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The Vatican's radical minority response to a Nobel Prize

October 5th 2010 07:03

: Vyoos

Robert Edwards, British scientist, IVF pioneer and Nobel Laureate

VYOOS EDITORIAL
Has everyone in the Vatican drowned on the tide of negative sentiment washing over the place? If there is anyone there trying to return some polish to the tarnished brand that is the Roman Catholic Church, they aren't rubbing hard enough.

That includes Bishop Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, who heads of the Pontifical Academy for Life. The splendidly-named body speaks for the Vatican on medical ethics.

de Paula today spoke for himself, he claims, when he painted 85-year-old Robert Geoffrey Edwards, the British physiologist and pioneer in reproductive medicine, as some sort of force for evil.

Edwards was yesterday awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work developing in-vitro fertilization, the process which has made parenthood possible for millions of infertile people.

This, said de Paula, was "completely out of order".

"Without Edwards, there would not be a market on which millions of ovocytes are sold ... and there would not be a large number of freezers filled with embryos in the world.

"In the best of cases they are transferred into a uterus, but most probably they will end up abandoned or dead, which is a problem for which the new Nobel Prize winner is responsible,'' the bishop told Italy's ANSA news agency.

de Paula later claimed he was speaking for himself and not the Vatican, an interesting claim from a man whose position makes him the official mouthpiece of the Holy See on medical ethics issues.

The Nobel committee hailed Edwards' work as a "milestone in the development of modern medicine''. And one of the first people to congratulate him was Louise Brown, the first ever "test tube baby". Clearly, she wouldn't be alive if Bishop de Paula had his way.

The truth of this debate lies beyond religious and ethical considerations. What Robert Edwards did was what any scientist must do - explore, with the aim of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.

He broke no laws of the land. He pushed the boundaries of understanding a very long way indeed. And his research brought happiness, not to mention life, to many families.

The Vatican is free to express its views. In a democracy, all minorities can be heard. But please, Bishop de Paula, understand that the freedom of scientific research has no less an imperative than the freedom of speech.

If you don't like the systems, processes and realities which have developed around IVF practices, then say so, and address those issues directly. Attacking the individual as you have done is as naive as it is radical. You, like the Roman Catholic Church, need more polish.
smh.com.au

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Europe, Sweden, Religion

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Questions about the afterlife

April 19th 2010 11:38

A remarkable story has unfolded today about the near-death experience of a three-year-old boy in Germany.

The story has three extraordinary levels. The first is that Paul Eicke, of Berlin, revived three hours and 18 minutes after drowning. The child fell into a pond at his grandfather's house and is thought to have been in it for at least several minutes before he was noticed and pulled from the water.

Efforts to resuscitate him failed. The boy's father gave him heart massage and mouth-to-mouth for 10 minutes until a medical helicopter arrived. The paramedics on board continued resuscitation procedures during a 10-minute flight to hospital, where doctors then took over and tried for "hours" to save the child. Just after they gave up, however, Paul Eicke's heart decided to start beating again.

The second remarkable fact is that it appears Paul will make a full recovery, suffering no brain damage because of the coldness of the water he fell into. His core temperature after being pulled from the pond was measured at 28 degrees, compared to a normal human body level of 37 degrees. It is known that cold temperatures slow the metabolism and allow the body to survive longer without oxygen, but Paul's case is still exceptional. "When children have been underwater for a few minutes they mostly don't make it," said Professor Lothar Schweigerer, director of the clinic to which Paul was taken. "This is a most extraordinary case." That view is supported by an American study which showed that, of children who survive drownings, 92 per cent are found within two minutes of submersion.

The third remarkable aspect of the story surfaced after Paul was well enough to speak when he was able to tell those around his hospital bed what he had seen and done during the three hours and 18 minutes he was thought to be dead.

Remember, this is the story of a three-year-old, someone unlikely to have woken and recognised the reality TV and sensationalist magazine possibilities.

Paul Eicke told his family, friends and assembled staff that he had been to heaven. And there, he said, he had seen his dead grandmother. "There was a lot of light and I was floating," Paul said. "I came to a gate and saw Grandma Emmi on the other side. She said, 'You go back to your mummy. I'll wait for you here'.''

He added, "Heaven looked nice, but I am glad I am back with mummy and daddy now." Mummy and daddy, no doubt, agree.

Near-death experiences like that described by Paul Eicke are not new. Popular interest in what are commonly termed NDEs was sparked by the book Life After Life, written by Raymond Moody and published in 1975, but NDEs have been studied for many years by people in a variety of fields, including psychology, psychiatry, parapsychology and hospital medicine.

All this leads to an Agence France Presse news story of two weeks ago which said NDEs are reported by between 11 and 23 per cent of survivors of heart attacks. The report used that fact to introduce what could be the fourth extraordinary level of this story. Or, perhaps, it proves that there was nothing extraordinary about the Paul Eicke story, nor about any other NDE.

AFP reported the findings of a study in Slovenia, published in the respected Belgian peer-review journal Critical Care, which investigated 52 heart attack cases, 11 of which reported NDEs. The researchers found no common link in terms of age, gender, education, religion, fear of death, time of recovery or drugs used to resuscitate the patients.

They did find one common link however high levels of carbon dioxide, and to a lesser degree potassium, in the blood.

Can these things create hallucinatory experiences? Medical science isn't sure. The researchers say further work is needed. But it could be the beginning of the end for notions of premature visits to the afterlife.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Europe, Happy Spot, Health, Psychology, Religion, Science

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The archbishop's take on social media

August 6th 2009 23:28

Internet social networking sites which promote themselves as communities are in fact undermining community life. So are texting and emails.

So says Archbishop Vincent Nichols, leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

Archbishop Nichols singled out MySpace and Facebook, and said they had led young people to seek "transient" friendships, with quantity becoming more important than quality. These sites, he said, leave young people unable to cope when their social networks collapse. The internet and mobile phones, he said, were "dehumanising" community life. Social networking sites, he said, were a "key factor" in suicide among young people.

"Friendship is not a commodity," Archbishop Nichols said. Society was losing some of its ability to build communities through inter-personal communication, as the result of excessive use of texts and emails rather than face-to-face meetings or telephone conversations.

Is he right?

If he is right, there is a fundamental difference in relationships built with and without face-to-face or, at least, live voice interaction. Archbishop Nichols is claiming this fundamental difference exists, that relationships built without seeing the body language or hearing voice inflections of the other party are relationships somehow built on less firm foundations.

Obviously these immediate signals are valuable aids in the process of getting to know people. If someone claims they are tall, it helps to test the claim if you are looking at them at the time. If someone claims they are calm, and yet their voice reveals a tension within, we have immediate evidence of something insecure.

Real relationships, however, are not built in a day, and they should not be determined by a person's height or equanimity. Firm relationships are built on an attraction of personality and on an appreciation of values. They take time and your best guide is and always has been instinct. You can be fooled by a person 10 inches away as much as by a person 10 time zones away.

The claim that the failure of a teenage friendship formed on a social networking site is more likely to trigger suicidal tendencies is particularly debatable. This sad possibility is about the state of mind of a person unable to cope with the breakdown of a friendship, a support structure, a statement of social acceptability. Archbishop Nichols in effect claims that the ensuing feelings of isolation and desolation are more potent when the relationship was formed on a social newtorking site than, say, in a coffee shop or a school playground. Yet he gives no evidence for this claim.

Perhaps no evidence exists.

Bullying can occur through Facebook and MySpace networks, and someone even now is probably working out how to do it through Twitter. Bullying, however, was and remains a problem in any space where people gather, either physically or internetly.

Archbishop Nichols offers no suggestions and no solutions. Does he want social networking sites banned? Are we to forbid our children from mobile phones and texting? No way the kids will just permanently take over the house phone again.

Social networking sites are not a microcosm of real life; they are not a poor cousin of real life; they are not even a reflection of real life. They are real life, and the friendships formed through them are no less a commodity then friendships formed elsewhere.

The rules may vary slightly, but that is nothing new. We assume Archbishop Nicholl was once a boy with a passing interest in girls. We assume he was sometimes introduced to girls by his parents. We also assume he sometimes met them in a quiet corner of the school playground, or perhaps even behind the bicycle shed a different scenario with a slightly different set of rules, but with the same potential to form an enduring relationship.

In the event of an ensuing close friendship breaking down, which one would have evoked the stronger tendency to suicide?

www.telegraph.co.uk

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: UK, Human nature, Religion, Social media, Technology

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