Mark Zupan is a tough guy, he is the captain of the United States quadriplegic wheelchair rugby team. Mark was the main character in the award-winning documentary entitled Murderball, a film I was impressed so much when I had seen it back at home in my favorite Toldi mozi. Mark was restricted to a wheelchair due to a truck crash when he was thrown into a canal and was stuck in frigid water, barely clinging to a tree branch, for fourteen hours and had broken his neck. Mark co-authored a book, called GIMP in which he tells his story on how he could totally redefine his life “through love, friendship, and an introduction to a new sport. Mark realized that he could live a more-than-full life in a chair and has gone on to create an existence that’s truly exceptional. Now a Paralympic athlete (playing quad rugby, aka “murderball”) who’s starred in a movie, Mark explains in his memoir that, in a way, getting hurt was the best thing that could ever have happened to him—and that despite people’s prejudices, a guy in a chair still gets to have sex with his girlfriend, party with his friends, and even crowd-surf at Pearl Jam shows.
And yesterday at the Juan’s Flying Burrito Restaurant on Magazine Street, New Orleans (Irish Channel neighborhood) we’ve just ran into Mark Zupan. Normally it is not my taste to bother celebrities, but Mark is different, I found his real life character respectable so I dared to approach him and ask. Finally Anna shot the following picture: Read the rest of this entry »
It’s Friday so the web is going to sleep for the weekend, but here is one more opinion on life extension, in this case the opinion of Arthur Caplan chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, and columnist on bioethics for MSNBC:
Source: TechJournal South (I’ve never heard of it before and not sure about its bias, if there’s any)
Caplan says the question of whether or not modern science and medicine should extend our lives and enhance our capabilities is going to be “the battleground of the next ten years and even of the 21st century.” He noted that while some may ask, what’s wrong with living forever, repairing damaged organs, or fixing genes, a lot of people and organizations from the left and right of the political spectrum oppose these advances.
My question: Exactly who are these guys from the left and from the right and what are their aims?
“Is it really unnatural to seek a longer better life, as critics argue?” Caplan asked. He pointed out that there is really nothing natural about a 70 or 75-year average lifespan. Read the rest of this entry »
EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS: Willingness to Donate Frozen Embryos for Stem Cell Research by Anne Drapkin Lyerly and Ruth R. Faden, Science 6 July 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5834, pp. 46 - 47 DOI: 10.1126/science.1145067
We conducted a survey of 2210 infertility patients receiving treatment at one of nine major, geographically diverse infertility centers and asked these patients about their intentions for the embryos they currently stored. Participating centers were located in California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The respondents were asked to answer a set of questions with one of the following: very likely, somewhat likely, somewhat unlikely, very unlikely, or unsure/don’t know.
/Figure legend. Disposition option for some or all of cryopreserved embryos currently stored. SCNT, somatic cell nuclear transfer. Key: Somewhat likely (lavender), very likely (gray).
CREDIT: MIODRAG STOJKOVIC/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Read the rest of this entry »
There was a Symposium Live Streaming where for the very nominal fee of $5 CAD per connection to cover bandwidth costs people could watch the majority of presentations in a Windows Media Format. If anybody participated in this trial please share with us the information on it.
Debate between Gregory Stock and Daniel Callahan, which was moderated by Aubrey de Grey
Aubrey de Grey: Damage Accumulation and Age-Related Degeneration
John Hlinko, veteran internet grass-roots organizer has launched a website called StemCellCandidates to highlight – and facilitate donations for — the races in which the stem cell issue is most likely to tip the scales. Hlinko is also the man behind StemPac, a U.S. stem cell research supporting coaliton, which includes professional political consultants, scientists (for instance E.Y. Snyder, see previus post), patient advocates. Kristen Bodyhack Philipkoski wrote an interesting Wired piece about the topic: To be featured on StemCellCandidates, a candidate must first strongly support stem cell research. Second, they must be running against an incumbent who opposes stem cell research. Lastly, the pro-stem-cell candidate must have a chance at winning. Link
Deep story by Kerry Howley, associate editor of Reason Magazine, aka “Donor #15” who sold 12 ova to a pair of strangers for $10,000. From the story: By the mid-1980s, babies were being born via donated eggs that were fertilized outside the womb and later implanted in women incapable of producing viable ova. If you can imagine a scenario involving IVF-related technologies, chances are it has already taken place. The once-hypothetical fears of bioconservatives are now walking and talking human beings, but the debate over the ethical implications of such children is still oddly abstract. “It is argued,” states a 2002 report by the President’s Council on Bioethics regarding the commercial trade in human, “that we stand to introduce a commercial character into human reproduction, and to introduce commercial concerns into the coming-to-be of the next generation.” If that is the risk, we’re already running it, because the market in eggs, sperm, and reproductive technology has never been larger or more accessible. Selling ova to another woman is at once impossibly intimate and wholly impersonal, a connected but highly distributed process of exchange. It is a transaction well suited to the Internet, which tends to provoke uninhibited sharing among strangers cloaked in anonymity. …Link
Human embryonic stem cell research historically and presently (see previous post1 and post2) is heavily depended on In Vitro Fertilization-related reproductive technologies, as most of the existing and established hESC line came from IVF surplus embryos. One kind of anti hESC argument originated from anti IVF agruments.
Now we have the introduction into the basic language of rights, duties and moral persons, and set the 3 hypothetic cost stages of the continuous regeneration treatment called pimm. The probable course of introducing pimm treatment into the real world is this: first the costs will be very high, then moderately expensive, eventually cheap enough that the state can guarantee it for its citizens. I focus here only to the very costly situation, because we will face with that condition first in real, 3 dimensional life within risky circumstances. Life extension supporters must prepare for the problems, when only rich people can afford partial immortalization and must fit pimm into liberal democracy . When the costs are extremely high the first question is: does the principle of equal dignity require us to make the treatment impossible for those, who can afford it? The answer is no, it does not, because immortalized persons are rational moral persons too, and forbidding their participation in the treatment would degrade them as morally inferior ones.
Three more questions arise:
2., can the treatment be permissible to those who can buy it?
3., could we justify the right for partial immortalization with instrumental premises?
4., could we argue, that the right for partial immortalization is a human right?
In order to get new philosophical insights from the pimm thought experiment and to prepare well for the future, we have to set up a philosophical framework, so let us move to normative morality, and the concept of rights. Normative morality is referred here by Bernard Gert as a code of conduct that all rational persons would put forward for governing the behavior of all moral agents. One example of normative morality is the Egalitarian theory of human rights by János Kis (see the picture), my main source in this respect was the book called Do We Have Human Rights?, that was published in English at Budapest, AB Independent Publishers 1985. The core of this theory is the principle of equal dignity: humans, as moral persons, as the subjects of moral rights and obligations, are equal. Rights and duties are complementary concepts, when there is a concrete right of somebody then there must be a concrete duty of some persons matching to this right. In the literature, positive and negative rights are discriminated. In the case of negative rights, there are complementary negative duties regarding everybody. For example, the right to life requires that it is our duty not to kill any person who has the right to live. Concerning positive rights there are complementary positive duties regarding some people, for example someone’s right to medical treatment requires complementary duties of doctors and nurses to treat the patient. The other basic distinction lies between instrumental vs moral rights. The difference between instrumental and moral-restrictive rights is based on the way of justification of the rights. In the case of instrumental rights the moral principle with which we would like to justify the right put on an aim, and the right is introduced as the powerful instrument to realise this aim, for example the right to property was justified this way by the utilitarians. Talking about moral-restrictive rights, first, we refer to a distinctive ethical quality of the subject of law, and, second, we mark the upper limit of the permissible instruments against the subject of the law, fix the minimal moral standard of admissible treatment. It is worth mentioning that the same right could be justified with moral-restrictive and instrumental premises, too. Human rights are moral rights, and the distinctive ethical quality which deserves respect is related to the fact, that the subject of law is a human being. Human rights are changing, they depend on time and place, and their range is gradually broadening.
The first generation of partially immortalized people will form a minority. Then questions will emerge about the social status of human beings under continuous regeneration treatment.
In current moral philosophy, there exists a received view of the moral person, which was worked out in John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. The moral person could only be the subject of rights and duties. It is a range property: a person is a moral person or not, there is not any hierarchical moral difference between moral persons. According to Rawls’s definition there are two necessary conditions of being a moral person: the person must have a capacity to form, pursue and revise a conception of the good and ii., be capable of having a sense of justice. Rawls, John: Theory of Justice, 1999.,p. 442. He defines goodness as rationality: if a man is capable of forming a rational plan of life, then „a persons’s good is the successful execution of a rational plan of life” Rawls, John: Theory of Justice, 1999., p. 380 The presupposition of this condition is lifetime perspective, taking the life of one person as a temporal whole. With the pimmthought experiment an argument could be formulated against this „plan of life” criterion of Rawls’s definiton of a moral person.
i., Because of the unforeseen duration of one‘s lifetime, one‘s unlimited lifespan, the person under treatment is not able to consider his/her life as a temporal whole, so per definitionem he/she cannot form a rational plan of life.
ii., Immortalized persons are moral persons. We could not think intuitively that they are not moral persons just because they are under treatment.
Conclusion: „the plan of life” necessary condition of being a moral person is too strict, and a weaker condition is needed.
Let us see a philosophical connection between euthanasy and life extension: As the moral problem of ending human life is inevitable , so inevitable a moral problem is the extending of human lifespan, and exactly for the same two reasons as terminating life namely i., the pluralisation of world views and attitudes of life, some conceptions emerged, which, because of distinct type of reasons, require or prefer the extension of healthy human lifespan, increasing the maximum expected life expectancy and ii., the extraordinary development of medical technology and biomedicine. /The two reasons concerning euthanasy is explained in the euthanasy paper of János Kis, who was one of the mentors of my philosophy thesis./
For first readers: The aim of regenerative medicine is to regenerate all tissues and organs of the human body with the help of stem cells’ regenerative potential. Theoretically if all tissues and organs of an adult body were regenerated once, then it could be regenerated two and eventually n times. This technological possibility is called partial immortalization.
Let us turn to ordinary morality and ordinary, first hand moral intuitions. The focus here will be on the level of the individual, and not the direct human environment of the individual (family, colleagues), or the society in which the individual lives. Contrary to the supposed intutition we try to show, that it is not a boundary situation (Grenzsituation) for the individual to participate in a continuous regeneration treatment, than we could think at first sight.
In a Grenzsituation, per definitionem, the life of a human individual (or a community) is in real danger. „The „limit” is the boundary line between life and death.” A Grenzsituation occurs only once, it is not repeated at another time, the individual will win or lose. Thirdly, a Grenzsituation is a short interval, the participant individual usually has an intensive experience, and the situation deserves some strong gestures and moral top condition.
A typical Grenzsituation could occur in war, in slavery, in a concentration camp, or in an euthanasy situation, but not in an average working day in a liberal democracy. Now imagine again an adult individual under the decision, whether to participate in a partial immortalization treatment or not, or just imagine an individual under regeneration treatment, and his/her next time to go to the clinic. First, this won’t be a boundary situation for him/her, because it is not a choice between life and death, but a choice between life and life, between an average life expectancy and a partially immortalized condition. Second, this hypothetical scenario of the treatment requires continuous, recurrent choices and decisions while a Grenzsituation is a unique one-time event, as mentioned before. Third, the treatment does not require high moral sensibility and spectacular gestures. The maximum moral intensitiy probably occurs when an individual first decides to go to the regeneration therapy, but we could hardly say, that this means his/her whole life is in danger. So immortalization does not seem to be a Grenzsituation for three reasons, and morally on the level of the individual under treatment it is not necessarily a source of moral conflict. Moral problems arise when we turn to the direct human environment of the individual (family, colleagues) and the society in which the individual lives.
When talking about a maximum life extension therapy it is intuitively credible that the moral judgement concerning this treatment will also depend on the putative cost of the technology. To handle this situation clearly, it is worth differentiating between three different conditions.
First, when the expense of the treatment (let it be the cost of one complete regeneration of an adult human body, i.e. the regeneration of all body parts, organs and tissues) is so high that only the richest people can afford it and the state obviously cannot guarantee it.
Mark Zupan is a tough guy, he is the captain of the United States quadriplegic wheelchair rugby team. Mark was the main character in the award-winning documentary entitled Murderball, a film I was impressed so much when I had seen it back at home in my favorite Toldi mozi. Mark was restricted to a wheelchair due to a truck crash when he was thrown into a canal and was stuck in frigid water, barely clinging to a tree branch, for fourteen hours and had broken his neck. Mark co-authored a book, called GIMP in which he tells his story on how he could totally redefine his life “through love, friendship, and an introduction to a new sport. Mark realized that he could live a more-than-full life in a chair and has gone on to create an existence that’s truly exceptional. Now a Paralympic athlete (playing quad rugby, aka “murderball”) who’s starred in a movie, Mark explains in his memoir that, in a way, getting hurt was the best thing that could ever have happened to him—and that despite people’s prejudices, a guy in a chair still gets to have sex with his girlfriend, party with his friends, and even crowd-surf at Pearl Jam shows.
EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS:
$10,000. From the story: By the mid-1980s, babies were being born via donated eggs that were fertilized outside the womb and later implanted in women incapable of producing viable ova. If you can imagine a scenario involving IVF-related technologies, chances are it has already taken place. The once-hypothetical fears of bioconservatives are now walking and talking human beings, but the debate over the ethical implications of such children is still oddly abstract. “It is argued,” states a 2002 report by the President’s Council on Bioethics regarding the commercial trade in human, “that we stand to introduce a commercial character into human reproduction, and to introduce commercial concerns into the coming-to-be of the next generation.” If that is the risk, we’re already running it, because the market in eggs, sperm, and reproductive technology has never been larger or more accessible. Selling ova to another woman is at once impossibly intimate and wholly impersonal, a connected but highly distributed process of exchange. It is a transaction well suited to the Internet, which tends to provoke uninhibited sharing among strangers cloaked in anonymity. … 
