Nov/24/2011

Is the fertilized human egg a person?

What is a person? Philosophers, ethicists and moralists have debated it for centuries and each generation brings in newer arguments. A rather interesting debate has been going on in America

A rather interesting debate has been going on in America. Of the 50 states comprising the USA, several (particularly in the South) have strong religious lobbies that persuade or pressurize the state's policies on a variety of issues, particularly governing human evolution, abortion, research on stem cells and related matters.

In several states, abortion is illegal. Indeed the issue of a woman's right to abortion went all the way up to the nation's Supreme Court in the year 1973, and its landmark judgment gave a woman the right to terminate her pregnancy in the first trimester as a constitutional right.

Since then, there have been continuous attempts in various states to overturn this judgment, using a variety of arguments.

Crucial to the argument is the issue of whether the foetus is a “person”. The unborn child is not legally classified as a person; the U.S. Supreme Court also noted then that “if the “personhood” of the preborn is established, then the case for the right to abortion collapses, because the foetus's right to life is then guaranteed specifically in the constitution”.

The debate thus turns to the issue of “is a foetus a person”.

And if we hold the foetus to be a person, why not the embryo out of which the foetus is formed, or even earlier to it — the fertilized egg a person? If yes, then the Supreme Court's 1973 decision of right to abortion should be overturned.

It is this point that the elected representatives of the state of Colorado wanted to establish by law in the year 2008.

When this issue was put to vote, it failed to get a majority. A second attempt in 2010 also failed, by a 70-30 majority.

And now the State of Mississippi has raised this issue of definition of ‘person' and held a series of public hearings on the question: “should the term ‘person' be defined to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the equivalent thereof?”

After a series of such public hearings, the issue went into the state legislature for voting on November 8, 2011 and was rejected. Thus, as on today, in the U.S., a human foetus, embryo, fertilized egg or a clone is not a person.

Not yet, but for how long? It is likely that fresh attempts will be made and it may even turn out that one state or the other might vote to grant personhood to them — and thus make abortion illegal all through the U.S..

Recall how George W. Bush stopped the U.S. federal government funding for research involving human embryonic stem cells, on the ground that since it can give rise to a human, we should not be tinkering with it, since that would be equivalent to man playing God.

What then is a person? The question is not easy to answer. Philosophers, ethicists and moralists have debated it for centuries and each generation brings in newer arguments.

A quick look at the Encyclopaedia and Wikipedia offers several perspectives. The 17th century French thinker Rene Descartes insisted on thinking or cognition as a must, stating “je pense donc je suis” (or “cogito ergo sum” in Latin, or “I think, therefore I am” in English).

A century later, the British philosophers John Locke and David Hume argued that a person is one who possesses continuous consciousness over time, and should have interpersonal relationship with others. (Pause for a moment and think about the qualifier adjective “continuous”; if one loses consciousness continuously, as when happens after a severe brain injury, is he no longer a person?).

But the one that I think captures personhood better is proposed by the contemporary philosopher Thomas I. White, of the Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, who wants the following attributes as necessary for personhood: be alive, be aware, feel positive and negative sensations, has emotions, has a sense of self, controls its own behaviour, recognizes other persons and has cognitive abilities.

White thus includes the ideas of Descartes, Locke and Hume, but note that in his case, personhood can actually extend to nonhumans such as higher primates, and perhaps even dolphins. (White has recently authored the book “In defense of dolphins: the new moral frontier”).

We thus have not heard the last word on ‘personhood' — either politically or philosophically.

Such serious issues are not without their satire. When The Economist reported on the Mississippi initiative, a reader Mr. Benjamin Twai from St. Louis, MO, USA wrote:

“My wife and I have been considering IVF. Mississippi's proposed amendment gives us even more reason to pursue this treatment. After the procedure, we will insist on taking custody of any extra embryos that result from IVF — it is our right as parents after all.

“Once safely in our home we plan to keep them in a freezer in our basement and list them as child dependents for tax deduction. In case of a power outage we will buy a backup generator. Anything less would be bad parenting.”

TN govt. bans Dam 999

The State government has banned the screening of the feature film, Dam 999, with immediate effect.

This was announced in a press release issued by Chief Secretary Debendranath Sarangi on Thursday.

The announcement followed the demand of several political leaders including M. Karunanidhi of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Vaiko of the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and S. Ramadoss of the Pattali Makkal Katchi that the screening of the film be banned on the ground that the release would disrupt the peaceful co-existence of Tamils and Malayalees in Tamil Nadu and Kerala and might lead to law and order problems.

In Lok Sabha on Wednesday, DMK members demanded a ban on its release.

PTI adds:

Director plans to move Supreme Court

The ban was described as “totally unfortunate” by the film’s director Sohan Roy, who said he planned to approach the Supreme Court against it because he has been given a go ahead by the Censor Board.

“This should not happen to any movie or creative work in India. Such actions will kill creative minds,” Mr. Roy, who is in Dubai in connection with the film release in UAE, told PTI when contacted from Kochi.

He said Dam 999 is a film with a "social cause", which describes hazards dams can cause and creates awareness among the masses about the impending dangers of a dam collapse if not attended to on time. The ban would send “wrong signals”, he said and pointed out there was not a word mentioning Mullaiperiyar or the issue in the film.

Maoist leader Kishenji killed in West Bengal

Elusive Maoist leader Kishenji was on Thursday killed in an encounter with the joint forces at Burisole forest in West Midnapore district, a day after he narrowly escaped from there.

The body of 58-year-old Molajula Koteswar Rao, better known as Kishenji, was found and identified after the “Jungalmahal encounter”, a top counter-insurgency force official said.

After receiving specific information that he and some of his associates and Suchitra Mahato, the wife of a slain leader he was living with, were hiding in the Kushboni jungle, the area was cordoned off and an encounter ensued after breaking the four tiers of security that Kishenji had, the official said.

It was from Kushboni forest that the Maoist Polit Bureau member, the second in-command of the outfit and in-charge of military operations in Jungalmahal since 2009, and Suchitra had eluded the joint forces on Wednesday.

The encounter which began this morning at Burisole jungle in Jamboni police station area was close to Kushboni near the Jharkhand border.

The official said Kishenji’s body was identified by the AK-47 rifle he was carrying. Suchitra and others fled.

A laptop bag, some letters written by Kishenji and Suchitra and a few important documents were earlier seized by the joint forces from Gosaibandh village nearby.

World's smallest car from nanotechnology

Ben Feringa of Groningen University in the Netherlands reports on his research in the British scientific journal Nature, describing how the tiny vehicle is electrically powered. His electric nano car even has four-wheel drive.

The nano car is not the first externally powered molecule, but it is the first that uses its own power to move in a directed way across a surface. They regard their design as a step towards developing nano machines capable in the future of carrying out work at the molecular level. To make the car, Feringa and his co-researchers mounted four previously developed molecular motors onto a central beam. Each of the molecular motors then becomes a drive wheel. The team has yet to find a way of reliably producing cars in which all the drive “wheels” travel in the same direction. Currently they have to select by trial and error those nano cars that do actually move forwards.

Electricity is provided by means of a scanning tunnelling microscope which transmits current through its extremely fine point to get the molecular car moving.

A brief pulse of half a volt changes the configuration of the molecular motors, and provided they all move in the same direction, the nano car moves forward around 0.7 of a nanometre.

The team got its molecular four-wheel drive to move around six nanometres across a copper surface with the aid of 10 pulses.