A Transgenic Posssibility?

Transgenic Silk Ear Sow?

Google Images

You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear . . . yet.

Note the piglet checking for an ear-ly appearance  of silken hair .

More on those abortion videos . . .

Ruben Navarrette Jr.
Google Images

Writing for the Daily Beast (August 10, 2015), Ruben Navarrette Jr. admits, "I Don't Know if I'm Pro-Choice After Planned Parenthood Videos," and he is particularly disturbed by the fifth video:

Most recently, in Video #5, Melissa Farrell, director of research at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast in Texas, talks cavalierly about the cost of extracting "intact fetal cadavers." It is, Farrell says coldly, "all just a matter of line items."

This raises the possibility that no one wants to discuss - that some of the aborted fetuses exited the womb alive and they were either killed or left to die, their "cadavers" intact.

No one wants to discuss this, but here we are, discussing it. I've often encountered the argument that abortion should be a woman's right even up to the moment before birth. After a successful birth, however, a living fetus is not only declared a baby, but, presumably, is also granted the right to life. Wouldn't that presumption likewise apply to aborted, "intact fetuses" taken from the womb alive?

Note that I'm focusing upon a narrow point: Does an aborted but intact, living fetus have the right to life?

Cormac McCarthy's Novel No Country for Old Men

Amazon Books

In light of the abortion video released only a few days ago, this passage in Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men seems particularly apt (with hat tip to JK and David Duff):

Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that's a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way this country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation. (Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men; quoted in Jean Bethke Elshtain's Sovereignty: God, State, and Self, Basic Books, 2008, pages 203-204)

Excellent recounting in dialect of a conversation, and a stunner of a conversation killer, but the words bring one to thinking . . .

Planned Parenthood and Planned Organ Harvesting

Deborah Nucatola
Google Images

Sandhya Somashekhar and Danielle Paquette report that an "Undercover video shows Planned Parenthood official discussing fetal organs used for research" (Washington Post, July 14, 2015). The official, Deborah Nucatola, Senior Director of Medical Research for Planned Parenthood, was recorded on camera explaining Planned Parenthood's work in 'donating' fetal tissue to researchers, according to the Center for Medical Progress, which recorded the discussion and which claims Nucatola's words prove that Planned Parenthood is breaking the law by selling fetal organs. Here are some of Nucatola's words:

I'd say a lot of people want liver, . . . [a]nd for that reason, most providers will do this case under ultrasound guidance so they'll know where they're putting their forceps . . . . We've been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I'm not gonna crush that part, I'm gonna basically crush below, I'm gonna crush above, and I'm gonna see if I can get it all intact . . . . Every provider has patients who want to donate their tissue, and they want to accommodate them . . . . They just want to do it in a way that is not perceived as: This clinic is selling tissue. This clinic is making money off this. In the Planned Parenthood world, they're very, very sensitive to that. Some affiliates might do it for free. [But if they charge, t]hey want to come to a number that looks like a reasonable number for the effort . . . allotted on their part . . . . [I]t's probably anywhere from $30 to $100, depending on the facility and what's involved . . . . It just has to do with space issues, are you sending someone there that's going to be doing everything . . . is there shipping involved? Is someone going to be there to pick it up?

Nucatola seems to be very careful in avoiding language that suggests Planned Parenthood to be involved in selling fetal organs, but money is definitely described as changing hands, and that itself offers the temptation to charge more if more trouble is taken, especially if Planned Parenthood is taking orders for specific organs, a problematic issue in its own right:

Arthur Caplan, director of New York University's Division of Medical Ethics[, says,] "I think the only relevant goal of an abortion clinic is to provide a safe and least risky abortion to a woman . . . . If you're starting to play with how it's done, and when it's done, other things than women's health are coming into play. You're making a huge mountain of conflict of interest."

Even if an abortion clinic is not getting money, the harvesting of organs from fetuses is highly problematic, for the reason Caplan gives. And note that Nucatola's matter-of-fact wording presupposes fetal body parts as commodities, even in her remark - or perhaps especially in her remark - that "Some affiliates might do it for free." Because some, perhaps most, do not do it for free . . . but for a price.

Genetics and Gender?

Eric Vilain
Human Genetics at UCLA

In looking for information to enrich discussion on issues of gender and feminism in one of the courses I teach, I stumbled onto a fascinating website titled Rediscovering Biology that featured a lengthly interview with an expert, a Parisian working at UCLA, Eric Vilain, on the "Biology of Sex and Gender," and the site is so interesting and informative about sexual characteristics, gender identity, and genetics that I've excerpted below, albeit heavily edited by me:

Sex determination is appealing to everyone because . . . . [o]ne of the first characteristics of a human being at birth is . . . boy or girl . . . . The field of sex determination[, however,] is very poorly understood . . . . We know a handful of genes that makes boys become boys and girls to become girls[,] but we know that we're missing a very, very large piece of this puzzle . . . . [such as] why . . . a number of babies would be born intersex . . . . What we know even less is how our brain becomes either more of the masculinized brain or more of the feminized brain . . . . [As for the body,] you can look at [it] with a different perspective[,] which is the makeup of the gonads, whether they're testes or ovaries . . . . We know[, however, that] there are individuals who have ovaries yet they can be XY and conversely . . . have testes and be XX . . . . [A]nother way of looking at [sexual determination] . . . is gender identity. It's one's own perception of one's sex[,] . . . how people feel . . . they are, either male or female . . . . You can have individuals who are fully masculinized, have a penis, have two testicles, they're XY, they have levels of testosterone of the majority of males, yet they feel . . . they belong to the [female] body and in their mind . . . are female . . . . When the sex chromosomes were discovered, it was immediately obvious that males and females were different at the chromosomal level. Females were XX; males were XY. Then the immediate question was: Well, what makes a male a male and a female a female? . . . . One [view] is it's the number of X chromosomes that makes you either male or female and females have two X chromosomes; males have only one. This mechanism is probably the most frequent in the animal kingdom . . . . [But there is the] Androgen Insensitivities Syndrome[,] . . . the inability for androgens -- that is essentially testosterone -- to bind to their receptor. In the Androgen Insensitivities Syndromes, the individuals are typically XY. They have a Y chromosome. They typically have two normally functioning testicles which do produce male hormones, in particular high levels of testosterone, but the testosterone cannot bind to its receptor[, which] . . . makes the external appearance of these individuals to be fully female. They do not have penis. They do have what appears to be a normal vagina and they look [like a] normal female at birth . . . . We [also] know that, there are a number of babies born who are male -- they have two testes and penis -- and yet they do not have a Y chromosome. We started to decipher the molecular mechanisms that lead to this situation and we now know that there [are] a few other genes that can sometimes mimic the action of the genes in the Y chromosome. So the Y chromosome is not this single force that pushes the whole male sex determination pathway . . . . The idea is in instead of having a simplistic mechanism by which you have pro-male genes going all the way to make a male, in fact there is a solid balance between pro-male genes and anti-male genes and if there is a little too much of anti-male genes, there may be a female born and if there is a little too much of pro-male genes then there will be a male born . . . . The pathway [to male or female] is made of a complex network of genes that interact with each other at the molecular level and these interactions depend highly on the dose of each of these genes. So the end result is a subtle balance between a number of genes, most of them still unknown unfortunately that lead to either the making of a male or the making of a female . . . . We know a number of things in sex determination. We know a handful of genes. We know a little bit how they work. We unfortunately don't know how to explain the majority of our patients, who are either intersex or with a complete sex reversal. We can understand what's happening in the molecular level in only about 30% of the cases and that's not very much . . . . Knowing that you're a boy or you're a girl is something that's unique to humans. This is what we call "gender identity" and we don't know how this happens. We don't know why suddenly at a certain age, and rather early actually, about 3, 4, 5 years of age, we just know that we're either boys or girls . . . . How do we know . . . ? I have no idea. I don't think anyone has any idea. I would love to know. We're trying to work on some biological determinance of gender, to try to understand what happens in our brain . . . . But that probably will not even tell us how we know at the time we knew it . . . . Studying gender is complicated: first because there is no animal model for it. You have to study humans. One way to study gender is by looking at individuals who don't feel right in their own gender. They have what we call "Gender Dysphoria." They're unhappy about their gender. Some of them may become transsexuals. They actually perform surgery because they're so intensely unhappy about the gender that was attributed to them that they feel the need to change using surgical tools . . . . Hormones have always been thought as the unique or major factor influencing the development of a male or female brain. We now know that hormones cannot explain everything in the making of a brain, whether it's masculine or a feminine brain. But we don't know really what the other factors are . . . . [S]ome of these factors may be genetic. Maybe pieces of the Y chromosome are important at some level in the brain['s] sexual differentiation. Maybe some environmental factors are also important: there are compounds in the environment that are hormone-like, they're estrogen-like for instance, that might play a role in this. These are purely speculative arguments, but those are the kind of things that we are trying to decipher . . . . Sexual orientation is an independent parameter from gender identity . . . . What we know about the mechanisms of gender identity is extremely poor. What we know about the mechanisms of sexual orientation is a little better but it's not clearly understood. It probably is a mixture of a number of factors -- social, environmental, genetic . . . . [We also have to understand intersex.] . . . . Intersex is an intermediate sexual phenotype. This means that this is a state of being in-between what's commonly accepted as male or female at all levels, that is an anatomical level, gonadal level, and brain level, and behavioral level . . . . Complete sex reversal corresponds to the extreme end of the intersex spectrum, where apparently there is no ambiguity of the genitalia at birth, but yet there is a intermediate state, at some level which is either the genetic level or the hormonal level or the brain level. But at birth sex reversal doesn't show. At birth phenotypically they look either male or female. It's only later on during their lives because they usually cannot go through normal puberty, that we find out that they had some intermediate state in terms of either their genetic makeup or their hormonal makeup . . . . The big dream for me and the big challenge in fact, is to understand the mechanisms of gender identity. This is really the big enigma and to me it's also the most important aspect of sex determination to understand because . . . out of all the definitions of sex, gender is the most important. In fact it's how people feel that is important, regardless of what they look like, of what their levels of hormones are, or what their face or genitalia look like. It's what they feel within themselves. That's what's important. And to understand what make[s] gender identity happen at some point in a human life is absolutely fascinating and extremely complicated to study but that's certainly the next challenge in the research in sex determination.

This might seem like a rather long excerpt, but the original piece is so much longer, and also in interview format, that I simply had to radically cut it and leave out most of the original text, but those readers interested in more can go to the link and read the entire fascinating interview.

Dr. Vilain's English is sometimes a bit awkward, but his explanations are usually very clear and tend to support Camille Paglia's advice, namely, that Feminists need to learn more biology . . .

Curiosity as a Vice: Three Aspects

Gilbert Meilaender

Lutheran Theologian

(Image from Valparaiso University)

I'm still following the paper trail on the trials of theoretical curiosity that Hans Blumenberg first introduced me too many years ago when I read his Legitimacy of the Modern Age, and I've recently come to see three distinct aspects to a critique of curiosity as a vice.

In "Mastering Our Gen(i)es: When Do We Say No?" (Christian Century, October 3, 1990, pp. 872-875), Gilbert Meilaender argues for limits to curiosity that derive from the unpredictability of those things that we would wish to control:

In That Hideous Strength, "a modern fairy tale for grownups," C. S. Lewis imagined a National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E) which is undertaking an ambitious attempt to control and shape nature. Filostrato, a slightly mad clergyman who is a member of N.I.C.E., says at one point that he awaits a more rational day when artificial metal trees will replace natural ones. Then, if we tire of a tree in one place, we simply move it elsewhere. "It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess." Applied to human beings, Filostrato's hope is equally sanitized. "What," he asks, "are the things that most offend the dignity of man?" Answer: "Birth and breeding and death." To take control of them is, we must admit, part of the Human Genome Initiative -- indeed, still more, part of the modern project whose "legitimacy" and "curiosity" have been defended by Hans Blumenberg in his provocative (if Teutonic) book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. What Blumenberg does not pay much attention to, however, is that the rise of the modern project was interwoven with renewed interest in magic and esoteric religion, with the thirst for control and mastery of the secrets of the universe. Still today that thirst is present: to get control of our genes and thereby, perhaps, of the elusive genies whose very unpredictability and unreliability threaten efforts at mastery.

I don't think that this "unpredictability and unreliability" of things that Meilaender thematizes in this article provide the material for his more fundamental objection, for our curiosity to understand might lead to information sufficient for us to know predictably well the consequences of our "efforts at mastery." Only if something is intrinsically unpredictable or unknowably complex would our curiosity for control need to be curtailed -- if the objection is merely that something unforeseen might go wrong.

This particular critique of curiosity as a vice if directed toward that which exceeds our grasp is thus merely a stopgap measure, not a profoundly serious critique, for an object of our curiosity might be illegitimate at one time but legitimate at another.

In "Curiosity as a Moral Virtue" (International Journal of Applied Philosophy, Fall 2001), Elias Baumgarten cites Meilaender to distinguish between two distinct albeit related critiques of curiosity as a vice:

Meilaender's religious perspective may help to spell out a concept of debasing curiosity, that which is beneath proper human inquiry. It also expands inappropriate curiosity to include a domain that is above and beyond proper human concern, and it suggests the possibility that both share a common flaw, a controlling and possessive spirit of curiosity that knows no limits, in contrast to a spirit of receptivity and humility.

Baumgarten then quotes Meilaender:

Many possibilities may pique my curiosity -- I may wonder how my neighbor's wife performs in bed; how human beings respond to experiments harmful to their bodies, or even to suffering; how the development of a fertilized egg could be stimulated to produce a monster rather than a normal human being; how to preserve a human being alive forever. I may wonder, but it would be wrong to seek to know . . . because I cannot possess such knowledge while willing what is good . . . . To love the good and to possess what we love are, in this life, not always compatible. (Gilbert C. Meilaender, The Theory and Practice of Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 140)

Although Baumgarten suggests that Meilaender is speaking here of "human overreaching" and holds that Meilander therefore "puts this form of curiosity together with voyeurism as a vice rather than a virtue," I think that voyeurism applies only to curiosity employed in such things as wondering "how my neighbor's wife performs in bed," which would constitute something "beneath proper human inquiry," as Baumgarten has previously expressed it, for to know such a thing would be debasing to dignity and respect. This is not so much overreaching as 'underreaching'. I suspect that many of us would agree that curiosity of this sort would be debasing . . . though pornographers have made an enormously lucrative business out of it.

Overreaching, by contrast, would be to direct one's curiosity toward that which is "above and beyond proper human concern," and this is the "theoretical curiosity" that Blumenberg was centrally focused upon in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age. This would be curiosity employed not toward objects that immodestly debase us but toward those things that would improperly exalt us. I am, however, rather at a loss to know what things fall into this category. Presumably, such things would be those that lead us into hubristic pride, but would knowing "how to preserve a human being alive forever" be one of these things? Maybe. But in what sense? Is there some harm in knowing? Or only in acting on that knowledge? Or does the problem lie in a potentially prideful attitude?

I'm not much of a moral philosopher, but I've managed to identify three aspects to the so-called 'vice' of curiosity (exceeding, debasing, and exalting), so I'll just step back at this point and let others weigh in.

Response to Warren T. Reich on ars moriendi

Aristotle

Philosopher of Phronesis

(Image from Wikipedia)

I suppose that I can now name one of the scholars whose papers I'm responding to.

Yesterday at Sogang University's Death, Dying, and Spirituality Conference, I responded to two papers, but I'll report on just one of my two responses, the one I made to Warren T. Reich's paper on "The Art of Caring for the Dying: A Crisis in Western Culture."

Professor Reich, by the way, is a Professor Emeritus of Bioethics at Georgetown University (Washington, DC), where he holds a position as Distinguished Research Professor of Religion and Ethics.

I won't summarize his entire article here because I'm pressed for time this morning, but I'll draw some passages from my response to a distinction that he made between negative and positive empathy, and I'll also include some observations relevant to caring for the dying:

You make the interesting point that empathy for the feelings of another requires not simply positive but also negative attention to the other as an individual. I confess that I had never thought of this negative aspect of empathy, by which you mean our need to diminish the attention given to anything distracting us from feeling 'with' the other.

...

I'm not a professional caregiver, but when I lived in Tübingen, Germany, I knew a young man named Daniel from Uganda who was dying of AIDS. I didn't know him well, but because we had a friend in common and because Daniel was very alone, I decided to visit him every afternoon in his hospital room on my way back from the theology library where I was pursuing my doctoral research. In doing so, I had to learn a capacity within myself to be with another person who is dying, and that requires patience, something that I'm not abundantly endowed with. I had to give up my impatience, my desire to do things quickly, for I did not know how long his dying might take. Perhaps by negative empathy, you mean something like that? I also had to relinquish some other things, such as disgust, for I occasionally had to help hold Daniel as the nurse wiped him clean after he had used the toilet. That also involved my overcoming my own trepidation about the virus that he carried. However, my knowledge of the disease helped me in that, for I knew that HIV is very hard to contract.

...

Recently, I have read reviews of a book by a young physician who has learned some of the lessons [about empathy, consolation, and care for the dying] that you describe. Her name is Pauline W. Chen, and her book is titled Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality. She also maintains a blog, and in an entry titled "Our two jobs," she writes:

I met a woman whose father had practiced surgery from the 1950's until his death from pancreatic cancer in the 1980's. He had a very busy practice and on top of his clinical duties was chairman of surgery at two of the local hospitals.

One day, this woman went to visit her father at the hospital. She found him in a patient's room, sitting at the bedside and reading the Bible aloud to his patient. When he later left the patient's room, his daughter asked him, "Why were you reading to that patient?"

"She asked me to read from the Bible to her," her father replied. "And because I could no longer do anything for her medically, I did what I could." (Chen, Amazon Blog)

Chen tells us that she was trained in surgery at a time when therapeutic failures were an exception but that older surgeons learned at a time when such failure was the rule. Older doctors understood the importance of taking time, and Chen advises younger doctors to learn the importance of doing so as well:

[S]ometimes the most therapeutic thing you can do has nothing to do with another drug or operation. Sometimes all we can -- and should -- do is simply be with our patients, make them comfortable. Sometimes the very best thing we can do as someone's doctor is to sit at their bedside, take their favorite book, and read aloud. (Chen, Amazon Blog)

I think that Chen and you are asking us to develop wisdom, a sense for the right thing to do.

From your citation of Walt Whitman as nurse and as poet, I gather that you would agree that he was one who had this sort of wisdom. Concerning the wisdom of knowing what to do, I am reminded of an anecdote about Abraham Lincoln:

Towards the end of the war, Lincoln went to see Seward, his Secretary of State, a man with whom he often disagreed and whom he did not particularly like. Seward had managed to break both his arm and his jaw in a carriage accident. Lincoln found him not only bedridden but quite unable to move his head. Without a moment’s hesitation, the President stretched out full length on the bed and, resting on his elbow, brought his face near Seward's, and they held an urgent, whispered consultation on the next steps the administration should take. Then Lincoln talked quietly to the agonized man until he drifted off to sleep. Lincoln could easily have used the excuse of Seward's incapacity to avoid consulting him at all. But that was not his way. He invariably did the right thing, however easily it might be avoided. Of how many other great men can that be said? (Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999) page 487; citing David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, (New York: Touchstone, 1996) 580-1)

William H. Seward was not dying, of course, but he was suffering, and Lincoln showed wisdom in extending a special kind of compassion -- negative empathy in relinquishing his dislike for the man, and positive empathy in recognizing that Seward needed company, someone to be there in his suffering until he drifted off to sleep.

Could we call this sort of practical wisdom by Aristotle's term for it: phronesis? Or is it a different sort of ethical wisdom? If so, could you suggest a different term?

Such was a portion of my response to Professor Reich's interesting paper on the issue of how to care for the dying, which I cannot quote directly since it is not yet published. Reich seems to have liked what I said, for he replied by remarking at the outset that my response "was the finest that he had ever heard at any conference that he had attended in his life," or something to that effect. I was so surprised that my astonishment may have interfered with my capacity to retain his exact words, which were, actually, the nicest thing that anybody's ever said to me.

Anyway, he did confirm that he was thinking about Aristotle's category of phronesis, or "practical wisdom," and he later asked me if he could have the sources for the quotes from Chen and Johnson.

Now, I must ready myself for another day at the conference.