Trust

Blog, Other Voices, United States / /

   

Guest Column* by Janet Liljestrand, M.D., M.A.  

Trust, once lost, is difficult to regain.  In last month’s Tennessee CBC article Credibility and How to Lose it, Dr. D. Joy Riley questioned if the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) risks its credibility for recommending “gender affirming care” in the treatment of gender dysphoria.  Such treatment involves radically and unnaturally changing the body and is not based on scientific data.  The AAP is indeed an influential organization.  It makes recommendations, but pediatric practitioners and Children’s Hospitals put those recommendations into practice for minors.  Children’s Hospitals ...read more

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Credibility — and How to Lose It

Blog, United States / /

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

Executive Director

Is the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) behaving badly? This is a cogent question. Recently (24 September 2024), the Attorneys General of twenty states, along with the President of the Arizona Senate and the Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives wrote to the AAP with multiple concerns:

Re: AAP’s Compliance with State Consumer Protection Laws 

. . . When the American Academy of Pediatrics speaks, its 67,000 pediatrician members, the broader medical community, the public, and especially parents are listening. Since its founding in 1930, it has exercised great influence on the practice ...read more

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Why “Provider” is a Four-letter Word

Blog, United Kingdom / /

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

Family and friends of Dr. Robert D. Orr recently gathered in Vermont to mark his passing. Due to previous COVID restrictions, this celebration of his life took place almost a year after his passing. Dr. Orr, a nationally-recognized physician and medical ethicist, was a mentor to many, many physicians and medical students, including this writer. He is sorely missed.

It is fair to say that Dr. Orr despised the term “provider” as an appellation of a physician. He once surprised a colleague of mine who had submitted a paper to him. He told my colleague that ...read more

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Who is He and what has he done to our children?

Blog, China / /

  Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University

Remember He Jiankui? He is the Chinese scientist who used CRISPR technology to edit the CCR5 gene for the HIV receptor in the genomes of human embryos. His goal was to make them HIV resistant. He reported at an international conference in 2018 that two of the edited embryos had resulted in the live births of non-identical twins, Nana and Lulu. There were also reports of a third child born in 2019. His revelations in a public forum provoked moral outrage from the scientific community. Global pressure caused Chinese authorities to suspend ...read more

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Life and Choice

Blog, United States / /

Janet Liljestrand, M.D., M.A.

In 1862 Louis Pasteur performed the definitive experiment that proved even the smallest organisms, those only seen under the microscope, derived from other like organisms. (1) Life came from life. Fast forward to 1973, and Justice Blackmun, writing for the majority decision in Roe v. Wade stated “We need not resolve the difficult decision of when life begins”. (2) What was the Justice’s definition of life? The human zygote contains all it needs for cellular division–and thus growth–at the union of a living sperm and living egg. How then has its human life not begun? Yes, in ...read more

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Human Dignity — A First Principle

Blog, C. Ben Mitchell, United States / /

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture

After the horrific human rights abuses of Nazi Germany were revealed at the end of World War II, an international tribunal was held in Nuremberg to try those who were responsible for the Holocaust. Hard on the heels of those Nuremberg Trials (1945-46) followed the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948) which enshrined the notion of human dignity, declaring that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of ...read more

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If Monkeys Could Talk

Blog, China, Engineering Humans, Other Voices, United States / /

Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology, Trinity International University Guest Column

Recent news announcements proclaimed, with both excitement and alarm, that Tan and colleagues, scientists from China and the US, had successfully produced human-monkey hybrid embryos. (1, 2) The hybrids (also termed chimeras) were made by injecting human pluripotent stem cells from an induced pluripotent stem cell line into 132 early- stage monkey embryos. Human pluripotent stem cells have the capacity to develop into a range of tissues and cell types which ultimately form all the structures of the human body including the brain and reproductive cells (sperm and egg). (3) In ...read more

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Tennessee Legislative Update: Commercial Surrogacy and a Pot of Gold

Blog, Commercial Surrogacy, Engineering Humans, uncategorized, United States / /

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

References to pots of gold usually occur in the month of March, and involve leprechauns and rainbows. This year, pots of gold figure in at least one set of companion bills (House Bill No. 1379 and Senate Bill No. 425) the Tennessee Legislature is transforming into law. Instead of leprechauns and rainbows, though, it is the fertility physicians/clinics and “third-party reproductive care for the benefit of the enrollee(s).” The pots of gold are to be provided by “insurance companies,” which means, of course, “the insured,” which would include all of us who pay insurance ...read more

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A Tale of Two Data Scientists

Blog, C. Ben Mitchell, COVID-19, United Kingdom, United States / /

 

Neil Ferguson, Ph.D. Infamous Graph Youyang Gu

 

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

It was a long year ago (March 2020) that a dire prediction was issued by a group at Imperial College London (UK) regarding the possible effects of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. The model predicted more than 500,000 UK deaths, and >2.2 million deaths in the U.S. by summer if no action were taken. One of the data scientists issuing that proclamation was Neil Ferguson, Ph.D. He and his group advised the government that “in the UK and US context, suppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the entire ...read more

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When Breath Is (Not Enough) Air: Let’s Talk about Ventilators

Blog, COVID-19, United States / /

There has been much public discussion about ventilators amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. It is humbling to consider that we, or someone we love, might require one. Most people know something about the benefit of a ventilator when needed; but how well do we really understand the functions and risks of mechanical ventilation? The pandemic presents an opportune time to learn about this. So I posed a series of questions about these machines and the processes involved in using them to a physician, who is a specialist in using ventilators to treat very ill patients. Those questions, and her answers, follow.  

1) ...read more

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