Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Beach Blanket Bioethics
BY NANCY BERLINGER

Bioethicists and contemporary novelists are captivated by the same issues. In recent years, major novelists have written acclaimed novels on research misconduct (Allegra Goodman’s Intuition), human cloning (Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go), and the pharmaceutical industry (Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections). Now, it’s our turn on the bestseller list: a major bioethicist has written a novel about biobanking.

Sequence, by Lori Andrews, Director of the Institute for Science, Law, and Technology at IIT, is a thriller set in the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology – a real place, she reminds us. The heroine is molecular geneticist/physician Alexandra Blake. Alex is brilliant. She was one of the authors of the Nature article describing the sequence of the human genome, and danced with James Watson at the publication celebration. She’s gorgeous yet practical, her must-have accessory being a fanny pack filled with medical supplies. She has eclectic taste in men – a musician, a Congressman – and in home décor: she lives in a barely renovated beauty salon, commercial rents being cheaper than residential in DC’s hipper neighborhoods. This is a genre thriller: there are forensics, conspiracies, gizmos, and chases galore, and no one ever seems to eat or sleep amid the hunt for a serial killer preying on women at military bases. But there is also serious consideration of the same issues that are the focus of the author’s scholarly research: the ethics of biobanking, including the rights of individuals to refuse to provide tissue samples (a gay serviceman calls himself a “DNA conscientious objector,” fearing he’ll be outed by his genes), limits on the commercialization of biobanks (a company with the all-too-possible name “Gene-Ease” has designs on the Department of Defense’s DNA Registry) and informed consent by tissue donors for subsequent analysis of their DNA (Alex objects to a Homeland Security law permitting analysis of biobanked samples without consent, even as she’s ordered to comply with it). Biobanking also provides the means to frame someone for murder, and the way to identify the real killer. I also enjoyed the reference to “Elektrobank” by The Chemical Brothers – a title and band name so perfect for this book’s theme they seem invented. (But they’re real. I Googled them.) If you’re looking for a beach book with bioethical heft, try Lori Andrews’s latest.

I recommend pairing it with another bioethical thriller featuring a woman protagonist, a serial-killer plot, and all-too-vulnerable databases of bio-information: A Philosophical Investigation, by Philip Kerr. Published in 1992 and set in early 21st century London, it’s an intellectual thriller in more ways than one: a national database of brain scans, intended to identify potential serial killers according to the size of a particular neural region, is encoded using the author list from the Penguin Classics. One day, “Wittgenstein” hacks his way in and . . . you’ll just have to see it for yourself. Happy reading.

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A Phony 'War on Science'
Michael Gerson, Washington Post
“In their talk of a Republican war on science, liberals may be blinding themselves to a very different kind of modern war in which their own ideals are deeply implicated: a war on equality.”

It’s Not Immoral to Want to be Immortal
Arthur Caplan, MSNBC
“Despite a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing, it is not obvious that wanting to live a lot longer is evil or immoral.”

Science Is Leading Us to More Answers, but It's Also Misleading Us
David A. Shaywitz, Washington Post
“Consumers of scientific information must balance the hope we place in global biology with the skepticism this field has surely earned.”

Taking the Scary out of Breast Cancer Stats
Carol Tavris and Avrum Bluming, LA Times
“The media understand how deeply women fear breast cancer, and the result is that every study that seems to find a link between some new risk factor and the disease makes headlines everywhere.”

Dollars to Doughnuts Diagnosis
Albert Fuchs, LA Times
“Insurance doesn't make routine care affordable; it makes it more expensive by adding a middleman.”

Tainted Medicine
Jerome P. Kassirer, LA Times
“Disclosure of financial ties may give a scientist or researcher a clean conscience, but that doesn't erase the possibility of a conflict.”

Children's health can't be left to faith alone
Arthur Caplan, MSNBC
“Parents do not have the right to watch a child wither away while they pray.”

Transplant List Numbers Raise Doubts
Arthur Caplan, MSNBC
“The American people have a right to expect absolute honesty about the number of people waiting for a transplant at any time.”

An Epidemic No One Wants to Talk About
Robert E. Fullilove et al., Washington Post
“Simply put, we will never rid the United States of HIV and other STDs if our only weapon is medical treatment.”

Making Cells Like Computers
Erik Parens, Boston Globe
“Conceivably, we are on the verge of installing synthetic genomes in bacterial cells to create products we want. But we are still a long, long way from doing what most people mean by ‘synthesizing life.’”

Miracle Workers?
David Rieff, New York Times Magazine
“Even today, the oldest of all relations between patient and physician — that of supplicant to shaman — continues to exert its authority.”

Overselling Overmedication
Judith Warner, NYTimes.com
“Most of the critics decrying the over-medicalization of the American mind rest their arguments upon the bedrock assumption that people who have nothing wrong with them are being medicated for largely fictitious concerns.”

Ads Spur Urge for Drugs
David Lazarus, LA Times
“DTC advertising has turned prescription drugs into just another gotta-have-it consumer product.”

Food Politics, Half-Baked
James E. McWilliams, New York Times
“Lost in this rhetorical battle was a quiet middle ground where the benefits and drawbacks of genetically engineered crops were responsibly considered.”

Perpetrating the Autism Myth
Benjamin Kruskal and Carole Allen, Boston Globe
“The scientific evidence is clear: neither the MMR vaccine nor thimerosal (mercury) in vaccines has any relationship to autism.”

Closing the Barn Door After the Cows Have Gotten Out
Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times
“The real beneficiaries are the nation’s large meatpacking companies — the kind that would like it best if chickens grew in the shape of nuggets.”

Human Embryos Cloned: What Does It Mean?
Art Caplan, MSNBC
“Let's not be frightened by scare tactics into not funding research that may be the key to curing what is currently incurable.”

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Is Bad Policy for Cloned Food
Art Caplan, MSNBC
“All of this fear-mongering about clones has made Americans forget that cloning is nothing more than artificially creating twins.”