Questions MAR 25

Time to sign up for final report presentations, and sign on as authors.

Presentations: Sawyer, Madi, Martha

1. What is the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's position on elective non-medical egg freezing?

2. The U.S. is the only developed country in the world without what?

3. Henrietta  Lacks's cells became the first what?

4. Henrietta's chart described her "household" as what?

5. Elsie Lacks was described as "touched," meaning what?

6. Why wasn't carcinoma in situ treated by most doctors in 1951?

7. Who was George Gey?

8. Why wasn't Gey's assistant excited about the new cell sample?

9. The HeLa cells weren't merely surviving, they were _____.

10. What were Henrietta's children's consuming questions?

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CB

1. CRISPR was used to edit which kind of Victoria Gray's cells? 246
2. The P53 gene does what? In what species is it more common than in humans? 251
3. What is ODIN? 255
4. What are anti-CRISPRS? 260
5. What do biotech utopians consider immoral, and how do technoskeptics and bioconservatives respond? 268
6. What did Roger Ebert say when he saw Gattaca? 276
7. What did the Kass Commission's report warn about? 281
8. What led Doudna to become more engaged in policy discussions about how CRISPR should be used? 286
9. What kinds of humans did Vladimir Putin say he could imagine creating with CRISPR? 294
10. What preempted high-minded ethical discussions about germline gene editing in Novembr 2018? 313
11. What did David Baltimore, David Liu. and Doudna think of Jiankui's embryo editing? 321-3
12. What did Josiah Zayner say that reminded Isaacson of Steve Jobs?  325

DQ

• What family-friendly workplace policies would you advocate?
• Is the egg freezing benefit at Apple and Facebook a progressive or retrograde policy, with respect to gender equality?
• Is Henrietta Lacks still "all but forgotten"?
• Is consent to "any operative procedures... deem[ed] necessary" too broad? 234

Henrietta Lacks on Radiolab

Health news... health news quiz

Supplements Won’t Prevent Dementia. But These Steps Might.

Scientists still have no magic shield against Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Yet there is evidence that some strategies may help

....the most helpful approach Donna Kaye Hill uses to protect herself from dementia probably isn’t taking fish oil.

It includes using medication to control her blood pressure. And reading biographies and mysteries and joining a book group with friends. And taking a four- or five-mile walk, five days a week, with a yellow Labrador named Annie.
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Family Medicine, Blood Relations
At the end of his life, my father went from doctor to patient, from scientist to subject.By James Marcus

We like the heart to behave—no skipped beats, no atrial flutter, just the regular, precious, plodding cadence. For this we will sacrifice much. The medicine my father began taking for his irregular heartbeat, in 2014, could have turned his skin gray, or caused him to grow breasts, or collected in tiny granular deposits behind his eyes, so that everything he looked at would have had a blue halo. None of this happened to him. Instead, he was cold all the time...

a staffer at the hospital introduced my mother to words we didn’t want to hear: “palliative care.”

It shouldn’t be so. The word comes from the Latin pallium, which is a cloak. It means that the patient will be enveloped, protected, wrapped in a mantle of painkilling techniques that are often pharmaceutical but may also consist of old-fashioned human tenderness. It’s what we should want for the people we love. But it also signals that the fight is over. It is a white flag, a coming to terms with extinction.

My mother was given a choice between moving my father to a nursing home and moving him to a hospice facility. She wasn’t sure. The decision was further complicated in late April, when he sat up in bed for a moment and told her, “I don’t know if I can beat this, but I want to live.” How could she now consign him to a hospice, which was a terminus—the end of it all? She was terrified that he might regain consciousness there, ask the nurse where he was, and abandon all hope when he heard the answer. She couldn’t stand the thought...

	The New Yorker (@NewYorker)
3/3/19, 2:38 PM Measles is highly contagious and potentially deadly—and entirely preventable through vaccination. So why would people choose to ignore the solid, evidence-based recommendations of the government and the health-care system? nyer.cm/NQ3Xj5h

Why Measles Is a Quintessential Political Issue of Our Time
By Masha Gessen

...Measles is a quintessential political issue of the late two-thousand-teens, one that turns on the conflict between facts and lies. There has even been some reporting that Russian trolls have been spreading anti-vax propaganda. If they are, they are tapping into existing tensions and preconceptions, just like they do when they spread electoral propaganda. On Facebook, a tiny cluster of anti-vax pages seems to have disproportionate reach. And, just as with other kinds of propaganda, the key question is what makes the soil fertile for it.

Why would people who care about their children’s health choose to ignore the solid, evidence-based recommendations of the government and the health-care system? The simple answer is because they don’t trust the government or the health-care system. Theirs is not an unreasonable position. The American health-care system is opaque and profit-driven. Working in concert with the pharmaceutical industry, it gave us the deadly opioid epidemic. It gives us the highest infant-mortality and the lowest life-expectancy rates among the world’s developed countries—as well as the highest bills...
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Samantha Bee Update-

Slugging the Sacklers
A lawsuit against Purdue Pharma has thrown back the curtain on the Sacklers, one of America’s wealthiest families. Their company produced OxyContin and subsequently covered up the drug’s addictive qualities, according to the suit. Until recently, the Sacklers have been known for their philanthropy more than their business. But that is changing, as Samantha Bee pointed out in a withering segment of “Full Frontal” on Wednesday...

& SB on the Fox News White House
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Directions to the Undiscovered Country

Advice for the Dying (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death, by Sallie Tisdale, Allen & Unwin, 256 pp, £12.99, ISBN: 978-1760632700

“Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life,” cautioned a certain nineteenth century German philologist with a nose for mischief. “The living is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.” As if to echo Nietzsche’s oft-quoted formula, the lead title of Tisdale’s book in its original US impression was Advice for Future Corpses. The apparent sanitisation of the title for the British market is rather an irony, given that it is part of the author’s purpose to confront a topic she insists is too often hidden, evaded or euphemised. The opening page states:

In Victorian times, children were kept away from anything regarding sex or birth, but they sat at deathbeds, witnessed deaths, and helped with the care of the body. Now children may watch the birth of a sibling and never see a dead body … many people reach the end of their own lives having never seen a dying person.

The problem of offering a practical perspective on death is summarised at the outset. “Birth and death are the only human acts we cannot practise,” writes Tisdale, and so “death looms ahead as a kind of theory.” There are no dress rehearsals for death. Dreamless sleeps will be woken from; the deaths of others do not necessarily carry instruction as to how one ought to go into that good night, gentle or raging. Practical advice then must deal with the concrete details of death; Tisdale’s book addresses both future corpses and their carers and families, and indirectly, health professionals and advocates of varying stripe. The advice is direct. The grammatical mood is usually imperative, the mood and tone of the author running the spectrum from compassionate to faintly peremptory. The book is “about preparing for your own death and for the deaths of people close to you”. A bank of experience built up as a palliative nurse makes Tisdale a singularly qualified counsellor of corpses-to-be, and allows her to lay out the various dull, uninspiring, sometimes absurd practicalities attending the business of dying while avowing simultaneously “the strange, undeniable fact that the presence of death can be joyful”...

 the book proper closes with a three-page paean to life, a fragile and ever-endangered thing, which only because it is hedged about by death offers delight and beauty. The chapter celebrates joy; and as Tisdale insists, joy could attend the immediate presence of death, so death’s general, pervasive presence in our lives confers meaning on them. Mortality and vulnerability are the larger context required to make one’s experiences special. These are not original sentiments, but Tisdale has in a sense earned this closing through the hard, clear-eyed look at death and dying that precedes it. Were one averse to this late turn to the lyrical, there remains that hardness and clarity to remind one that the living is after all but the rarer type of the dead, and that to be grateful for life must entail some gratitude to the dead – not only one’s direct ancestors, but to the countless, mostly nameless host gone before one to fatten the maggots.

The Lancet recently established a Commission on the Value of Death (which includes Irish authors Mark O’Connell and Seamus O’Mahony), a marvellous way of framing the issue that reminds us that people must die so that others may live, and that to strive after, never mind achieve, immortality (the dream of certain Silicon Valley denizens, as O’Connell records in To Be a Machine) would be a scandalous violation of the intergenerational contract with future humans. One might recall Elias Canetti’s analysis of the figure of the survivor in his eccentric opus Crowds and Power, his assertion that we draw sustenance from the deaths of others and his proposition that survival where others have succumbed is productive of the feeling of power. One might find the ground for a sober reckoning with death in the thought that one’s own flourishing is purchased at the cost of others’ perishing, and thereby discover some renewed solidarity with both the living and the dead; and finally meditate upon a cast-off thought from Canetti’s journals which stands, solitary and gemlike, among the jottings: “Perhaps every breath you take is someone else’s last.” Paul O'Mahoney

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