her daughters, Mia and Belle (“especially if this cancer-fighting journey doesn’t end in the way we all hope it ends”), and partly, she wrote, “to carve out my own little space out there to express my sadness, anger, joy, hope, despair and a slew of other emotions that come with living with cancer.”

Mark Warren, her editor at Random House, says, “Julie was my friend for a couple of years before the prospect of a book even came up. It was in the last year of her life, when her health was turning toward its end, and she was resolving all she could resolve, that we began to contemplate whether the blog could be a book.” Yip-Williams had been searching for a book that would help her prepare to die, but she hadn’t found one. “She was unnerved by the level of denial that she found in the culture at large,” Warren recalls...
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Embryo ‘Adoption’ Is Growing, but It’s Getting Tangled in the Abortion Debate
As evangelical Christians, Paul and Susan Lim believe that life begins at conception. So when they decided to have a third child, in vitro fertilization was out of the question, since the process often yields extra embryos.

But “adopting” the frozen embryos of another couple who had gone through I.V.F. was not.

Dr. Lim called it a “rescue operation.” To him, transferring donated embryos to his wife’s uterus was akin to saving a life. “These children are being abandoned in a frozen state,” he said. “If they don’t get adopted, they’re dead.”

As I.V.F. becomes more widespread and the number of spare embryos rises, giving birth with donated embryos is becoming more popular, especially among couples who oppose abortion and are struggling with infertility. But many of the agencies that offer donated embryos, including a vast majority of those supported by federal grants, are affiliated with anti-abortion rights or Christian organizations, leading some people to question whether single people, gay couples and others who might be interested could be missing out.

Even the term “embryo adoption” is caught up in the rhetoric of debate over abortion.

“The issue in the medical community is that by calling it ‘adoption,’ we give too much personhood to the embryo,” said Kimberly Tyson, the marketing and program director at Snowflake Embryo Adoption in Loveland, Colo...

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A Mother Learns the Identity of Her Child’s Grandmother. A Sperm Bank Threatens to Sue.
The results of a consumer genetic test identified the mother of the man whose donated sperm was used to conceive Danielle Teuscher’s daughter. Legal warnings soon followed.

Danielle Teuscher decided to give DNA tests as presents last Christmas to her father, close friends and 5-year-old daughter, joining the growing number of people taking advantage of low-cost, accessible genetic testing.

But the 23andMe test produced an unexpected result. Ms. Teuscher, 30, a nanny in Portland, Ore., said she unintentionally discovered the identity of the sperm donor she had used to conceive her young child.

The mother of the donor was identified on her daughter’s test results as her grandmother. Excited and curious, Ms. Teuscher decided to reach out.

“I wrote her and said, ‘Hi, I think your son may be my daughter’s donor. I don’t want to invade your privacy, but we’re open to contact with you or your son,’” she recalled. “I thought it was a cool thing.” (continues)