Whatever happened to good old fashioned adoption? It’s still here, of course. But in our sense-of-entitlement times, why adopt when we can rent a poor woman’s uterus to gestate a baby for us? That’s seems to be a growing business in India. From the story in the New York Times:

An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India’s mix of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.

Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some states and some European countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost comes to about $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States. That includes the medical procedures; payment to the surrogate mother, which is often, but not always, done through the clinic; plus air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to collect the baby).

Meanwhile, other forms of medical tourism include buying organs from the destitute, as we have discussed here.

We are not entitled to everything we want just because we want it. Infertility is heartbreaking but so is orphancy. Poor people are not brood mares. The story warns about a potential for exploitation. This is by definition exploitation, against we in the wealthy lands of the world should turn our backs.

As Kevin Warwick gently squeezed his hand into a fist one day in 2002, a robotic hand came to life 3,400 miles away and mimicked the gesture. The University of Reading cybernetics professor had successfully wired the nerves of his forearm to a computer in New York City’s Columbia University and networked them to a robotic system back in his Reading, England, lab. “My body was effectively extended over the Internet,” Warwick says.

It’s a far cry from his vision of transforming humanity into a race of half-machine cyborgs able to commune with the digital world—there is no spoon, Neo—but such an evolution is necessary, says 54-year-old Warwick. Those who don’t avail themselves of subcutaneous microchips and other implanted technology, he predicts, will be at a serious disadvantage in tomorrow’s world, because they won’t be able to communicate with the “superintelligent machines” sure to be occupying the highest rungs of society, as he explains in a 2003 documentary, Building Gods, which is circulating online. (Scientific American)

A group of researchers including Kyoto University Prof. Shinya Yamanaka that successfully developed induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, plans to create iPS cells from the cells of Japanese patients suffering from about 10 intractable and incurable diseases, including muscular dystrophy, it has been learned.

The researchers are set to apply to an in-house ethics committee for permission to begin the project and start work on research including developing new medicines using iPS cells as early as April.

Cell deterioration is usually studied to determine the cause of a particular ailment. But if the team can create iPS cells from patients’ cells and transform them into sick ones, they will be able to elucidate the mechanism by which healthy cells degenerate. (The Daily Yomiuri)

Essay from: Science (March 7, 2008): 1336a-1337a

Excerpt: “Being originally from an Eastern European country, I’ve noticed two possible practices in establishing international research collaboration between richer and poorer countries. In the more desirable scenario, investigators from wealthy countries spend time living in poorer countries, where they patiently gain trust of local people and build capacity in local research infrastructure. In the other scenario, investigators use local researchers to perform the difficult, risky, and demanding part of the work, after which they collect the raw data and begin to publish papers.” (Available from Science by subscription only)

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows. Officials in Philadelphia say testing there discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe. But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health. (CNN)

A thoughtful piece in today’s New York Times has usefully brought the “enhancement” question into general discussion. It is a curious thing how little attention this clutch of questions has received, and how when attention has been evident it has tended to be to some particular (mainly in the sports context) rather than the general principle.

It is widely agreed that there is no easy way to draw the “enhancement” line; though some otherwise smart people have been much too quick to suggest that therefore there is no issue here to be discussed. One of the most useful documents to emanate from the President’s Council on Bioethics was the report Beyond Therapy, which asserted jointly that this issue has huge importance and it is not possible to give it a sharp definition. Yet the examples of steroid use, human growth hormone, and the sprinter with prostheses, are beginning to illustrate to the public that definitional difficulty is no bar to the need to make decisions, and to our ability to make them when we are presented with a particular application.

The key need is to mainstream this discussion, and get it out of the hands of transhumanists on the one hand and Luddites, if there really are any, on the other. Our embrace of the technologies of the 21st century depends vitally on our understanding of their implications and our ability to take responsibility for their development.

The significance of the sports doping (and prosthetics) stories, and the particular issue that sparked the Times article (discussion among educators about academics’ use of performance-enhancing pills like Adderall), is that they offer us the opportunity to reflect on the limits of such interventions in human capacities with an eye on current technologies and their uses - well before tomorrow’s technologies, with their sci-fi promise of brain-boosting implants and the steady cyborgization of at least some of the world’s “haves,” have become immediate problems. Conversely, how the current debates go (and they may well be going one way in the sports world and another in the laisser-faire world outside) is likely to weight the dice for every future engagement with such technology applications. (ChoosingTomorrow)

Catholic Labour MPs opposed to the Government’s controversial embryo Bill will be able to break with convention and withdraw their backing for the legislation, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

In a highly unusual step, Geoff Hoon, the Chief Whip, will invoke special Labour party rules to allow MPs to abstain from the vote on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which will enshrine new laws on embryology research and fertility treatment. (Telegraph)

By Leon Kass & Eric Cohen

Like the Mitchell Report, most discussions of biotechnical enhancement are preoccupied with the novel biotechnologies themselves. Commonplace in such discussions are quasi-Talmudic (and inconclusive) arguments about whether and how, for example, steroid use differs from special diets as a means for increasing the mass of muscles, or how an erythropoietin injection (”blood doping”) differs from taking vitamins as a means for increasing the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood. But a deeper analysis of enhancement should begin not from assessments of the technical means, but from explorations of the desirable ends. Only if we have a clear idea of the nature and dignity of human activity, in sport and beyond, can we see how that dignity is threatened by the age of biotechnological enhancement. (This was the approach adopted in Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, the 2003 report of the President’s Council on Bioethics, which we helped to draft and from which, in this section of our essay and the next, we freely draw.) We begin by examining athletic activity itself, seeking to illuminate the integrity of the athlete; and move then to consider the activity of the spectators, so as to illuminate the integrity of sport and its value for all of us. . . . (The New Republic)

MPs are planning a change in the law to allow babies to be conceived from artificial sperm, a move described by opponents as playing God with human DNA.

A furious debate is building over how far to leave the door open to its use in IVF treatment, ahead of a Commons vote due shortly on the government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology bill. The legislation currently allows so-called artificial gametes in research, but imposes a blanket ban on their use in creating a human pregnancy.

The technique involves the creation in a lab of sperm grown from embryonic cells taken from the would-be parent. Although the science is in its infancy, it could ultimately help people rendered infertile by cancer treatment, or fortysomething women who can no longer produce their own eggs, to have children who are genetically related to them. (Guardian)

From embryo selection to abortion, fertility treatment to stem cell research, medical advances have created a furious ethical debate. Now MPs must decide how far science should be allowed to go.

Like any other three-year-old child, Molly has brought joy to her parents. Bright-eyed and cheerful, Molly is also deaf - and that is an issue which vexes her parents, though not for the obvious reasons. Paula Garfield, a theatre director, and her partner, Tomato Lichy, an artist and designer, are also deaf and had hoped to have a child who could not hear. (Guardian)

Yonatan Gher and his partner, who are Israeli, plan eventually to tell their child about being made in India, in the womb of a stranger, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked from an Internet lineup. Women like these at a clinic in Anand can earn much more as surrogate mothers than at normal jobs. The embryo was formed in January in an Indian fertility clinic about 2,500 miles from the couple’s home in Tel Aviv, produced by doctors who have begun specializing in surrogacy services for couples from around the world. (New York Times)