Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Martha Nussbaum on America’s Puritanical Streak

    All of us, except the independently wealthy and the unemployed, take money for the use of our body.

  • UN HRC Passes Islamic Resolution on Defamation

    Resolution cites deep concern about the defamation of religions, urges governments to prohibit it.

  • Project to Inquire into Religion

    Experiments to look at the mental mechanisms needed to represent an omniscient deity.

  • Parvez Sharma’s Film ‘A Jihad for Love’

    Sharma doesn’t believe that the Iranian authorities are conducting an antigay witch-hunt.

  • The Swat Valley Taliban

    ‘Those promoting “enlightened moderation” are the agents of darkness,’ says Fazlullah.

  • The Taliban in the Swat Valley

    The Taliban are growing in popularity partly because the state is not functioning.

  • Many Muslim Children Kept Out of School

    Hajra Bibi taken out of school at puberty; parents wanted her to cook for male relatives.

  • Campaigners Support Wakefield

    BBC accuses medical experts of seeking to ‘discredit’ Wakefield’s ‘findings.’

  • Return of the ‘Framing’ Debate

    Nisbet tells Dawkins and Myers to ‘Lay [sic] low and let others do the talking.’

  • Seumas Milne on Religion and Secularism

    Startling new thoughts on the wave of atheist books, atheists as fundamentalists, Dawchens.

  • Polly Toynbee on Selective ‘Conscience’

    Fundamental questions of who rules are raised if Catholic ministers get a special dispensation denied to other ministers.

  • The news from Lodi

    Girls yanked around like so much furniture.

    Like dozens of other Pakistani-American girls here, Hajra Bibi stopped attending the local public school when she reached puberty, and began studying at home. Her family wanted her to clean and cook for her male relatives, and had also worried that other American children would mock both her Muslim religion and her traditional clothes…About 40 percent of the Pakistani and other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the district here are home-schooled…Some 80 percent of the city’s 2,500 Muslims are Pakistani, and many are interrelated villagers who try to recreate the conservative social atmosphere back home. A decade ago many girls were simply shipped back to their villages once they reached adolescence…As soon as they finish their schooling, the girls are married off, often to cousins brought in from their families’ old villages.

    How nice to know that Lodi has so much in common with Luton.

    Aishah Bashir, now an 18-year-old Independent School student, was sent back to Pakistan when she was 12 and stayed till she was 16. She had no education there. Asked about home schooling, she said it was the best choice. But she admitted that the choice was not hers and, asked if she would home-school her own daughter, stared mutely at the floor. Finally she said quietly: “When I have a daughter, I want her to learn more than me. I want her to be more educated.”

    Too bad Aishah can’t have what she wants for her daughter. Too bad she can’t be more educated too.

  • Just ask a professor of bioethics

    And speaking of sanctimony, there’s nothing like letting a child die miserably while you pray over her instead of going to a doctor.

    An 11-year-old girl died after her parents prayed for healing rather than seek medical help for a treatable form of diabetes, police said Tuesday…”She got sicker and sicker until she was dead,” [the police chief] said…[S]he had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness. The girl’s parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to “apparently they didn’t have enough faith,” the police chief said. They believed the key to healing “was it was better to keep praying. Call more people to help pray,” he said.

    Which might be understandable if they lived on some other planet, but they lived in a town in Wisconsin, they owned a coffee shop, they had sent their daughter to school. They lived on planet earth and were not cut off from knowledge of what people do when they get sick. They were not cut off from available knowledge of what is the right thing to do when a powerless child gets sick.

    But we are told we shouldn’t judge.

    It’s important not to be moralistic or pass judgment on parents who think they can heal a child through prayer, said Dr. Norman Fost, professor of bioethics and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison. “They believe they’re helping their child; they love their child, and they believe prayer has an effect,” Fost said.

    How does he know they love their child? Does he know that? Is he just assuming it? Is he just thinking well all parents love their children so even parents who are delusional and reckless enough to let their children suffer and die for lack of medical treatment, must love their children? Probably. Which doesn’t give one much confidence in his powers of reasoning.

  • The odour of sanctimony

    David Aaronovitch murmurs a quiet word in the ear of the bishop of Durham.

    Sermon continues: “This secular utopianism is based on a belief in an unstoppable human ability to make a better world, while at the same time it believes that we have the right to kill unborn children and surplus old people…” Now, this is as close to a lie as makes no difference. Dr Wright may reply directly to the Times letters page, which, even in this fallen age, generally prints the words of high clergymen, to tell me which significant secularist body, or scientific group, or gaggle of atheists is it that believes “we” have the right “to kill surplus old people”?

    Ah, you see, we must allow for episcopal hyperbole, and we must respect the beliefs which prompt them to indulge in such hyperbole. We’re not allowed to tell whoppers like that about them, but when they do it about us, why, they’re…um…following their consciences. Or something.

    This almost wanton disregard of fairness was being deployed for the specific purpose of attacking the proposals to allow the creation and use of hybrid embryo tissue in scientific and medical research…[T]he argument about what is actually in the Bill has been sidetracked by the mass complaints about the decision by the Government to put a three-line whip on Labour MPs. This has led, among other miracles, to the call by the Catholic hierarchy for there to be a free vote – a “conscience” vote – on the entirely contradictory basis that, according to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor: “Catholics have got to act according to their Catholic convictions.” But these are not personal convictions, they’re matters of doctrine. Churches constantly change their collective minds about what God says, so what is being asked is that MPs put their Church – not their conscience – above everything else.

    Not personal convictions? Matters of doctrine?! That’s blasphemy! It’s insulting! Of course the embryo nonsense is a matter of personal conviction; it’s totally a coincidence that it’s Catholics who have it and who keep saying that as Catholic MPs they – um – well let’s talk about something else now.

    Naturally, despite this, just about every editorial in every newspaper lined up, almost languidly, behind the free-vote demand…It is an easy concession to make to the religious lobby…providing that you don’t believe they’ll win. That way the churchy can go back to their bishops and say they’ve done their bit, and the rest of us can have our Bills to ameliorate or improve the human condition. Then, when the Bill becomes law and, over time, the advances save lives, the bishops and their flocks can quietly benefit from the measures they so denigrated, have the operation, swig the medicine and move on, sanctimoniously, to the next bit of opposition.

    Sanctimoniously. Just so. That’s what’s so irritating: the preening, self-admiring parade of ‘conscience’ superior to everyone else’s – when they’re putting a handful of cells ahead of the well-being of real humans.

  • Aaronovitch on Wicked Untruths from the Church

    There is a growing unscrupulousness about the way some of the top faithful choose to conduct their arguments.

  • God Gave Us Physicians, Cleric Notes

    Rev. Ted Nelson said they did what’s best in their heart. Rev. Steve Brice respects anyone who follows their conscience.

  • Important Not to Judge, Says Professor of Ethics

    ‘They believe they’re helping their child; they love their child, and they believe prayer has an effect.’

  • Girl Dies After Parents Fail to Get Medical Help

    They prayed instead. She died after 30 days of nausea, vomiting, thirst, loss of appetite, weakness.

  • Richard Dawkins on ‘Lying for Jesus’

    Goals don’t come more own than this.

  • Colin Blakemore on Stem-cell Research

    This is part of an interview of Colin Blakemore by Jeremy Stangroom which took place in 2004. The whole interview appears in What Scientists Think, Routledge 2005.

    The issue of animal experimentation is not the only area of dispute in the field of medical science. There is also, for example, considerable public debate about the use of stem cells – roughly speaking, cells which have the capacity to differentiate into cells of any type – in medical research. What, I ask Blakemore, is the importance of stem cell research?

    ‘It’s very easy to slip into hype when answering this question, but even so, I would say that the discovery of stem cells, and of their potential to transform into any tissue type in the body, really offers the possibility of one of the most significant advances in the history of medical treatments,’ he replies. ‘Most importantly, the kinds of diseases which potentially can be treated with stem cell therapy is a whole range of presently incurable diseases which are growing in rate in the population because of ageing. These are the degenerative diseases. The possibility of replacing tissue which no longer functions properly is extremely exciting. The kinds of conditions which might well be treatable, and for which there are already animal models of treatment, include Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, heart disease, bone disease, stroke and cancer.’

    In May 2004, the world’s first stem cell bank, partly funded by the MRC, was opened in the UK. On its opening, it contained two stem cell lines, developed by teams from Newcastle and London. What’s the idea behind banking different stem cell lines like this?

    ‘There are actually a number of reasons for banking stem cell lines,’ Blakemore answers. ‘The main one is to provide uniform standards for typing the cells; for understanding their composition and makeup. It is estimated that perhaps as few as one or two hundred different stem cell lines, each with different immunological characteristics, will be enough to provide tissue type matching for virtually every person who needs a transplant. So it’s a bit like matching blood groups, or indeed tissue typing for organ transplants; it is necessary to get the match right, which is the main reason for collecting more than one line.

    ‘The other reason is that different stem cell lines might have a better capacity to transform into particular kinds of adult tissue. We don’t know enough yet about the basic biology of stem cells to know this for certain, but it is possible that although all stem cells from embryos are derived at a similar stage of development, between 0 and 14 days of age, some of the lines will be better at transforming into say heart or brain than others. So this is a second reason for having more than one line.’

    The moral objections to stem cell research tend to be voiced primarily by people who object to the use of embryos in the collection of stem cells. For example, Patrick Cusworth, spokesperson for the anti-abortion charity Life, claimed that the use of embryos in stem cell research ‘reduces human life to little more than a pharmaceutical product’. What does Blakemore make of this kind of argument?

    ‘Well, I said earlier that we should have a special attitude towards other humans, so crucial to this argument is how we define a person,’ he replies. ‘A pro-Life group will say that a fertilised egg is a human being. I don’t accept this; if any cell which has a full complement of DNA and is capable of transforming into a human being is a person, then every cell in a human body is a person. We now know from Dolly the sheep that if we take the nucleus from an adult somatic cell – a cell from our skin, for example – and put it into a vacant egg, then it can become a human being. Should we therefore be worried about every cell which sloughs off from the surface of our skin? Should we treat each one of those cells as if it were a person? Obviously not. We have to recognise that an embryo, certainly before the nervous system begins to form, is just a bundle of cells.’

    People who are opposed to research which uses stem cells taken from embryos also claim that there is no scientific case for the practice; that adult stem cells will do just as well. Is there any truth to this claim?

    ‘This sounds very like the argument which the animal rights lobby makes about the alternatives to animal experimentation,’ Blakemore replies. ‘My response is to say show me the heart surgery which is going on using adult stem cells. It doesn’t exist. It might be that harvesting adult stem cells will be the right thing to do at some point in the future. One of the great advantages of adult stem cells is that you can do autotransplantation; you can take cells from a patient, let’s say bone marrow stem cells, or neural stem cells from the nose, grow them up so that there are enough of them, and then use them to treat whatever problem the person you took them from is suffering. In this situation, there is no difficulty with tissue typing, it will match perfectly. But we don’t have the expertise at the moment to do this; we would need to know a lot more about stem cells, and this knowledge is going to come from the study of embryonic stem cells. But the hope is that one day we will be able to use adult stem cells.’

    What about if a person has an illness which is caused by a genetic mutation? Presumably it won’t be easy to treat something like Huntington’s, for example, with a patient’s own stem cells?

    ‘It’s true that if a person carries a genetic mutation then it is present in their stem cells; but actually this doesn’t necessarily mean that you couldn’t use their own stems cells in a treatment,’ Blakemore says. ‘Huntington’s disease is a dominant genetic disorder. The symptoms, though, don’t appear until the person is thirty-five or forty years old. So although the gene is carried from birth, it doesn’t express itself until later; the problems accumulate gradually. It is conceivable, therefore, that if you were to derive neural stem cells from someone with Huntington’s disease, and you then transformed them into new nerve cells, that they too would last for many years before the condition showed itself. So there is this possibility.

    ‘One of the things which should be emphasised about stem cell research is that it is going to provide much greater insight into the nature of disease. It isn’t just a matter of developing new treatments, it is a way to understanding disease. For example, stem cells are helping us to understand the cancer process, because, like cancer cells, stem cells are immortal. Also, our understanding of the normal development of human embryos will be helped by understanding stem cells; we’ll learn about the rules which cause uncommitted cells to transform into committed cells. Finally, we can learn about the nature of certain diseases by studying the stem cells of people who carry genetic defects.’

    Does Blakemore have a view about how the various issues and debates surrounding medical research are likely to play out? Is he optimistic about the future?

    ‘I think it is necessary to learn the lessons of history,’ he replies. ‘I remember that after the first heart transplant there was intense criticism from the church, civil libertarians, medical ethicists and the animal rights lobby. People complained that the original research had been done on pigs; that the procedure was a dangerous experimental technique; and that it was possible that patients were being coerced into undergoing transplants. All the same kinds of arguments that we hear now were being played out then. But people today think that heart transplants are a medical miracle. The public completely accepts the procedure. Social and moral attitudes then are not absolute and fixed; they are influenced by the evidence of benefit. My view is that if we keep the public informed, if we move forward gradually, then, as and when the benefits accrue, the issues will become progressively less contentious. I am actually extremely optimistic about the future of medical research. The investment of the last fifty years in basic biological research is going to deliver in very big ways in terms of human health and the quality of people’s lives.’