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AR 24:9 - "An unpleasant scientific practice: ethics dumping"
In this issue:
ISLAM - "how the young Muslim demographic thinks"
SCIENCE - doing politically incorrect experiments in less-sensitive countries to avoid scrutiny
SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER - 'judging hate in America fairly?'
Apologia Report 24:9 (1,417)
February 28, 2019
ISLAM
"A journalist's newsletter offers a glimpse into how Muslim Millennials think" by Julia Duin -- "One interesting note that came out of a Religion News Association meeting two months ago was a prayer meeting of Muslim journos who belong to the group. There was also a group of Jewish reporters who met for a Shabbat dinner.
"Signs of a big change? As a veteran of probably two dozen such conferences, I remember the days when folks took care not to mention their religious preferences at all, even in the company of like-minded reporters. Some thought it was a journalistic sin to do so. ...
"So it was with great interest that I read Boston freelancer Aysha Khan's entry on her 'Creeping Sharia' newsletter. <www.bit.ly/2UhDSCp> ...
"I'm guessing 'creeping Sharia' is a tongue-in-cheek rebuke to those who see the specter of sharia law in America's near future. [It generates] a curated list of articles about Islam you might not see anywhere else.
"She links to the Dearborn, Mich.-based Institute for Social Policy and Understanding <ispu.org> an organization that researches American Muslims. I can't comment on the ISPU as I've never used it to help source any articles and there are some questions about its function as a charity. But they seem to be the closest thing we have to an American Muslim think tank." Duin includes plenty of background info as well. GetReligion, Nov 19 '18. <www.bit.ly/2TkK7bn>
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SCIENCE
"No Dumping, Please" (The Economist [UK], Feb 2 '19, pp66-68) -- reports on "Recent events [that] have highlighted an unpleasant scientific practice: ethics dumping" and opens by recounting an incident involving "the editing of the genomes of two embryos that are now baby girls, by He Jiankui, a Chinese DNA-sequencing expert [visit <www.bit.ly/2Nntg1X> to see this discussed in AR 23:42]....
"Dig deeper, though, and what happened starts to look more intriguing than just the story of a lone maverick having gone off the rails in a place with lax regulation. It may instead be an example of a phenomenon called ethics dumping.
"Ethics dumping is the carrying out by researchers from one country (usually rich, and with strict regulations) in another (usually less well off, and with laxer laws) of an experiment that would not be permitted at home, or of one that might be permitted, but in a way that would be frowned on.
"The most worrisome cases involve medical research.... But other investigations - anthropological ones, for example - may also be carried out in a more cavalier fashion abroad. ... Dr He was encouraged and assisted in his project by a researcher at an American university." The details which follow name this researcher <www.bit.ly/2Vja8oG> as "Michael Deem of Rice University in Houston, Texas."
"[T]he European Union (EU) has sponsored a three-year, 2.7m Euro investigation into ethics dumping. TRUST, as it is called, has been a collaboration <trust-project.eu> between researchers from Europe, Africa and Asia, which came to an end last year. It scrutinised past examples of ethics dumping and sought ways of stopping similar things happening in the future. ...
"Zhai Xiaomei, the executive director of the Centre for Bioethics at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, in Beijing, who is also deputy director of the health ministry's ethics committee, welcomes what TRUST has done. ... One high-profile case in China concerns Sergio Canavero, an Italian neurosurgeon who resigned from the University of Turin in 2015 because of fierce opposition to his plan to perform head transplants on human beings. ... Dr Canavero went to China [where] he collaborated with Ren Xiaoping, an orthopaedic surgeon at Harbin Medical University, on dogs, monkeys and human cadavers, and planned, last year, to graft the head of a patient [Don't try this at home. - RP] paralysed from the neck down onto the body of a deceased donor - only to be stopped by China's health ministry at the last minute. ...
"A dozen similar cases in Asia and Africa fill Ethics Dumping: Case Studies from North-Sough Research Collaboration [1], a book published by TRUST. ...
"The latest twist in the CRISPR-babies saga itself is that Dr Deem was supposed to take up a position this month as Dean of the College of Engineering at the City University of Hong Kong. The offer was made before news of the birth of genetically modified babies broke. Dr Deem's possible involvement in the affair has led the City University to put the contract on hold...."
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SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER
The Power Line blog's Steven Hayward discusses <www.bit.ly/2TdqMbQ> The Washington Post Magazine's long feature article by David Montgomery <www.wapo.st/2Tb7DHG> entitled "The State of Hate: Researchers at the Southern Poverty Law Center have set themselves up as the ultimate judges of hate in America. But are they judging fairly?" from November 8, 2018.
Hayward titles his piece "The Southern Poverty Libel Center" and finds Montgomery "extremely wishy-washy on the subject of extremism and the SPLC's handling of various conservative groups, but in the context of the mainstream media it might be read as a mild probation for the SPLC.
Hayward quotes Montgomery: "[T]he SPLC undermined its own credibility with a couple of blunders. In 2015, it apologized for listing Ben Carson as an extremist (though not on the hate list), saying the characterization was inaccurate. Then, this past June, the group paid $3.4 million to Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz and his Quilliam organization <quilliaminternational.com> to settle a threatened lawsuit. The SPLC had listed them in a 'Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists' (again, not on the main hate list). The SPLC apologized for misunderstanding Nawaz's work to counter Islamist extremism. ...
"Does an alliance of lawyers with conservative Christian leanings that has won nine cases before the U.S. Supreme Court in the past seven years meet that [criterion]? According to Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project <www.bit.ly/2ToHuF6> - which produces the hate list - the decision to put the Alliance Defending Freedom <adflegal.org> on the list for 2016 was a judgment call that went all the way up to top leadership at the SPLC. ...
"Which means it was a political decision. Probably because ADF has such a good track record at the Supreme Court. (It won a couple of its cases on 9-0 and 7-2 votes, which hardly looks like getting the favor of a 'right-wing' Court.) ...
"The SPLC's stated goal is to create an unbiased hate list, but forays into political activism by other parts of the organization could certainly hurt the list's reputation. For the first time, the SPLC recently took a stand on a Supreme Court nomination, urging Alabama's senators to vote against Brett M. Kavanaugh. It also just formed a political arm called the SPLC Action Fund <www.bit.ly/2Ug7XlO> that can lobby and support ballot measures. I asked Cohen if those advances onto political ground threaten to erode the SPLC's credibility as a nonpartisan arbiter of hate. 'We think it's important to protect our integrity, the power of our brand, you might say,' Cohen said. 'But we also think the issues that we're advocating for are important.'"
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Ethics Dumping: Case Studies from North-South Research Collaborations, Doris Schroeder, ed. (Springer, 2018, paperback, 134 pages) <www.amzn.to/2U733Hz>
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