Senomyx Redux

Looks like Semonyx is back in the news regarding their testing of artificial flavors on cells from aborted fetuses.

I wrote about Senomyx three weeks ago: the world yawned; Children of God for Life wrote about it, and something happened: Campbell Soup has ended its relationship with Senomyx.

Within hours of our press release, Children of God for Life received notice from Campbell Soup that they have severed their ties with Senomyx.

Stated Juli Mandel Sloves, Senior Manager of Nutrition & Wellness Communications at Campbell Soup Company, "We are no longer in partnership with Senomyx. This fact was discussed during the Senomyx conference call with its investors earlier this month." 

“Every effort is made to use the finest ingredients and develop the greatest selection of products, all at a great value. With this in mind, it must be said that the trust we have cultivated and developed over the years with our consumers is not worth compromising to cut costs or increase profit margins."

From the CGL press release:

“What they do not tell the public is that [Senomyx] are using HEK 293 – human embryonic kidney cells taken from an electively aborted baby to produce those [taste] receptors,” stated Debi Vinnedge, Executive Director for CGL, the watch dog group that has been monitoring the use of aborted fetal material in medical products and cosmetics for years.

“They could have easily chosen COS (monkey) cells, Chinese Hamster Ovary cells, insect cells or other morally obtained human cells expressing the G protein for taste receptors,” Vinnedge added.

After three letters, Nestlé finally admitted the truth about their relationship with Senomyx, noting the cell line was “well established in scientific research”.

Pepsico wrote: “We hope you are reassured to learn that our collaboration with Senomyx is strictly limited to creating lower-calorie, great-tasting beverages for consumers. This will help us achieve our commitment to reduce added sugar per serving by 25% in key brands in key markets over the next decade and ultimately help people live healthier lives.”

“If enough people voice their outrage and intent to boycott these consumer products, it can be highly effective in convincing Senomyx to change their methods”, Vinnedge noted. “Otherwise, we will be buying Coca-Cola, Lipton soups and Hershey products!”

So you see that we CAN change the way these Big Pharma and Biotechs operate if we speak our consciences.

What Do You Do With A Problem Like Lila Rose?

Lila Rose and her Live Action undercover investigative videos of Planned Parenthood have created a firestorm of media coverage lately.

In the videos a man and a woman pretend to be a pimp and prostitute running an underage sex trafficking ring. Planned Parenthood does the predictable thing: aids and abets the pimp under the mistaken guise of "helping" the women get "needed" services.

The result has been a huge backlash against PP with several calls to defund them (about time!) from the millions they receive in public dollars.  Here's the problem: As much as I want it to, I don't think it will stick.

Here's why in a nutshell -- it's all based on a lie. Not the kind of lie that is against the law, but the kind of lie that our enemies tell. It's the "ends justifies the means" tactic that is the hallmark of the Father of Lies. They can and do tell those types of falsehoods all day, every day. Theirs is the tactic that says "if you just repeat the lie long enough and loud enough, people will believe you". It's the necessary lie.

But that tactic can't and won't work for us. We can't overlook it for the "greater good". One may not do evil so that good may result from it. Doesn't work. Ours is definitely the harder path; ours is the way of love and truth. It's so much harder to do things the right way that sometimes it is tempting to borrow a page from the forces that oppress us. That's why God fights for us: because we can't do it on our own. To attempt it on our own is an act of pride and hubris. Note that I am not ascribing any such motives to Lila Rose or Live Action -- the motive was good, but the motive was flawed.

The excellent site Public Discourse: Ethics, Law, and the Common Good has an article by Christopher O. Tollefsen that puts it succinctly:

Yet for all the good that may come of these videos, the way in which Live Action has made its mark is itself extremely troubling, for it is predicated on a form of falsity, which is exercised in an unloving way. Promising and welcome as the effects of these videos might be, they represent a real and dangerous corruption of the pro-life movement itself by endangering the pro-life movement’s commitment to its ideals of love and truth.

It is tempting to refer to the “pimp” character in Live Action’s videos as an “actor.” But this is misleading. Actors perform for willing and aware audiences who realize they are watching a fiction. The “pimp,” rather, lied, repeatedly and pervasively, in his conversation with the Planned Parenthood worker: he presented himself as other than he truly was, and his purpose in doing so was clearly to deceive.

In so presenting himself, the “pimp,” and all those who abetted him, did damage to his own integrity, creating for himself an appearance in the world deliberately at odds with his inner self. But integrity—a unity of one’s acting self in all its aspects—is a great good, and we destroy that unity in a lie only at a great cost to our wellbeing[.]

So we have the task of constantly evaluating ourselves and examining our motives in this fight against the scourge of abortion. But we have to fight clean, and we have to trust God to deliver us from evil because He is Truth and Love itself -- and Love conquers all.

Stem Shell Game

I can't decide whether this reporting is purposefully negligent or simply sloppy. Inquirer.net is carrying a story about a Japanese team that used "stem cells" to partially treat a spinal cord injury in a monkey.

TOKYO - Japanese researchers said Wednesday they had used stem cells [which kind? some are moral to use, others not] to restore partial mobility in a small monkey that had been paralysed from the neck down by a spinal injury.

"It is the world's first case in which a small-size primate recovered from a spinal injury using stem cells," professor Hideyuki Okano of Tokyo's Keio University told AFP. [Another reference to generic "stem cells". Designed to confuse?]

Okano's research team, which earlier helped a mouse recover its mobility in a similar treatment, injected so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells into a paralysed marmoset, he said. [So-called? That's what they're called: iPS. Differences matter.]

The team planted four types of genes into human skin cells to create the iPS cells, according to Kyodo News. [Injecting genes into skin cells is licit (iPS), putting baby in the blender (embryonic stem cells (ESC)) is not.]

The injection was given on the ninth day after the injury, considered the most effective timing, and the monkey started to move its limbs again within two to three weeks, Okano said.

"After six weeks, the animal had recovered to the level where it was jumping around," he told AFP. "It was very close to the normal level." [Apparently not a cure-all.]

"Its gripping strength on the forefeet also recovered to up to 80 percent."

Okano called the research project a major stride to pave the way for a similar medical technique to be used on humans. [Always they want to experiment on humans.]

Scientists say the use of human embryonic stem cells as a treatment for cancer and other diseases holds great promise, but the process has drawn fire from religious conservatives and others who oppose it. [Irrelevant reference to ESC, when Okano's research used iPS. Uncalled-for attack on "religious conservatives and others" who are opposing the "great promise" of the ends-justifies-the-means.]

Embryonic stem cell research is controversial because human embryos are destroyed in order to obtain the cells capable of developing into almost every tissue of the body. [Right. ESC are capable of developing into the whole tissue of the body, because they come from babies!]

Oy! For a more complete treatment about the different kinds of stem cells and their permitted moral use in medicine see Father Tad Pacholczyk, Director of Education at the NCBC (National Catholic Bioethics Center), is the author of a column called Making Sense out of Bioethics that appears in various diocesan newspapers across the country.

As If On Cue

Now we have this story about a team of American scientists who have created the first synthetic cell. J. Craig Venter , a genome-mapping pioneer and researcher converted one kind of bacterium into another with its own RNA.

We just mentioned last post (Fold It, the protein folding game) about medical/scientific research and the obligation to behave ethically. The Church is not anti-science regardless of what you may have head misreported about the whole Galileo incident. Indeed she is very avid to support it, because truth can never be contradicted, and God is Truth. But as with all research, it needs to come with boundaries in order to use it rightly.

[NYT] A top Italian cardinal, Angelo Bagnasco, said the invention is ''further sign of intelligence, God's gift to understand creation and be able to better govern it,'' according to Apcom and ANSA news agencies.

''On the other hand, intelligence can never be without responsibility,'' said Bagnasco, the head of the Italian bishops' conference. ''Any form of intelligence and any scientific acquisition ... must always be measured against the ethical dimension, which has at its heart the true dignity of every person.''

Cure Cancer By Game Playing?

This is a bit novel: games with real-life purposes and applications. A team of biologists have created a game called Fold It (at the equally clever domain name fold.it).

David Baker, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher at the University of Washington, designed a game that uses human intuition about puzzle solving to help predict how proteins fold. Proteins are key players in both diseases and developing cures.

What big problems is this game tackling?

• Protein structure prediction: As described above, knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small proteins can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.
• Protein design: Since proteins are part of so many diseases, they can also be part of the cure. Players can design brand new proteins that could help prevent or treat important diseases.

A human protein (+) Enlarge This Image

How does my game playing contribute to curing diseases?

With all the things proteins do to keep our bodies functioning and healthy, they can be involved in disease in many different ways. The more we know about how certain proteins fold, the better new proteins we can design to combat the disease-related proteins and cure the diseases.

I suppose it is a little like SETI@home in that it is using voluntary distributed processing to work on difficult problems, but unlike SETI, this might have more practical applications closer to home.

Supposedly all the resultant work will be in the public domain and not just the intellectual property of some mega-biotech firm, but time will tell. One guy has already folded a protein that might be a good anti-influenza form.

One of the troubling aspects of all the research that is getting done these days is the lack of ethics and moral restraint accompanying it. (Yes, I know that ethics can mean whatever you want it to depending on your starting point, but in this case I mean Judeo-Christian/natural law type ethics). "Science" is running far ahead of its ability to keep a moral framework around it.

Case in point: a friend of mine says he rarely contributes to fundraisers and Walk/Run/Race for the X cure, because the money raised to "find a cure" frequently turns into "a genetic test for X abnormality in utero and subsequent abortion". Instead of curing the disease, they are preventing the disease from troubling society by preventing that person's birth.

This has apparently happened with organizations like the March Of Dimes, UNICEF, and the Komen Foundation.

As helpful as many [Down Syndrome] support organizations can be to parents of children with DS, some of the largest ones have abdicated any responsibility for reducing abortions of babies with birth defects. The March of Dimes, the National Down Syndrome Society, and the National Down Syndrome Congress all take a neutral stance on abortion, ostensibly because they don't want to judge or to tell anyone what to do.

However, a neutral stance on abortion is not a neutral policy. It implies that the killing of these innocents is in the best interests of society, and can therefore be justified. Instead, these organizations need to take a stand in defense of all babies with Down syndrome, born and unborn.

They could have an unparalleled influence on the current situation by putting a positive face on these unborn babies, whose humanity and inherent value to society shine through at the moment of birth. There is no telling how many precious lives could be saved if they did. [source]

These are all things to ponder and think about. In the meantime, you could solve a puzzle by Fold It.

What's Your Meta-Ethic?

From time to time it's important to do something that's hard for most people because it's done so seldom: think. Yours truly is not immune from this.

Thinking is hard work. It's easier to do a whole day of manual labor than to think and reason and learn all day.

But it's worth doing at times because it makes the rest of the time that much easier. Especially when it's about the basics -- no, deeper than basics; something foundational.

Meta-ethics.

Meta-ethics isn't some kind of Japanese monster movie, Godzilla vs. Meta-Ethics. Meta-ethics deals with the overarching principles of which things are "good" and "important"; the things to be valued; the worldview.

[Wikipedia] Meta-ethics addresses questions such as "What is goodness?" and "How can we tell what is good from what is bad?", seeking to understand the nature of ethical properties and evaluations.

According to Richard Garner and Bernard Rosen,^[1] there are three kinds of meta-ethical problems, or three general questions:

1. What is the meaning of moral terms or judgments?
2. What is the nature of moral judgments?
3. How may moral judgments be supported or defended?

A question of the first type might be, "What do the words 'good', 'bad', 'right' and 'wrong' mean?" (see value theory). The second category includes questions of whether moral judgments are universal or relative, of one kind or many kinds, etc. Questions of the third kind ask, for example, how we can know if something is right or wrong, if at all.

Why should we bother with such philosophical stuff? Isn't it rather esoteric and removed from everyday life and ultimately unknowable?

It's important because the meta-ethic determines what the ethics are. Morals are derived directly from ethics. These tell you what to do.

If you have a bad meta-ethic, you get bad ethics; bad ethics lead to bad morals; bad morals lead to bad actions. So, it's important to start from the right place. [Part 2]

What's Your Meta-Ethic? Part 2

If you have a bad meta-ethic, you get bad ethics; bad ethics lead to bad morals; bad morals lead to bad actions. So, it's important to start from the right place. [Part 1]

Here's a (simple) example.

Meta-ethic: Life is universally good.
Ethic: Death is bad, because it deprives people of life.
Moral: Killing people causes death; therefore, you shouldn't do it.

Starting from somewhere else leads to different results.

Meta-ethic: Freedom is universally good.
Ethic: Things or people that restrict freedom are bad, because it inhibits freedom.
Moral: Killing people who restrict freedom is ok, because it increases freedom.

Now the latter example is, in fact, ethical and consequently moral, because it is consistent with the stated meta-ethic.

It is consistency which determines whether or not something is ethical. Something is immoral if it is inconsistent with the ethic. It is the meta-ethic which determines what is good, or goodness itself.

Take politicians. (Please.) Jonah Goldberg writes:

[USA Today] Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is "being out of alignment with my values." [...]

There is, however, a third possibility. Obama is a postmodernist.

An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.

"PoMos" hold that there is no such thing as capital-T "Truth." There are only lower-case "truths." Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo's telling, reality is "socially constructed." And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that "privileges" the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.

Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism. It claims to liberate society from fixed meanings and rigid categories, but it is invariably used to impose new ones, usually in the form of political correctness.

So next time you hear about some pharmaceutical company or some Bio firm who is experimenting on human embryos and justifies it because their Ethics board said it was OK, ask them: what's your meta-ethic?

Ethics And Reason Not Leaving Anytime Soon

(h/t chaospet via Language Log)