Author: Brian Carnell

Some Curmudgeonly Thoughts on World AIDS Day

You know you work at a university when all of the “save the world” events happen a day early. World AIDS Day is today, but all of the related events by activists here were held yesterday. Apparently saving the world from AIDS is important, but you’ve got to fit in raising awareness before the students start their alcohol rituals beginning Thursday night.

Also I have to confess I’m getting annoyed with the “break the silence” and “raise awareness” angles. For example, actor Danny Glover told the Associated Press that, “If I am disappointed with a tape, we shoot it again. But with AIDS, the movie’s over. It’s up to you and me to break the silence.”

Break the silence? Maybe in South Africa or Zimbabwe, but in the United States you can’t avoid AIDS awareness — if I walk a mile on campus I’m sure to see at least 5 or 6 different AIDS-related posters.

Finally, it is interesting to see that today moderate conservative claims that were so controversial in the 1980s have become mainstream. The United Nations AIDS Agency put out a press release saying,

Broadly speaking, men are expected to be physically strong, emotionally robust, daring and virile. Some of these expectations translate into ways of thinking and behaving that endanger the health and well-being of men and their sex partners.

This seems like a veiled way of saying, “Stop having so many different sex partners, you morons.” When some conservatives in the 1980s tried to suggest that maybe gay men should act more responsibly by limiting the number of sex partners, the idea was pilloried as a right wing attack on everything good about life.

Part of the difference is that in Africa AIDS is largely a heterosexual disease, so the attack on reckless promiscuity is no longer directed solely at homosexuals. Still, those who criticized monogamy as repressive or conversely celebrated casual sex with multiple partners as liberating were dead wrong.

British Researchers to Decode Zebrafish Genome

Now that the human and mouse genomes have been decoded, United Kingdom researchers have announced plans to decode the genome of the zebrafish in a three-year projected funded by the Wellcome Trust medical research charity.

Although mice and monkeys get the lion’s share of press when it comes to medical research with animals, the zebrafish has been an important animal in laboratory studies for a long time. The zebrafish’s blood, kidney, and vision systems are very similar to those in human beings and the species has been used as a model in those areas.

The decoding of the zebrafish genome will help researchers better understand what specific human genes do. The human genome is of limited usefulness by itself, but when scientists can compare the human genome to the genome of mice, zebrafish and others, they will be able to get a very good idea of exactly how the genes interact and how things like inherited diseases arise.

Some zebrafish, for example, suffer from genetic blood disorders that are very similar to human genetic blood disorders. By comparing
the genomes, scientists might get a better understanding of what causes these genetic diseases and how they might be treated.

Currently efforts are underway to decode the genome of dogs and chickens, and some scientists are calling for researchers to focus on decoding the genome of great apes, which are the closest living genetic relatives to human beings.

Source:

Zebrafish genome next. The BBC, November 21, 2000.

Feminists for Free Expression Attack Columbia Sexual Harassment Law

Feminist for Free Expression recently wrote a letter to Alan Stone, vice president of public affairs at Columbia University, to protest Columbia’s controversial new sexual harassment policy.

The letter complains that the new disciplinary procedures for sexual harassment complaints, “infantilize students by streamlining away both the protection for the accused and the accountability of the accuser, as the juvenile justice system routinely did to “protect” children before In Re Gault.”

Such infantilization is taken to an extreme by Columbia’s odd definition of lack of consent.

The inference of lack of consent when the accused “should have been aware” of “mental . . . impairment or incapacity” opens the door to a wide variety of potentially spurious accusations against which defense might be difficult. Such a red flag should be countered by a rigorous attention to fundamental precepts of due process, but it is not.

FFE also strenuously objects the Star Chamber aspects of the new policy, wherein the accused is not allowed to confront the accuser, nor have an attorney, parent, or other third party present, nor even be notified of the disciplinary proceeding until just before it occurs.

This policy, by isolating the parties from each other and enforcing secrecy, attempts to combine a disciplinary procedure with therapeutic consideration of “the emotional needs of individuals who have experienced sexual misconduct.” However, since charges are real and potential penalties are real, therapeutic considerations should be dealt with independently, not entwined in a fact-finding hearing with the resulting failure of a full and fair and recorded hearing of the charges.

Sexual attacks should certainly be punished. But it is no service to women to hold that offenses against them require a kangaroo court.

A very succinct summary of the problems with Columbia’s policy.

Meanwhile civil libertarian Nat Hentoff points out in a Village Voice column that in March 1999 Columbia’s own Columbia Law Review published a definitive study of private and public college disciplinary procedures. The study was co-authored by Columbia Law School professors Vivian and Curtis Berger. Hentoff interviewed Vivian Berger and writes,

In her comments to me, Vivian Berger emphasizes the [Columbia] policy’s denial of the accused student’s right to confront and cross-examine the accuser and the accuser’s witnesses. She also criticizes the denial of the right to have an attorney present, even during an appeal. Appeals are solely by the dean, who, as the policy states, “relies upon the written record and does not conduct a new factual investigation.”

Since the dean doesn’t investigate further, how can the accused bring forth new evidence? And since there has been no-cross examination of his accuser and her witnesses, what kind of a fair, complete written record can the dean rely on to be just in the appellate process.”

Leave it to a major American university to create a disciplinary policy reminiscent of legal proceedings in some third-rate authoritarian dictatorship.

Sources:

Feminists for Free Expression letter to Alan J. Stone. Joan Kennedy Taylor for the Board of Directors of FFE, Letter, November 16, 2000.

How Columbia can save itself?. Nat Hentoff, The Village Voice, November 22-28, 2000.

North Korea Starving Again

The United Nations is once again appealing for hundreds of millions of dollars to avert famine in North Korea, where it estimates millions of people risk starvation if aid donations to the Communist state don’t increase dramatically.

U.S. congressman Tony Hall recently visited North Korea and reported that food production was down by almost half over last year’s already poor harvest. The North Korean government blames the ongoing famine on drought and other natural conditions, but the main cause of the 6-year long famine that has claimed up to 2 million lives is the closed, totalitarian state.

North Korea’s government is extraordinarily xenophobic and rarely lets any foreigners venture outside of its capitol of Pyongyang — which is one of the reasons some countries are reticent about donating aid since they often aren’t given the ability to track how such aid is used.

Hall, who was allowed to venture into rural areas of North Korea, reports that in many parts of the country that he visited hospitals were in such poor condition that, “Electricity ran for no more than two hours a day, and patients were fed less than half the food a human being needs to survive.” According to Hall, many North Koreans have turned to “alternative foods” made from 40 percent grain and 60 percent twigs, leaves and barks. Such pseudo-foods are a common feature of any famine area, but in the end usually do far more harm to starving people than good.

Unfortunately barring some sort of dramatic coup or fall of the North Korean government, life for those within the Communist state is unlikely to improve as the government has proven able to main tight military and political control over its territory even in the midst of very high death rates from famine.

Sources:

N. Koreans eating twigs. The BBC, November 29, 2000.

North Korea’s lost generation. The BBC, November 29, 2000.

Research on Sea Squirts Might Aid Infertility Research

Animal rights activists like to claim that medical research on non-humans is pointless since non-humans are too different from human beings. While there are massive differences, which researchers take into account, it is amazing just how much human physiology has in common with something as tiny as the tiny sea squirt. Specifically, the sea squirts reproductive system is very similar to that of human beings and researchers at Newcastle University are hoping that studying the sea squirt might reveal important clues to better understanding human reproduction and, more specifically, some of the causes of infertility.

In this case researchers are examining how the sperm of sea squirts fertilizes eggs. Researchers hope that they will be able to isolate the protein present in the sperm that initiates the fertilization process. Surprisingly there are still very large unknowns about how this process proceeds in human beings.

One of the problems with studying the problem in human beings are legal and ethical issues in experimenting on human eggs and sperm, as well as difficulties in screening human sperm and eggs for any number of diseases that might affect the results of the experiment. “We think we have nicely circumvented all those problems by going after the sea squirt activating factor first,” Dr. Keith Jones told the BBC. “We are hoping that we can identify the factor within a couple of years, and hopefully we can come up with the human equivalent within a matter of months.”

Source:

Sea squirts aid fertility research. The BBC, November 23, 2000.

Researchers Cure Type I Diabetes In Mice

Researchers at Yonsei University in Korea and the University of Calgary in Canada recently announced they had developed a gene therapy cure for mice suffering from type I insulin. In type I insulin, which afflicts millions of people, the body doesn’t produce enough insulin because the insulin-producing beta cells within the pancreas are destroyed.

The genetic therapy cure involved injecting mice with a virus that contained a gene designed to spur insulin production. After receiving the treatment, the animals’ blood sugar levels remained stable for the eight month period of the study.

Because of differences in mouse and human physiology, there are still enormous obstacles that would have to be overcome before such gene therapy could be a viable treatment option in human beings. It is an important first step in that direction. It wasn’t too long ago that proof that genetically modified cells could be made to produce insulin was heralded as an important step forward. Now by demonstrating that complex organisms such as mice can be successfully treated in this way provides enormous hope that this century will likely be the last in which type I diabetes is a significant health problem.

Jerrold Olefsky of the University of California-San Diego, in a commentary on the research published in Nature, wrote that, “Despite these issues, the paper represents a good example of how basic research can applied to problems of clinical significance.”

And also a prime example of why basic research on animal models must continue.

Source:

Gene therapy used to cure rodents with diabetes. Reuters, November 23, 2000.