Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
As a follow-on to the below post on PIGD in England, Pro-Life News reports on the same story and then comments (complete with misspellings and scare quotes):
Doctors tested embryos created by the woman and her “partner” using in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) methods for the cancer gene. Only unaffected embryos were implanted in her womb, the newspaper said. But it is not reported how many babies the so call “doctors” killed in the screening proucess.
It will surprise no one, I’m sure, that this makes not the slightest sense.
Glen McGee reports on this development in genetic diagnosis: England’s HFEA (national assisted-reproduction policy-making body) has finally agreed to authorize pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (”PIGD”) for some known cancer-linked genes (apparently BRCA1 & 2), but the genes in question are patented by a commercial corporation, Myriad, who flatly refuse to license the testing. So the regulatory barrier has been removed, but it is still illegal to perform tests which, presumably, patients want, and that could give them knowledge of a child’s predisposition to breast or ovarian cancer, because a commercial license-holder has decided unilaterally not to allow it.
I have blogged previously on the dangers of patents for ordinary genome sequences; this seems to be as stark an example as you could ask for. Basic information about people’s health status and prognosis is being withheld from them, deliberately, by an uninvolved third party acting under property rights law, of all things. Are people’s values and freedom ever going to be taken seriously in the healthcare arena?
