Science and Tech Flashcards
SCIENCE AND ETHICS: Dong Pyou Han, former assistant professor of Biomedical Sciences at Iowa State University.
Dr Han required impressive lab results in order to continue receive funding for the research and development of the AIDS vaccine.
So Dr Han did what some scientists are tempted to do which is to fake test findings.
He faked tests results by using rabbit’s blood spiked with human antibodies to make it appear that he made a breakthrough toward a potential vaccine against the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).
SCIENCE AND ETHICS: Anesthesiologist Scott Reuben
Over the past 12 years, prolific anesthesiologist Scott Reuben revolutionized the way physicians provide pain relief to patients undergoing orthopedic surgery for everything from torn ligaments to worn-out hips.
Now, the profession is in shambles after an investigation revealed that at least 21 of Reuben’s papers were pure fiction, and that the pain drugs he touted may have slowed postoperative healing.
The drug giant Pfizer underwrote much of Dr. Reuben’s research from 2002 to 2007. Many of his trials found that Celebrex and Lyrica, Pfizer drugs, were effective against postoperative pain.
When researchers are beholden to companies for much of their income, there is an incredible tendency to get results that are favorable to the company,
Paul White, another editor at the journal, estimates that Reuben’s studies led to the sale of billions of dollars worth of the potentially dangerous drugs known as COX2 inhibitors, Pfizer’s Celebrex (celecoxib) and Merck’s Vioxx (rofecoxib), for applications whose therapeutic benefits are now in question.
REGULATION OF SCIENCE: Fully autonomous weapons
Fully autonomous weapons can select and engage targets without human intervention.
If the development of such weapons is not regulated and even banned through international treaties, the weapons could be potentially very dangerous in the wrong hands. They are also incapable of meeting international humanitarian law standards, including the rules of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity, while they would threaten the fundamental right to life and principle of human dignity.
Without proper regulations in place, could hold catastrophic consequences for mankind.
REGULATION OF SCIENCE: Synthetic biological weapons
Synthetic biology involves designing and constructing biological modules, systems and machines for useful purposes. There is potential for developing biological weapons, possible unforeseen negative impacts on human health and the environment. As it involves biological modules that can mutate, the potential problems can be difficult to stop once released.
REGULATION OF SCIENCE: Big Science
After WWII, Big Science has increasingly defined the scientific community, with huge profit-driven corporations influencing the direction of scientific developments and not all of them have positive outcomes.
A pharmaceutical company, Turing pharmaceuticals, has recently increased the price for Daraprim, an antiparasitic commonly used to treat HIV patients, from $13.50 to $750 a pill. The US Congress is interrogating the company for their decision, and rightly so, since such regulatory processes should be in place to protect the rights of the patients and keep these firms with their greed in check.
Scientific and technological developments are increasingly driven by the profit motive of huge corporations, which means that areas of need could be potentially exploited. Hence, regulation must be put in place to address the concerns of the consumers.
REGULATION OF SCIENCE: Cloning and Chimera experimentation.
Controversial Scientific Research such as Cloning and Chimera experimentation should arguably be restricted as it raises multiple moral and ethical issues.
In traditional cloning, scientists transfer donor cells into an egg, while for the case of chimera research, scientists are able to transfer human cells into any animal eggs, creating an embryo that is almost entirely human.
The potential of this research enables scientists to perform drug tests on other living organisms such as sheep, with human liver cells in order to develop new medicines. This eliminates the unethical issue regarding human testing, thus avoiding human health risks.
Yet, it highlights a number of ethical questions regarding the extent to which human and animal cells may be combined and the killing of innocent lives for the experiments. Those animals have been through torture and suffering for the sake of human benefit.
Therefore, these types of scientific research should be controlled as it raises ethical concerns about the treatment of animals.
REGULATION OF SCIENCE: Artificially intelligent Robot with learning capabilities.
As technology progresses from inanimate objects governed by numbers to human-looking machines (like Sophia) controlled with conversations, it raises the question as to the compassion owed to AI. The more we humanise chatbots, virtual assistants, and machines, the more we in turn display human emotions toward them.
REGULATION OF SCIENCE: Environmental issues
Environmental issues such as : Depleting ozone layer, increased global warming, reduced vegetation, climate change, animal extinction etc…
Because of scientific research that gave birth to modernisation, the development of industries and establishment of factories and plants, which have in turn harmed everyone on the planet.
Urbanisation and improvement in infrastructure have definitely shaped everyone’s lives, but sometimes, its price is too high to be ignored.
REGULATION OF SCIENCE: Benefits of Scientific Research
Medical research should not be restricted as they help to improve the standard of health treatments against illness and diseases. A lot of people have benefited from scientific research and development in the medical field with the creation of vaccines against diseases and illnesses that were not curable in the past like tuberculosis, polio and many others.
Furthermore, new afflictions arise in our everyday life and it is only through scientific research can remedies and treatment for new diseases can also be found to save lives.
For example, during the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), thousands of people were infected and innocent lives were lost in the process. If it had not been for time and investment in antiviral medication, the virus would have not been contained and people would still be suffering from SARS, and possibly it’s even worse mutated forms.
Scientific research has transformed the way we eat today. In the 1940s, biologists began developing high-yield varieties of corn, wheat and rice, which, when paired with new fertilisers and pesticides developed by chemists, dramatically increased the amount of food that could be harvested from a single field, ushering in the Green Revolution.
These science based technologies triggered striking changes in agriculture, massively increasing the amount of food available, especially for impoverished third-world nations, and simultaneously transforming the economic structure of agriculture practices.
CONSEQUENCES OF SCIENCE: Madame Curie
Madame Curie is remembered for her discovery of radium and polonium (two extremely radioactive elements), and her huge contribution to finding treatments for cancer. She died of aplastic anaemia, a blood disease that often results from exposure to large amounts of radiation.
Many who were present at the early detonation of nuclear bombs at Bikini, New Mexico, and the Monte Bello Islands, not to speak of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, have suffered disastrous long-term effects. Civilians who have also been exposed to nuclear accidents or leakages have suffered in the same way.
It may be unfair to attribute responsibility to a scientist if his discovery is used for destructive or anti-social uses, for he cannot be expected to fully foresee the adverse consequences of his discovery. The scientist is only responsible for the consequences he can visualise in the immediate future.
In the case of the terrible side effects of exposure to nuclear energy, the scientist can hardly be held responsible, since in the early days nobody fully understood such effects.
SCIENCE AND TECH: Genetically modified foods
After five years of deadlock, parliament passed the national biotechnology and biosafety bill, paving the way for the cultivation of genetically modified crops in Uganda.
Trials for a GM banana variety, which is resistant to wilt and contains vitamin A, have been ongoing since 2004 in an effort to improve production. The law will mean this crop can be released to the public.
Priver Namanya Bwesigye, a plant biotechnologist at the National Agricultural Research Organisation adds that GM bananas could be released for public use in 2021. Other GM trials include developing cassava resistant to brown streak, drought-resistant maize and bollworm-resistant cotton.
Critics say GM crops will make farmers beholden to big agribusiness by having to buy seeds every season. Farmers in Uganda produce between 80% and 85% of their own seeds, saving some of their harvest as seed for the next planting season.
Prof Ogenga Latigo, an MP and champion of biotechnologies, says there have been numerous attempts to scare people about GM crops. Writing in the Uganda Observer recently, he said: “The scaremongering is, however, essentially unjustified and absolutely unjustifiable in science, facts and realities.”
He says there is little difference between GM crops and those grown conventionally. “The only difference now is that crops modified through the process of genetic engineering or biotechnology are called GMOs, and are feared and demonised, whereas all the other crops that are also genetically modified using conventional breeding methods – they are now called non-GMOs, are not feared or demonised, and are easily accepted.”
Scientists say the GM banana will fight vitamin A deficiency. In Uganda, on average, 30% of people do not get enough of this vitamin, Bwesigye says: the World Health Organization classifies the situation as grave if 15% of the population is deficient.
“[Malnutrition] is rampant in communities feeding a lot on staple [crops],” she says. “We are addressing communities feeding on these bananas every day.” She says the culture in Uganda is still for people to feed on staples and little else, rather than having a more varied diet that includes vegetables.
DANGERS OF SCIENCE AND TECH: Gain of Function research
Any organism can acquire a new ability or property, or “gain” a “function.” This can happen through natural selection or a researcher’s experiments. In research, many different types of experiments generate functions.
The high-risk practices raising concern are those that create mutations to examine whether a pathogen becomes more contagious or lethal as a means of estimating future threats. Examples include an altered pathogenesis, transmissibility and host range (ie. the types of host it can infect). This subset of research is represented by the term “potential pandemic pathogens” (PPPs).
It is intended to show how viruses can evolve in the near future, and give researchers something on which to test different medical treatments, like vaccines. The theory is that if you can show how one virus that isn’t dangerous to humans at the moment can evolve to attack the human immune system, you could begin preparing for a future where that variant exists.
Researchers can also get ahead of threats via software that can predict how the virus proteins might interact with various cell types or how their genetic sequences could be associated with specific virus features. Moreover, if researchers use cells in a lab dish, the viruses might be designed not to replicate, eliminating the risk of causing a pandemic due to lab leaks.
Another option is loss-of-function research, which uses versions of a virus with less pathogenic potential to unlock that microbe’s secrets. (However, the highly pathogenic forms can be quite different from their less threatening counterparts - for example, they may differ in how they replicate - possibly limiting the usefulness of such studies.)
In 2014, about 75 Atlanta-based employees at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) learned about their potential exposure to anthrax (a disease that causes fever, swelling, and often death in animals. It can be passed on to humans) after safety practices were ignored. Also, several long-forgotten vials of freeze-dried smallpox - a pathogen long thought to be stored in only two places, one in Russia and one in the US - turned up during a cold-storage cleanup at the National Health Institutes (the US’s medical research agency). A month later, the CDC made news again after it sent out vials of a relatively benign influenza virus contaminated with the much more deadly H5N1 avian flu virus.
The challenge now is to make sure that any research conducted, gain-of-function or otherwise, does not pose unreasonable risks to researchers, the public and the environment since lab incidents will inevitably still occur even with risk-mitigation measures. However, such measures in the form of a robust biosafety and biosecurity system might, at the very least, ensure that such incidents are inconsequential.
SCIENCE AND TECH: GM foods PT 2
Gene flow is one of the most common objections to GM food. In the case of crops, it would mean that GM crops could mix with traditional crops and introduce unwanted new characteristics into them.
A product of Genetic use restriction technology (GURT), also known as terminator technology. It is a method to restrict the use of GM crops/plants by producing seed or offspring which are sterile in order to restrict the spread of the new genes introduced into the target plant to their wildlife counterparts.
One argument against terminator seeds is that it would enslave farmers by preventing them from saving seed from one season to the next, making them dependent on re-purchasing seeds from big biotech companies. The irony is that either sterility or seeds that do not breed true are already widely used in conventional agriculture. Seedless grapes, watermelons and bananas are prized by consumers around the world, and despite their sterility have apparently not yet enslaved the farmers who grow them.
Another objection stems from the allegation that the sterility of the plants may be inherited and transferred unintentionally to other plants, despite it being biologically, as well as logically, impossible. This is because many crops pollinate themselves, and all crops have to be related to mingle.
Crops engineered to be toxic have also been a major concern regarding GM food. One example is BT crop, which has a gene borrowed from a bacteria that lets it produce a protein that destroys the digestive system of specific insect pests. Essentially, this means that the plants produce their own pesticide. At first glance this may seem alarming because pesticide sprays could be washed off our produce, while the “poison” in BT crops is inside the plant itself! But a closer look would show that it really is no big deal since what is poisonous to one species may be harmless to another: coffee is poisonous to insects but harmless to us, chocolate is dangerous for dogs but a pleasure for humans. The proteins produced in BT crops are tailored to the specific design of the digestive tract of certain insects, so it is completely harmless to us.
SCIENCE AND TECH: Fraud and Science
When Elizabeth Holmes, founder of medical company Theranos, announced that her firm was working towards a new type of blood test that would only need a miniscule amount of a patient’s blood, the medical industry and media became ecstatic about this “game-changing” invention, and investors poured millions into
this promising new start-up. It all turned out to be a lie, unfortunately, when it was soon discovered that Theranos’ work turned out to be a fraud.
SCIENCE AND TECH: Fraud with Evidence
Several years back, a meta-analysis of
research articles that were sponsored by soda companies found that, unsurprisingly, the majority of these articles showed positive conclusions that
favoured the soda industry. As scientists require funding for their research, it is inevitable that some may turn to industry for financial support. At the same time, businesses seek to improve the public’s image of their goods by providing supposedly robust and evidence-based support for the benefits of their products.
