CRISPR — Who’s in Charge? (Part I)

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D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director

This is part I of our report. View part II, part III, or part IV.

The ability to edit genes using CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) has been in the news for more than a year. A committee has been appointed to advise our government regarding the editing of genes, particularly editing the genes of the human embryo.

Who are the members of that committee? What are their views? The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture has been working to gather information for you, our readers. This is part I of our report.

On 16 June 2015, ...read more

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Bioethics “Reading List” — Summer 2016

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D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director

History, U.S., recent

Letter from Representative Marsha Blackburn, chair of the Committee of Energy and Commerce’s Select Investigative Panel investigating fetal tissue procurement in the United States, to New Mexico’s Attorney General, Hector H. Balderas, Jr., included the notebook of a laboratory technician, who recorded the following:

See pages 9-10/291 of the document, as well as “attachment 28.”

Instead of history, however, the request for “whole, fixed brains” (human, fetal) for summer campers to dissect should be classified under HORROR.

Technology

A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) “Intelligent robot that ‘remembers and learns’ could be scrapped after escaping a lab for a second time,” ...read more

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Morphing and Transforming: The Physician-Assisted Suicide Debate

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D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director

For years, Jack Kevorkian was synonymous with assisted suicide. Seeing patients after death was not sufficient for the pathologist; he wanted to help them to that state. Kevorkian’s first kit was made from flea-market items. That was 1989; the euthanasia group at that time was called “The Hemlock Society.”

Kevorkian lived in Michigan; ironically, his first subject, Janet Adkins, traveled from Portland, Oregon, in 1990 to use Kevorkian’s machine in his parked van. He started her i.v., but she had to activate the machine to administer the lethal substances.

Kevorkian went to prison for his illegal activities, ...read more

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What Hippocrates Knew

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D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director

Recently, I had the opportunity to hear Dr. John Patrick speak. It was a fairly wide-ranging lecture, but the mention of the Registry of Hippocratic Physicians caught my ear. So I contacted him to ask about that, and he agreed to a telephone interview. That follows below . . .

D. Joy Riley (DJR): How shall I introduce you to our readers? You are a British physician, with extensive experience feeding malnourished children in the Caribbean and Africa. You now call Ottawa, Canada, your home. What else do they need to know about you?

Dr. John Patrick ...read more

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Adam on the Road

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Adam Creating Himself by Karen Swenholt.

By D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director

When our children were small, I read to them the story of Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown. Stanley is an unfortunate boy who suffers an accident and becomes two-dimensional. Because of his shape, he is able to have adventures that normal, three-dimensional children cannot have, like being folded and mailed to a place far away.

Unlike Flat Stanley, Adam is three-dimensional, made of resin, and cannot be mailed easily or cheaply. But he is off on an adventure nonetheless. In fact, Adam has just begun his adventures on the road.

This ...read more

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Taking stock: Where are we now?

Blog, Emerging Technologies, End of Life, Engineering Humans, Genomic & Genetics Issues, United Kingdom, United States / /

D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A.

Taking stock of where one is at the beginning of a new project or a new year is a good idea. Where we are in the entire realm of bioethics is beyond the scope of one blog post, but what follows are some landmarks discernible in January 2016…

Physician-Assisted Suicide

On Sunday, 24 January, John Jay Hooker, Tennessee lawyer, politician, and activist, died. Mr. Hooker had most recently championed “death with dignity” — physician-assisted suicide — in a proposed bill and in the courts. By the time of his death, neither the legislature nor the courts had provided ...read more

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We Were There…

Blog, United States / /

As the year 2015 comes to a close, we at The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture look back over a year of involvement in a number of important bioethics issues.

1) We were there when the Tennessee Senate Health and Welfare Committee met in Legislative Plaza Room 12 on 9 June 2015 to hear testimony regarding “Death with Dignity,” otherwise known as Physician-assisted Suicide (P-AS). We heard the testimony of John Jay Hooker and others promoting the bill. The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture stayed after a prominent news anchor and her television crew left the hearing. We stayed so we ...read more

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CRISPR: What is it? Who decides what we do with it?

Blog, China, United Kingdom, United States / /

D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A.

What is it?

Imagine a word processor for genes, where you could search for a defective gene, find the mutation, cut it out, and replace it with the proper DNA sequence. The cutting and replacing part of the process is what CRISPR and its associated (Cas) systems do. They are enzymes used to clip out particular sections of DNA in a cell’s nucleus, and replace the removed sections with other DNA segments, presumably replacing “defective” DNA with “good” DNA.

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) were first described in 2012, and the technique was used in human ...read more

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Why Did Gosnell Keep Severed Fetal Feet?

Blog, United States / /

D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A.

Regrettably, in defending human dignity, we are often confronted with circumstances in which humanity is degraded. Warning: The following graphically details some of those circumstances brought to light.

The 2011 report of the Grand Jury investigating abortionist Kermit Gosnell included a number of strange details about his place of business, including, “The investigators found a row of jars containing just the severed feet of fetuses” (p. 21).

Image from LifeNews.com.

Why would anyone do this?

Fast forward to the summer of 2015 and the Center for Medical Progress, which released a series of ...read more

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