Facebook slightly relaxed its policy of requiring accounts to carry people's real names, under pressure from cross-dressers. The company feared they would leave the site, and then it would be unable to do drag net surveillance.
First, it's more that those two conditions. Modern ethics requires informed consent. If your doctor lies to you to get you to agree to a treatment, then just because you are of sound mind and agree to it doesn't make it ethical. If this doctor says there's a 5% chance of success, and that number is pulled out of his ass, can the patient really make an informed decision?
Second, this falls under futile medical care. The chance of survival should this work is well under 1%, and would normally suggest palliative and comfort measures rather than a highly experimental procedure. There is nothing special about this case which makes it outside the normal guidelines.
Third, experimental surgery can be warranted even under this case, but only if the knowledge gained is worthwhile and effective. The estimated cost of this surgery is over $10 million. As a straight cost/benefit analysis, the cost to do the same on a mouse or dog is much cheaper, so there can be more experiments, giving better overall information, and provide concrete data used to make a real informed consent.
Bollocks. Consider again my point 3. If it takes 100 human surgeries to match the results from 10 animal surgeries, and animal surgeries cost $100K while human surgeries cost $10M then the costs to the patient are irrelevant.
No one has established that there is a benefit to society for doing a human head transplant now vs. spending the equivalent amount of money on animal head transplants.
All evidence says that this transplant will not work and there won't be any gain from it that we couldn't have gotten cheaper and better in another way. The claims of a single surgeon are not evidence that it might work. Animal tests are evidence that it might work.
With your view we end up with things like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. The Declaration of Helsinki - a foundation of modern medical research ethics - rejects your viewpoint. Quoting from https://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/organtransplant.html :
> 5 Every biomedical research project involving human subjects should be preceded by careful assessment of predictable risks in comparison with foreseeable benefits to the subject or to others. Concern for the interests of the subject must always prevail over the interests of science and society.
The surgery requires a staff of 150 doctors and nurses and exclusive use of a state-of-the-art operating theatre. The doctor clearly can't afford to go testing on animals.
That makes no sense. Do you know anything about animal or human research, and the ethics involved? I mean, history and accepted practices, not your personal beliefs. Because it looks like you're making things up to fit your preconceptions.
I gave links to people who did research with monkey head transplants, and reattaching rodent heads to the same body. I give links to the Declaration of Helsinki which rejects your stated belief.
And all you do is repeat yourself. It's getting boring.
It's not gratiutously negative - or even negative at all. It's a matter of fact. The advice in that column will not lead you to create a successful company, so take it with a healthy dose of humility and with a grain of salt.
Indeed, while your post can be considered harmful, mine cannot.
I have theorized that allergies, such as cat allergies, may, in some cases, be your body's way of warning you that there are Big Cats in the vicinity and you should GTFO.
This is not how Type I hypersensitivity works. Epitope recognition is powered by a biological RNG (somatic hypermutation) and evolves at runtime via the process of somatic / V(D)J chain recombination. Your body learns to be allergic, perhaps due to a bad ashy vent (you got sick that one spring), under-stimulation (play outside!), or just plain bad luck. Unfortunately for all of us, the immune system has no concept of the innocuous nature of harmless antigens. It will continue to pick up bad habits until the day we die. But thankfully it also keeps the trillions of cells, leaky programming, our own broken and errant self, and other uninvited guests that would just as soon eat us at bay (bacteria, viruses, cancer, fungi, nematodes, ...).
No. I described at a high level just one of the mechanisms of adaptive immunity--one of the most incredible biological systems in my opinion. (Runtime metaheuristics search!) These are complex pathways that involve many genes.
If the system isn't working you probably won't live very long. And while there may be certain functional alleles that may increase odds of an initial false positive stimulation, by in large the entire class of failure known as "allergic reactions" is simply a result of how the system itself works. You don't really need to invoke genetic differences to see how it fails. This is why the hygiene hypothesis is so strong.
There are actually four major categories of hypersensitivity that involve different cell populations and signalling pathways (eg. why poison ivy allergy is different from pine allergy).
If you're interested, the Wikipedia articles aren't a bad read. I also recommend Janeway's Immunobiology as a great intro to the entire subject.
It's an environmental allergy, not an emergency one. If you notice you feel like crap in a certain place (because cats like to lurk there), and subsequently avoid it, that's a win.
Not that I necessarily believe that's a good explanation for allergies, but it's plausible enough to think about.
