Should the scientific community use the information collected from the Holocaust death-camps?
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Whirling into view, the complex chemical helix that spirals past is the molecular basis, the foundation, upon which all life takes shape. The intricately woven structure of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and hydrogen defines, at the most basal level, our identity. As the double helix of deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA) whizzes by, the sequence of nitrogenous bases begins to form into coiled chromosomes of an animal, and the farther the progression, the more clearly it is determined that the genome before you is that of a mouse—but not just any mouse. Suddenly out of the code leaps a foreign element, a segment of human DNA. This creature, not merely a mouse, represents the future of biotechnology and biomedical research—it is a transgenic mouse. Now that mixing and modifying of a creature’s genome has become a scientific possibility; what will be the effects on society? What are the implications of being able to engineer such a novel organism for specific purposes? The moral and ethical arguments for and against transgenic animals must be considered, and to this end there must also be a distinction drawn between moral and ethical arguments. Before their implications and effects on society can be evaluated or even investigated, reasons for creating transgenic animals and their uses must be explored to some degree first.
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U.S. prisoners have few rights. There is no right to privacy for prisoners. They can’t vote and aren’t allowed to own anything while in prison. However, our Constitution guarantees them the right to adequate medical care as long as they are incarcerated. [1] The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston (UTMB) is contracted by the Texas government to provide health care for 80% of the state’s prisoners. UTMB is in charge of the eastern half of the state and Texas Tech handles the smaller population in the West to cover the remaining 20% of our 150,000 prisoners. The care UTMB is providing is unacceptable. Some patients leave the prisons much sicker than when they entered and others never leave at all. For them their time in prison became a death sentence because UTMB failed to give them the medical care they needed to stay alive. UT is solely responsible for the unnecessary suffering it is causing the prisoners. We, as students as staff of this university, need to know what is being done to prisoners with the seal of approval of UT. The most alarming thing about UTMB is that it is promoting using prisoners as subjects in biomedical research studies. Many of the Biomedical Engineering students graduating from here in Austin will end up as medical students at UTMB; some might even be asked to work in the prison system as part of their education or oversee a clinical research trial. Knowing what is going on will give them the power to stand up and fight for patients rights.
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