|
Hope, Hype - and Ethics?
Professor Nigel Cameron introduces some of the questions that we will be tackling on biotechnology.
21st century healthcare is linked arm in arm with developments in science and technology. It sometimes seems as if every day some new procedure or discovery is announced. Science journals (usually) make their claims carefully, but the press tends to pile on the hype. What are we to believe?
On the one hand, there's no question that enormous advances are being made in basic research, and they will lead to cures. What we don't know is when. Think back 20 or 30 years to all those promises of cures for cancer. There have been advances in cancer therapies since then, but nothing on the scale of what was hoped for - and sometimes predicted. Developments in nanomedicine - medicines and ways of delivering them on a tiny scale - may revolutionise our treatment of many diseases, cancer included. But we need a healthy dose of scepticism, especially if the researchers telling us how wonderful things will be are the same people asking us for more grants to keep them going.
On the other, we face new challenges. Concern that we are not developing antibiotics as fast as diseases are building immunity to them. Concern that new diseases (BSE - mad cow disease - is the best-known and most terrifying) will emerge that we can't fight in the old way. Concern that an old enemy, influenza, will sweep the world again on the scale of the "Spanish flu" that spread around the end of the First World War and killed perhaps as many as 100 million people - this time aided by air travel. Anyone who thinks that science has somehow conquered disease or is about to needs a bucket of water emptied over them. We can't even cure the common cold!
At the same time, there are other kinds of challenge facing us, challenges at least as great as those posed by new diseases and new kinds of research. We face ethical challenges. Hard on the heels of the debates about genetically-modified foods we are getting into debate about genetically-modified people.
p>The UK has taken the lead, through the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, in regulating new technologies that involve research on embryos and clinical applications of in vitro fertilisation. But the UK is not just the most regulated nation in the world, it has some of the most controversial policies. For example: there has been much discussion lately of sex selection - choosing if you want a boy or a girl - through what's known as PGD - pre-implantation genetic diagnosis; selecting embryos so you get the kind of baby you choose. What few people in the UK know is that even using PGD to select out embryos with inherited diseases (something many in the UK now take for granted) is illegal in some countries, including Germany. The Germans have a special conscience about technology and how it can be misused.
Another example: what's been called therapeutic cloning - cloning embryos for research - is now approved in the UK and actually being carried out on a small scale. But in most democratic nations - including France, Germany, and Canada - it is illegal. The UK has not (yet) signed the only international treaty on these issues, the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine.
But tomorrow's biggest issues may have little to do with genetics and test-tube babies. Scientists are working away on joining up the human brain and the computer, and making tiny implants that will give us memory chips in our heads. Their research is mainly intended for people who have had strokes or other problems caused by disease or accident. But once the technology is there, the pressure will be on to enable the rich to buy super-power brains. Will we provide them on the NHS?
As "designer babies" begin to become possible and the Brave New World foretold by Aldous Huxley looms, the debates are going to get bigger.
We need to get informed.
That is what this web-site will be aiming to achieve.
Alongside this we need to key into the global discussion, so we see what other nations have made of the challenges we face at home. And we can use Google to reach beyond the headline, so we get our own idea of what's happening and what's being said and aren't dependent on what we see on TV and read in the press.
And remember that healthy dose of scepticism.
|
