Yesterday, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics published its latest report: Emerging Biotechnologies: technology, choice and the public good. The report was launched by Professor Mick Moran, who chaired the working party that produced the report, at a well-attended reception at the Nuffield Foundation. Here’s what he said:
On 19 November, Dr Geoff Watts, Council member and Chair of our Working Group on mitochondria, will discuss the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s (HFEA) consultation on mitochondrial transfer at a discussion event in London. In this article, adapted from a longer post which first appeared on the Wellcome Trust blog, he reflects on some of the Working Group’s conclusions.
On Sunday I took part in the Battle of Ideas session Organ donation: dead or alive? We discussed a number of questions with a lively and engaged audience, but the issue on this occasion came down to essentially two points: is the current definition of death right, and do we trust the medical profession to manage it?
The EU Commission has this week proposed a new target for the percentage of transport fuel from renewable sources to be made up by food crop-based biofuels. Specifically, the proposal says: “The share of energy from biofuels produced from cereal and other starch rich crops, sugars and oil crops shall be no more than 5 per cent, the estimated share at the end of 2011, of the final consumption of energy in transport in 2020.” This five per cent is half of the 10 per cent of total EU transport fuel demand to be met from renewable sources by 2020, a target set in the 2009 Renewable Energy Directive.
Following in the steps of my colleague Hugh (see previous post), I too crossed the Channel this week to take part in a Europe-wide discussion of organ donation and transplantation: this time through a workshop for journalists hosted by the European Commission. The aim of the workshop, attended by journalists from nearly twenty different countries, was twofold – first to provide background information from a range of perspectives, including an ethical one, and then to discuss the role and impact of the media on donation.
On the back of our 2011 Human Bodies report, I took part last week in a panel discussion at the 23rd European Students’ Conference in Berlin. This was a terrific event, gathering several hundred medical students from around Europe, looking at this year’s theme of ‘Transplantation and Implementation’. My session, shared with colleagues from Germany and Spain, was focused on ways of increasing organ donation for transplantation.
In the recent court judgement on Tony Nicklinson’s challenge to the current law on euthanasia Lord Justice Toulson quoted from the report of the Falconer Commission on Assisted Dying on a number of occasions. He said that it ‘contains an interesting analysis of arguments and views, but it would not be right for the court to treat it as having some form of official or quasi-official status’ (para 24).
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