Rob Irvine

Why might people donate tissue for cancer research? Insights from organ/tissue/blood donation and clinical research.

Little is known about why patients with cancer do or do not donate their biopsied/cancerous tissue to research. A review of the literature on motivations to participate in clinical research and to donate tissues/organs for therapeutic use may provide some insights relevant to tumour banking research. While more research is necessary, a better understanding of the factors that motivate patients to give or refuse consent to tumour banking may ultimately improve consent practices, public trust and donation rates.

Ethics of Species Research and Preservation

The case outlined below will be the basis for the “In That Case” section in the 10(4) issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry (JBI) that will focus on non-human animals. We invite interested readers to provide responses to the case for possible publication. Responses should be 500–700 words, although longer manuscripts will be considered for publication. Responses should be submitted as soon as possible after publication of this issue. The editors will select the responses to be published in the 10(4) issue of the JBI and reserve the right to edit contributions to avoid repetition. Editorial changes will be cleared with authors before going to press. Responses should be submitted via Editorial Manager (http://www.edmgr.com/jbin/).

Conservation Through Sustainable Use

The case outlined below provides the basis for the “In That Case” section in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry (JBI). We invite interested readers to provide responses to the case for possible publication. Responses should be approximately 500–700 words in length (though longer manuscripts will be considered) and submitted as soon as possible. The editors will select the responses to be published and reserve the right to edit contributions to avoid repetition. Editorial changes will be cleared with authors before going to press. Responses should be submitted via Editorial Manager.

Consent: a need for guidelines to reflect local considerations.

As you point out in your Editorial (Nature 460, 933; 2009) on the distribution of human cell lines, withholding scientific material from the broader research community contravenes the basic norms of science. We do not believe, however, that standard international consent guidelines for donors are the solution to this problem and suggest that these should instead be devised on a local scale in collaboration with ethics committees to facilitate tissue distribution. Far from research being “hindered by restrictions from donors” as you suggest, people are generally willing to donate tissue for research, and even to give open-ended consent to unspecified future applications. This willingness is underpinned by donors’ faith in medical research and in their right to protection and confidentiality; the assumption is that their tissue will be used only for ‘ethical’ research. But problems can arise, for example over whether consent covers the proposed usage (at present there are many different models of consent, ranging from specific to general) and when and how tissue should be discarded (K. Aalto-Setala et al. PLoS Biol. 7, e1000042; 2009). The answers may not always be obvious, and ethics committees (in collaboration with donors or their representatives) need to take into account the kind of tissue involved as well as the demographics and potential vulnerability of the donor or donor community, to judge the acceptability of the research proposal.

Faith-based perspectives on the use of chimeric organisms for medical research

Efforts to advance our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases involve the creation chimeric organisms from human neural stem cells and primate embryos—known as prenatal chimeras. The existence of potential mentally complex beings with human and non-human neural apparatus raises fundamental questions as to the ethical permissibility of chimeric research and the moral status of the creatures it creates. Even as bioethicists find fewer reasons to be troubled by most types of chimeric organisms, social attitudes towards the non-human world are often influenced by religious beliefs. In this paper scholars representing eight major religious traditions provide a brief commentary on a hypothetical case concerning the development and use of prenatal human–animal chimeric primates in medical research. These commentaries reflect the plurality and complexity within and between religious discourses of our relationships with other species. Views on the moral status and permissibility of research on neural human animal chimeras vary. The authors provide an introduction to those who seek a better understanding of how faith-based perspectives might enter into biomedical ethics and public discourse towards forms of biomedical research that involves chimeric organisms.

Food Ethics: Issues of Consumption and Production Self-Restraint and Voluntaristic Measures Are Not Enough

Keywords Foodethics.Foodadvertising.Ethicalconsumption.VeganismThe articles in this symposium issue of the Journal ofBioethical Inquiry (JBI) explore some of the moral,political, and social concerns bearing on the produc-tion and consumption of food issues. In The Ethics ofFood, biomedical ethicist Gregory Pence wrote:“Food makes philosophers of us all. Death does thesame … but death comes only once … and choicesabout food come many times each day” (Pence 2002,vii). The contributions presented here in this issue ofthe JBI underscore Pence’s point and raise importantquestions about ethics, morality, values, and the law aswell as the responsibilities consumer-citizens, the foodindustry, and government authorities have to eachother and to non-human animals in the market placeof products and ideas. In addition to the articles, thereis a set of case study commentaries by three leadingauthorities, all of whom are involved in the criticalanalysis of various aspects of animal welfare, ecology,environment, and sustainability in their research andwriting.The PapersReeve (2013) provides valuable insights into the op-eration and outcomes of self-regulatory systems offood advertising to children. Using two Australiancodes as an entry point—the Australian Food andGrocery Council’s Responsible Children’s MarketingInitiative (AFGC 2010) and the quick service restau-rant industry’s Initiative for Responsible Advertisingand Marketing to Children (QSRI 2009)—she interro-gates the adequacy of voluntary codes of practice thatare to bring about morally and politically meaningfulchange to the governance of the food industry and itstelevision campaigns.The food industry spends billions of dollars onadvertising to reach into and shape consumer subjec-tivities and to create consumer cultures (Bakir andVitell 2010). Food and beverage companies are espe-cially active in constructing children as consumers(Bagdikian 2000). Direct marketing of “non-core” orunhealthy foods to children is a sensitive and morallychargedissue.Recent researchsuggestsalink betweenchildren’s use of media (TV, videos, video games, andcomputers) and media targeted to children (particular-ly sophisticated advertising campaigns) with the rapidincrease in childhood obesity. The marketing tacticsand strategies that are mobilized by the food industryhave led to calls for the introduction of stricter regu-lations on food advertising directed at children.Reeve notes that the food industry in Australia, in itsattempt to avoid legislation and additional regulations,has reacted to the issues that external stakeholders have

Bioethics and Nonhuman Animals

IntroductionThis special issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiryfocuses on animal ethics and various intersectionsamongst human and nonhuman animals. Interest innonhuman animals and their moral status is well-established internationally, and human interdependencewith nonhumans is now at the forefront of political,socioeconomic, and medical agendas in most countriesaround the world—where people and animals are in-creasinglyregardedeitherasthreatsorsourcesofbenefitin relation to one another. The nonhuman animal hasbecome, therefore, the centre of inquiry and debate inthe study of philosophy, literature, history, visual art,cultural studies, sociology, geography, environment,and religion.Against this background, it is perhaps surprising thatnonhuman animals remain on the fringe of bioethics. Inan extended critique on the state of contemporary bio-ethics, Cary Wolfe (2010) contends that modern bioeth-ics is riddled with prejudices and “pragmatic expedien-cies” that have emptied bioethical discussion of nonhu-mananimalsandwhyandhowweshouldtakethemintoaccount in our moral decisions:Of these prejudices, none is more symptomatic ofthe current state of bioethics than prejudice basedonspeciesdifference,andanincapacitytoaddressthe ethical issues raised by dramatic changes overthe past thirty years in our knowledge about thelives, communication, emotions, and conscious-ness of a number of nonhuman species—apreju-dice that bioethics shares with the very core of acenturies-old humanism (Wolfe 2010,56).One might conclude from Wolf’sdiscussionthattheexclusion of nonhuman animals from bioethics dis-course reflects a kind of fundamentalism that takesanthropocentrism as an order of nature in which humanparadigmsformthebasisofasinglepointoforientationand the only reference point for moral consideration.Thisisnottoarguethatconcernwiththemoralstatusof nonhuman animals and our relationships with themhave lost their vigour. While bioethics experienced anepistemological shift—becoming “reissued” as whatcould be described as biomedical bioethics—animalethics has beenpursued and developed under a separateheading. A Google search of the phrase “animal ethics”undertaken by the authors in July 2013 yielded31,700,000 hits, while the term “bioethics” yielded6,863,000. Indeed the examination of animal ethicshas generated sophisticated philosophical discussion ofthemoralstatusofnonhumananimalsandenhancedourunderstanding of animal capacities (Beauchamp andFrey 2011; Armstrong and Botzler 2008).From both within the discipline (Gruen and Ruddick2009;Pierce2009; Potter 1996, 2001; Reich 1995;Whitehouse 2003) and without (Wolfe 2010;Ehrlich2009), orthodox bioethics has been criticized for beingtoo narrowly conceived and medically oriented. Whilewe agree with the overall conclusion of theseauthors, we must be careful not to make sweeping

Uncanny Animals: Thinking Differently About Ethics and the Animal–Human Relationship

Maintaining the attention to bodily difference human and animal ontology has long been constructed on rigid physical characterizations seemingly untouched by culture. In “Reframing the Ethical Issues in Part-Human Animal Research,” Haber and Benham (2012) call into question most of the formal elements of essentialism that an earlier mode of thought took for granted. Two views on the nature of human and interspecies animal bodies are in contention here. The first offers an argument grounded in the essential developmental properties of human and animal material and biological systems such that giving life to “animals with human derived material,” exemplified by animal–human hybrids and chimeras, effaces physical distinctions between animal and human. Dualism is invoked as an interpretive aid, structuring thought and shaping understanding. Against nonhuman animals, human life, in all its stages and forms, uniquely requires some fundamental form of moral consideration. Because of this presumptive obligation, an “inexorable moral confusion” is an inevitable by-product of scientific change, since fixed constructions of animal and human bodies as unified and separate wholes are lost in any clear-cut sense (Robert and Baylis 2003). The uncanniness of animals with human parts is not, therefore, simply a product of the tension between the familiarity and foreignness of their appearance and nature. Rather, their very existence disrupts a priori assumptions about how the world is and ought to be ordered; belief systems that are central to understandings of what it means to be human and humanitys sense of distinctiveness...