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Media outlets are reporting that Stanford scientists used AI to create an artificial virus. From the Wall Street Journal story:

Artificial-intelligence systems have been displaying some eye-opening new abilities in recent weeks: breaking out of their enclosures, hacking other companies, lying to people.

And now, for the first time, an AI model has created a new virus. A whole family of them, in fact.

In a study published in the journal Science, researchers at Stanford University and elsewhere said they successfully directed an AI model to create a collection of simple viruses that only infect bacteria and pose no threat to humans.

These particular viruses may not be dangerous, but what about the next ones scientists manufacture? What about potential attempts to test their virulence in humans? The approach in the Stanford lab sure sounds like a new form of gain-of-function research to me.

Say what you will about Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but he definitely cares about ensuring that organ transplant medicine remains ethical, and unlike many government functionaries, he and his department are actually doing something about it. Thus, on the back of Medicare decertifying a Florida organ procurement organization for cause in 2025, the government is now decertifying the Network for Hope that operates in Kentucky and a few other states.

The government warned the network last year that its procurement procedures were ethically deficient. But the organ procurement organization never cleaned up its act despite knowing it was being scrutinized, including, apparently, for seeking to procure organs from people who had not died.

The unethical cases involve a procedure sometimes known as heart death (as opposed to brain death). In a heart-death donation, the donor is usually receiving intensive care. That medical support is withdrawn with consent and if cardiac arrest occurs — sometimes it doesn’t and the patient is then to be returned to care — after three or so minutes the patient is declared-dead because cardiopulmonary function has irreversibly stopped. After that, the procurement commences.

Anthony Conwright argues in the New York Times that the Civil War should not be called by that name because it never was so called during its fighting.

Conwright is angry that back on the anniversary of Appomattox, President Trump marked the event by quoting Ulysses S Grant’s magnanimous statement that the “rebels are our countrymen again.” Never mind that Grant was carrying out Lincoln’s explicit policy of magnanimity toward the rebels as a means of reuniting the country (“with malice toward none, with charity for all” and all that).

Even more ridiculously, Conwright argues that calling the conflagration the “Civil War” somehow diminishes the evil of slavery abolished after the North’s victory. From “It Wasn’t a ‘Civil War:’ It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion“:

As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?

And what, exactly, is “human dignity?” Do we all possess it as a matter of objective truth, simply and merely because we are human, or must we earn our status by possessing particular capacities? Do AI and biotechnological advances threaten human dignity and diminish our moral standing? If so, what should public policy do about it? These are among the important — nay, crucial — questions with which we must grapple as we rush, so far with few regulatory brakes, toward a brave new world. Now, an ideologically odd pair of United States senators — the conservative Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and the progressive Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) want to do something about that. They are co-sponsoring the Human Dignity Read More ›

Over the past decade or so, the Nonhuman Rights Project has sought to obtain legal personhood for chimpanzees and elephants. The method to their madness is to seek writs of habeas corpus to release the animals from various means of confinement.

The group has failed so far. But it keeps gaining ground that should never have been lost. One high court judge in New York would have granted personhood and rights to chimps, and later, two judges in that court would have done so for elephants. Meanwhile, this fall the Hawaiian Supreme Court will review yet another elephant writ of habeas corpus case brought by the organization. Frankly, I fear the worst.

Michigan has seen similar habeas litigation involving chimps where the NhRP lost in the trial and appeals courts. The case involved seven chimps kept at a roadside zoo in apparently inappropriate circumstances from an animal-welfare perspective. As animal rights activists always do, the NhRP analogized the denial of rights to chimps to the oppression once imposed upon women and to slavery. The Court of Appeals judges weren’t buying. From the unanimously decided, Nonhuman Rights Project v. DeYoung Family Zoo (citations omitted):

The bioethicist Quill R Kukla, a philosophy professor at (the Jesuit) Georgetown University, also serves as the editor in chief of one of the most influential bioethics publications, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. To say the least, Kukla is well ensconced within the bioethical establishment.

I bring this up because Kukla was just interviewed about a newly published book the bioethicist authored, Sex Beyond “Yes”: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone. The interview was conducted without challenge by the president and CEO of the Hastings Center — the world’s most prominent bioethics think tank — for its “Bioethics Chat” feature. This is mainstream bioethics with exclamation points, and its content illustrates why I believe the predominant views in the movement are wildly out of sync with those of the general population they supposedly serve.

First, Kukla describes the book’s (which I have not read) sexual theses (emphasis within the text):

I wanted to write a book about good sex — sex that not only manages to avoid being unethical, but that is a joint activity built around pleasure, expressive and respectful of everyone’s agency, and fulfilling and worthwhile for everyone.…

I also wanted to write a book that genuinely spoke to the agency, pleasures, and experiences of all kinds of sexual subjects. In my book, queer sex, kinky sex, and sex for trans people, disabled people, old people, fat people, and nonmonogamous people are just as centered as is traditional sex between heterosexual monogamous couples. I tried to draw on the sexual wisdom of alternative sex communities such as queer and kinky communities, who have often thought and talked deeply about sexual agency because they cannot just slide unreflectively into the given heterocentric, patriarchal scripts provided by our culture.

New York just legalized assisted suicide. Adding insult to injury, the law requires morally or religiously objecting doctors to be complicit in assisted suicides by cooperating with some of its provisions. Specifically, the Medical Aid in Dying Act requires that the “attending physician” of patients requesting assisted suicide perform specified functions before patients can be prescribed lethal substances, with no apparent opt-out in the law that I could discern for physicians who are morally or religiously opposed to such a request. These mandatory actions include examining the patient to determine whether the illness is terminal, referring the patient to a consulting doctor to approve the assisted suicide, and discussing the “potential risks associated with taking the medication” (among others), the Read More ›

A pro-illegal immigrant advocacy article in the New England Journal of Medicine urges doctors to protect undocumented patients by impeding law enforcement in the context of the physician/patient relationship.

First, the authors complain that enforcing immigration law has engendered an environment of fear:

The current climate echoes that surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, when fears of surveillance, deportation, and the effects of new public-charge policies drove immigrant communities to avoid necessary care, which led to increased morbidity and mortality. As erosion of trust in institutions again drives patients away from clinics, confronting their needless suffering also exacts a toll on physicians, who may experience moral distress, feeling complicit in a system that’s failing marginalized groups. [Citations omitted.]

The West continues its love affair with the culture of death as the French National Assembly just voted to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide, overriding the Senate’s rejection. I haven’t read the bill, but here are a few notes I discerned from various media reports: Please remember that the law as it currently exists will surely not be the permanent ceiling of permissibility, but as other jurisdictions illustrate, merely be the launching pad for an ever more expansive euthanasia regime. Moreover, even these weak-tea parameters will probably not be enforced meaningfully, because that’s how the culture of death rolls. And once euthanasia starts, it picks up steam year by year as hastened death becomes normalized. The constitutionality of the law Read More ›

Assisted suicide legalization is bad medicine and even worse public policy. It abandons the sick, destroys human equality by creating a killable caste of people, and cheapens the intrinsic dignity of human life. Moreover, the supposed “strict safeguards” are neither strict — for example, relying on doctor self-reporting — nor particularly protective. Besides, as soon as the law goes into place, the safeguards are quickly redefined as “obstacles” to a good death and the process of loosening the law commences.

These and other myriad problems have gotten the attention of Senators James Lankford (R., Okla.) and Tim Kaine (D., Va.), who along with two representatives sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asking for oversight over the practice in the hospice context. Among their expressed concerns (citations omitted):

• “There are grave informed consent issues within physician-assisted suicide. Patients spend little time with the physician providing physician-assisted suicide relative to the course of their disease.”