The Importance of Up To Date Data When Discussing Bioethical Issues.

 In any ethical debate is is imperative that the information you are using to argue your point be as accurate and up to date as possible. This is not only important for the sake of being truthful, if you hold that in high regard, but also for making your position as unassailable as possible. If you are attempting to influence someone and your positions and points are easily proven to be factually wrong you will have failed and your credibility to will be lowered. It will not matter if your point still holds merit, as people are not like influenced my someone who hold a viewpoint they do not readily agree with if that individual can't even take the time to ensure what they are saying is correct. 

This is especially important when regarding things that can change rapidly, such as bioethics. 

Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics brings many points of concern for the bioethics field, with what was accurate data at the time. However, in the sometimes thirty plus years since the data this book pulled from was published, much has changed. One should see what has changed over the last thirty years before they allow themselves to be overly incensed or influenced by what may no longer be the case. This is what I have tried to do, for a small number of chapters anyway, here. 

One claim made by the book was that sex-selection was the driving influence behind many Asian countries, particularly China, to have an imbalance in ratios for male and female. While it was proven true that Chinese families were selecting more for males than females, what caused this swing in sex imbalance had much more to do with the "One Child" policy China had in place. As show in the 2022 paper found here, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8744150/, and to quote it "We found that the relaxed policy resulted in a statistically significant decline in the male to female sex ratio at birth. Specifically, we found that the policy resulted in a decline in the infant male to female sex ratio from 1.10 to 1.05 over the 5-year study period, 2013–2018. This change meant that relaxation of the one-child policy resulted in an approximate 4.5% decline in the male to female sex ratio." There is also a lot of evidence pointing to the "disposal" of unwanted female children after birth. So, while it may be true that China's citizens were using sex selection to have more male children, putting the blame on the the sex selection tools is flimsy at best and outright misleading at worst. 

Another area that was attacked by the book was the use of race based medicine. The use of BiDil specifically was targeted as the study referenced was show to only involve black people. This was misleading to begin with as if you were to look at the paper referenced in the book you would find that that paper is derived off another in which 70% of the participants were white and was considered a failure as the drug was found to not be effective. Upon looking at the data from that paper scientists came to he conclusion that the 30% it was effective on were mostly black and ran the experiment the book is attacking. More up to date info can be found on this 2011 paper, https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/epub/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.110.012781, that says "Blacks appear to have worse impairment in NO-mediated mechanisms, which may explain the potential, but unproven, race-related differences in heart failure outcomes and responses to therapy.^28,31,32 Studies have shown alterations in endothelial function and abnormal vascular responses to a number of pharmacological and physiological stressors that are surrogates of NO activity. Stein et al³¹ showed that healthy blacks had an attenuated NO-mediated vasodilator response to both methacholine (stimulant of endothelium-dependent NO release) and nitroprusside (endothelium-independent vasodilator/exogenous NO donor) compared with whites."

Based upon this, to completely dismiss the race as a "quick and dirty:, way to get someone medicine that may work better for them just because of societal racial issues would not be in the best interest of the patient. Make no mistake, this is no replacement for targeted medicine based on the individual, but to completely do away with working race based medicine puts more lives at risk.

Lastly, the book attacks the use of DNA testing for crime scene investigations due the occurrence of false positives that were more common then. At this time of the books publishing the FBI required 17 loci to be considered a good match for DNA testing and this gave many instances of false positives. When this was paired with other issues found in crime scenes, such as cross contamination, the book questioned the use of these methods especially due to the governments unwillingness to have third part scientists review their DNA data banks. A 2022 paper, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R41800, claims that the FBI not requires 20 loci for DNA testing, has had their databases third-party checked, and that specific training is now given in effort to reduce cross contamination of DNA. A snipit of the paper says, "This report provides an overview of how DNA is used to investigate crimes and exonerate innocent people of crimes they did not commit.¹ It also reviews current law related to collecting DNA samples, sharing DNA profiles generated from those samples, and providing access to post-conviction DNA testing. The report also includes a summary of grant programs authorized by Congress to assist state and local governments with reducing DNA backlogs, providing post-conviction DNA testing, and promoting new technology in the field." So if you have any other questions about how the government uses your DNA I would highly suggest reading the paper. 

Books are an invaluable method of learning, that is unquestionable. However, one should always question if what they are reading is still, or ever was, true. Beyond Bioethics was diligent enough to have citations in their claims, making it easy to double check what they were claiming and to try and find more up to date data. This level of academic rigor is not common, so it is the responsibility of all of you as individuals to ensure what you repeat and cite in your attempts to ethically influence the world to be up to date and accurate lest you turn the world even more against Philosophy and Ethics than is already seems to be.