Category Archives: ethics

A Two-Edged…Coin

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A baby with a rare genetic disorder that’s often fatal has been cured, probably, by a newly developed targeted gene therapy.

Thanks to decades of research, gene sequencing rapidly identified KJ’s disorder.

An overnight success that was years in the making. Then there’s this:

Doctors at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania medical school then raced to design a gene-editing therapy using CRISPR technology to correct the defective gene. …
This process ordinarily take[s] years, though doctors in collaboration with several biotech firms were able to do it within weeks. The Food and Drug Administration also rushed to approve the treatment.

Then the overnight part was itself rushed. We may be seeing the effects of rushing genetic- or RNA-centered therapies with the conflicting reports of a number of the Wuhan Virus mRNA-based vaccines. We’ll learn more about the efficacy of KJ’s gene-editing treatment over the course of his lifetime and whether other genetic-related disorders develop as he ages, particularly as his body passes through the hefty disruption of its hormonal development as it grows into adulthood.

My larger concern, though, is this. This sort of gene-editing to cure genetic diseases also can be harnessed to cure “ordinary” and “normal” genetic complements in efforts to develop “better” babies—stronger, smarter, immune to this or that, or just attempts to “improve” humans.

The disease-curing/preventing advantages of gene treatment are huge and well worth pursuing. But in parallel with that, there need to be serious and draconian controls put on the techniques in order to control (that genie is out of the molecular bottle; it won’t ever be perfectly controlled) and mitigate misuses of the technique—beginning with clear definitions of “misuses” and “better.”

A Quick Summary

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The Institute for Justice each week summarizes several appellate court cases and publishes the summaries in its newsletter. (Subscribe to the newsletter here.) This one in particular caught my eye.

At George Floyd protest in Grand Rapids, MI, protester who approached police line is met with burst of pepper spray. As he turns away, another officer fires a special munition that’s meant for crowd control at long distance, striking him in the shoulder. Excessive force? Sixth Circuit: No QI for the special munition. It’s deadly force at that range. Dissent: There’s no case on point.

My dissent dissent: Now there is.

Appellate courts most assuredly are allowed to set precedents/issue precedential rulings. In the present case, too, the officer firing his special munition at what amounted to point blank range had constructive knowledge of the gross dangers of his action. It’s part of his crowd control special munition training.

Leaving Stuff to Heirs

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A man wrote to The Moneyist regarding his question of “fairness.” He and his wife are on their second marriages, and each has two biological children. The man has a million dollar inheritance from his parents, all of which he intends to pass to his biological children. His wife says that if she survives him, she intends to leave all of their common estate to her biological children exclusively. The man asked whether his wife’s intention was fair.

The Moneyist writer answered, in part:

A spouse’s inheritance is deemed separate property. So it is fair to leave it to your own biological children, if that’s what you want to do. Community or marital property, acquired during a marriage, goes to the surviving spouse. They can do whatever they wish with it.

That’s the purely legal answer. The writer, however, went on:

Your wife has made her plans clear. If she dies before you do, however, her kids could have a problem, because you plan to split the estate four ways, reducing your stepkids’ inheritance.

“Reducing your stepkids’ inheritance.” That distorts the matter. The man’s tacit plan, were he to survive his wife, to split the marital property four ways increases his biological children’s inheritance markedly from the complete shutout his wife plans for his kids while still leaving half the property to his wife’s kids. He could choose, per his legal control over the estate as the surviving spouse, to leave it all to his biological kids, shutting out his wife’s kids as she intends to do his.

The merits of the two spouses’ positions—what you and I, and The Moneyist, think is irrelevant. What’s fair is what the two spouses agree is fair.

There’s another lesson here, too, for blended families. The husband and wife, while they’re still prospective husband and wife, need to work this sort of thing out before they marry. If a disagreement over future plans for their prospective estate becomes a deal-breaker, it’s far better to know that in advance than after the marriage has occurred and then existed for some time. Of course, in the present case, there isn’t enough data regarding the timing of the man’s inheriting relative to their marrying to judge whether they could have worked this out in advance.

Is the Question Irrelevant for Children?

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Toothpaste manufacturers put fluoride in their toothpaste and market that as good for tooth health. They also recommend, through their toothpaste labeling among other pathways, to use only “pea-sized” dabs for children under six and “rice-sized” dabs for children under three.

Associated with all of that are concerns that too much fluoride can negatively impact IQ scores. My question: are fluoride and the question of IQ impact really relevant for children?

For one thing, those tiny dabs are extremely hard to dole out in any consistent fashion, especially as children are taught to brush their own teeth (and to apply their own toothpaste to their brushes), and it’s easy to err by adding increasingly larger dabs.

For the more important thing, though, children’s teeth are impermanent and start to fall out and be replaced with adult, permanent teeth around six and a little older. Maybe the answer, at least regarding children, is to duck the question altogether and use non-flouridated toothpaste for these. At that age, the important task is to train them in tooth hygiene and regular brushing. Any toothpaste adequate to the task of cleaning teeth would serve.

Another Misleading Claim

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This one by a Progressive-Democrat: California’s Alex Padilla. In his Tuesday letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, he wrote regarding Republicans’ musings about overruling the Senate’s Parliamentarian on the matter of California’s legal right to set its own emissions standards (itself a misleading claim, since what’s in question is whether California, or any State, can set emissions standards more stringent than the Federal government’s),

Republicans are now considering overruling Ms MacDonough, essentially going nuclear and throwing out the rule book in order to get their way.
…
If they can ignore the parliamentarian on this….

This is so broadly misleading as to approach being deliberately false. Far from ignoring the Parliamentarian, Republicans would be taking her eminently seriously and following Senate rules regarding her ruling, whether voting to overturn it or the Senate’s presiding officer overruling it.

Of course, Padilla knows this; he’s merely demonstrating, with his distortion, why it’s next to impossible to deal with members of his party.