Moral Questions
Leon R. Kass: Playing Politics With the Sick?
In the heat of the Bush-Kerry race for the White House, even the widow and the son of late President Ronald Reagan, and of course the hopeful afflicted among the famous in Hollywood and the families in Hoboken, have been engaged in the politics of new government-funded sources for new lines of embryonic stem cells for research. From the day of appointment nearly four years ago, President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics has been injected with political controversy and accused of being a ‘conservative’ cluster of ideological “clones.” The Chairman of the Council, a politically appointed agency within the Office of the President, charges Senator John Kerry with ignoring “the weighty moral issues involved’. [Leon R. Kass. “Playing Politics With the Sick”. Washington Post Op-Ed October 8, 2004.] But how many of the antagonists in the political debate have actually read the commission’s report?
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Human Ecology
Did Our Ancestors Imprint Life Style
Many patients with stroke, heart disease and diabetes may be suffering from the after-effects of their ancestors' overeating, according to a study in the November 2002 issue of the European Journal of Human Genetics, by Gunnar Kaati and co-investigators at the University of Umeå, Sweden.
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Bernard Gert
Common Morality: Deciding What
to Do
An International Ethical Framework for Unraveling the Genome?
Bernard Gert, a distinguished Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Dartmouth College has written a useful framework for those bedeviled and confused by the seemingly intractable ethical issues of the human genome exploration. In plain English - devoid of the usual convoluted language that would-be philosophers use to cover their inabilities - and from a sharp mind that has been fruitfully immersed in ELSI issues for a decade, Gert has devised an ethic applicable in the multicultural intellectual souks of the massive human genome exploration. His latest book, Common Morality: Deciding What to Do, is published by Oxford University Press.
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New AHC Chairman, Veteran Safety Activist
Henry Bagwell [left] is the recently elected President of the Amarillo Metal Tades Council, AFL-CIO, and new Chairman of the Board of the Amarillo Health Consortium [AHC]. He is shown here in 2000 with Mike Flynn, Director of Occupational Health and Safety for the International Association of Machinists, at the organizing meeting of the Consortium.
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Genetic
Profiles
A Simple Blood Test for Lymphoma?
GENE EXPRESSION IN LYMPHOID CELLS USED TO DIAGNOSE CANCER
Lymphomas are generally difficult to diagnose since no single test is currently sufficient to establish their presence. In the clinic, pathologists look for changes in normal lymph node architecture and cell characteristics through a series of tests, such as blood tests, x-rays, computerized tomography (CT) scans, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and bone marrow biopsy. But an Italian-American team headed by Professor Antonio Giordano, MD, PhD, may have made diagnosis easier.
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Global
Policy
An Answer by Jung on Terrorism
A reader from Germany e-mailed TheEditors@RamazzinUSA.org: “You write about the historical mechanism of the 9/11 tragedy in New York [See archives Volume Two, Number Four. Fourth Quarter 2001]… What about the mind of the terrorist … What happens to the individual mind in history? … Is the mind or the society responsible?”
When the tide of terrorism began to engulf the entire West, beginning with World War I, C.G. Jung a founder of psychoanalysis had a cogent insight.
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