Category: Bioethics

As most of you know, I’ve spent much of the last few months immersed in Spinoza and his intellectual descendents, the legitimate ones as well as the bastards (I see you, Deleuze – oh, how I see you!). As such, I’ve cultivated a more than unhealthy interest in people who write about Spinoza. What do they write about? What do they see? What are they searching for?

Quite naturally, I was drawn to this New York Times book review of Rebecca Goldstein’s “Betraying Spinoza”. For an excommunicated Jew living an austere life, what was left to have betrayed?

Seems, according to the book review, not much – it is instead one woman’s desperate attempt to see the Jewishness in Spinoza, an idea I find – puzzling, at best. Yes, his religious background is necessary to understand his “Ethics” and the reasoning his God is a naturalistic diety who doesn’t give a damn about the mechanations he’s wound up and released, but why is is necessary to find the religion inside that which the very author professes has no religious motivation? Or at least no Jewish motivation, something with which he wishes no connection.

The review makes me leary to pick up the book, for the book sounds like nothing more than a desperate attempt to grasp on to a now-heroic figure and claim him to a lineage he himself denies. It seems that those who are looking for Spinoza do best to look elsewhere.

Finally and about time – given the huge number of measles outbreaks that have happened, and the deaths and disabilities, I sincerely hope this fuckwad gets everything possible coming to him.

Vaccinate, people! Diseases are bad, mmmkay? Sheesh. Medicine works for hundreds of years towards this goal, and people take 3 steps back the minute it’s available. Idiots.

The doctor who sparked an international scare over the safety of MMR vaccine is to be charged with serious professional misconduct by the General Medical Council in an attempt by the medical establishment finally to lay the controversy to rest.

Andrew Wakefield, who published a research paper in 1998 purporting to show a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, is accused in preliminary charges of publishing “inadequately founded” research, failing to obtain ethical committee approval, obtaining funding “improperly” and of subjecting children to “unnecessary and invasive investigations”, The Independent has learnt. The research is said to have caused immunisation rates to slump and cases of measles, mumps and rubella to soar. The research, which appeared in The Lancet, is said to have done more damage than anything published in a scientific journal in living memory.

Holy crap! This is…amazing. It might very well be one of the most significant medical break-throughs of the last 50 years.

Cure found for Huntington disease in mice offers hope for treatment in humans
Researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT) have provided ground-breaking evidence for a cure for Huntington disease in a mouse offering hope that this disease can be relieved in humans.

Published today in Cell journal, Dr. Michael Hayden and colleagues discovered that by preventing the cleavage of the mutant huntingtin protein responsible for Huntington disease (HD) in a mouse model, the degenerative symptoms underlying the illness do not appear and the mouse displays normal brain function. This is the first time that a cure for HD in mice has been successfully achieved.

Oiy. Where to even start?

A state report on a Massachusetts school for the disabled said electric shocks were administered to students – sometimes as they bathed – for offenses as minor as nagging, swearing and sloppy appearance.

“Various injuries to students have been reported” at the Judge Rotenberg Center, according to the report released Wednesday by the New York Education Department.

The school in Canton, Massachusetts, receives $50 million a year from New York state to care for and educate about 150 youths because there is no space available in New York for the intensive treatment.

The Rotenberg Center provides an intensive, 24-hour program that begins with a typical school setting, but about half the residents require the “aversive therapy” of electric shock, according to Rotenberg staff. The center describes the one- to two-second shocks as similar to a bee sting.

For years, the state has contracted with the facility, where autistic and other disabled students wear backpack-like devices that shock them when they misbehave.

Even the folks at AJOB appear relatively speechless.