UNESCO

It is now officially two weeks before many of you will start packing, polishing up those speeches, checking over the nuances of your policies, all in anticipation of what is by far the best committee of BMUN56. I’m not saying this because of how awesome our chairs are (doesn’t hurt); I’m saying this because I’m very proud of how so many of you grasp these topics. As many of you can attest to, it wasn’t easy to understand. But because you guys wanted to understand the topics, you emailed me, posted comments, and came to my office hours to get a better understanding.

Anywho, these next two weeks will feature A LOT of posts, so be absolutely sure to keep up. I’ll start with an article that isn’t really directly related to our second topic. I do, however, want to see how you guys can tie this news into the committee topic.

Article link.

By Avram Goldstein
Bloomberg News
Thursday, February 28, 2008; Page D08

Four makers of artificial hips and knees paid doctors more than $800 million in royalties and fees in four years to influence their choice of implants, a U.S. investigator told Congress.

The unidentified companies control about three-quarters of the $9.4 billion worldwide market for hips and knees, said Gregory E. Demske, an assistant inspector general at the Health and Human Services Department, at a hearing yesterday of the Senate Special Committee on Aging…

The posts to come will include several intriguing case studies that are somehow related to the issues we will tackle, a distribution of the grades I gave you on your position papers (!) that came in before the research award deadline, and much much more.

I hope you’re as excited as I am.

- Bryan

UNESCO1 will be open at 6 pm, start at 6:05 pm, and close at 7:00 pm.

UNESCO2 will be open at 8, start at 8:05, and close at 9:00.

IM BMUNunesco56 first, and I’ll invite you to the chat room.

- MPB

Just a quick reminder: BMUN does not accept pre-written resolutions. If a resolution that is turned looks like its been prewritten, or if during committee a delegate reports a pre-written resolution, we will not accept it. That however does not mean you cannot come to committee with ideas for solutions; in fact, we encourage that.

Alright, I hope to see many of you tonight online!

- Bryan

Hey everyone,

I will be holding online office hours tomorrow from 6-7 pm and 8-9 pm tomorrow (Tuesday) on AIM. My screenname will be BMUNunesco56.

I will post the chat room I will be using tomorrow before office hours on this blog. In addition, if the activity is strong enough, I will consider holding the office hours the following week as well.

Don’t let the suddent influx of posts following an extended hiatus confuse you. There are THREE new posts today, so be sure to read up on those.

 - Bryan

Article link.By AMY HARMON

Published: February 24, 2008

 

Victoria Grove wanted to find out if she was destined to develop the form of emphysema that ran in her family, but she did not want to ask her doctor for the DNA test that would tell her.

She worried that she might not be able to get health insurance, or even a job, if a genetic predisposition showed up in her medical records, especially since treatment for the condition, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, could cost over $100,000 a year. Instead, Ms. Grove sought out a service that sent a test kit to her home and returned the results directly to her…

Again, if you cannot access the article, let me know and I will email the full text to you.

Also, a great archive of articles on the same topic. Granted, these are all issues that exist in the US. Still, its a great resource, especially when you extend those same issues to the international arena and apply cultural relativism to the debate.

- Bryan

Hey everyone,

Again, I have to apologize for my haphazard breaks from blogging. Life for a college student is very busy, and I hope you understand.

That being said, its less than three weeks until the conference, and I hope you guys are getting as excited as I am, especially seeing some of the submissions of articles that I’ve been getting.

First of all, I promised you guys an overview of international law, both in principle and in practice. Convienently, I was the head chair of the 6th Legal committee of the General Assembly for last year’s session, and I provided a succinct overview of international law in that committee’s topic synopsis. It was brief considering that international law is a very nebulous and arbitrary process, and hard to understand, even for people like me. Last year’s delegates only needed a minimal level of understanding, and I cannot see you guys needing to know more than they did…

6th Legal topic synopsis from the 55th Annual Session

Finally, two delegates have submitted very interesting articles…

Article link

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People indigenous to Siberia have strong genetic links to native peoples in the Americas, according to a study further supporting the theory that humans first entered the Americas over a land bridge across the Bering Strait.

Scientists at Stanford University in California combed through the genes of 938 people from 51 places, looking at 650,000 DNA locations in each person…

This article is quite revealing in the fact that we can discover people’s common ancestry in a peaceful way and let science be a main priority. With this way of discovering the past and DNA of indigenous people, we can ensure the safety of indigenous people and also let science discover the links between various ethnic groups. Also, by discovering the differences between people’s places of origins, we can stop the flow of prejudice by disproving that a certain ethnic groups committed crimes against another group. This would be one of the more positive side effects of genetic tracking. Hopefully, countries will see the positive effects of genetic tracking and will be more inclined to support scientists, but will also hopefully join together to combat any negative side effects that may arise.

Article link

The normal “standard of care” against which new interventions are tested in medical research has not been formally defined. It is usually taken to mean the “best proved treatment” for any condition under investigation in a trial. We reject the arbitrariness of this notion of the standard of care and offer a more comprehensive alternative. Use of this new standard invokes a new approach to international research ethics that focuses on reducing inequalities in global health…

If you guys cannot access the second article, let me know, and I will email the full text to you. I have access through the University of California proxy server, so I’m not sure how the restrict access to the general public.

Later this week I will start posting some intriguing case studies for you all to look over. So, until then, good luck with continuing your awesome researching!

- Bryan

Q: The position paper guidelines you link to here are different than the guidelines in the Delegate Guide. Which do I follow?

A: Follow the guidelines in this blog, as they are more comprehensive than the guidelines in the Delegate Guide.

- Bryan

A delegate emailed this article to the chairs about a very interesting and pertinent article concerning the first topic. I’m getting very encouraged by some of the more exemplary examples of researching shown by some of you. Keep up the great work!

Article link.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 23, 2008 ) — The origins and current genetic relationships of Pacific Islanders have generated interest and controversy for many decades. Now, a new comprehensive genetic study of almost 1,000 individuals has revealed that Polynesians and Micronesians have almost no genetic relation to Melanesians, and that groups that live in the islands of Melanesia are remarkably diverse…

This article is a prime example of how genome identification on indigenous people can be used. While the discovery stated in this article may not lead to any harmful effects later on, the problem still arises of what may happen when two races are found to be identical. A hate relationship may develop as one side refuses to acknowledge the other. Bitterness may brew between two different groups and prejudice could spread. Genetic identification is an issue of varying opinions that need to see the problems from all sides of the spectrum and determine the route that will allow science to prevail but danger to dissipate.

- Bryan

Article link.By Will Dunham Tue Feb 12, 4:47 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Only about a third of U.S. medical schools have policies aimed at curbing conflicts of interest arising from their financial ties with companies like drug and medical device makers, researchers said on Tuesday.

Such businesses cultivate deep financial relationships with medical schools. Among other things, industry often relies on academic researchers to conduct studies that may help win government approval for drugs that could generate billions of dollars in sales.

The researchers asked 125 U.S. medical schools about their policies governing financial ties with industry. Eighty-six schools responded to the 2006 survey.

Only 38 percent had adopted a policy covering financial interests held by the institution. Thirty-seven percent were working on adopting such a policy, and the final 25 percent were doing nothing…

This article touches on two issues that are important for us. One, this should remind you about the ethical issue of conflicts of interest I talked about in my last post. Businesses want profits, and that could and often does interfere with proper health care. Two, the coordination of business and medical research is the main impetus for spreading research past national borders, which leads to the very problem of a lack of an international standard for research ethics that will dominate our second topic.

- Bryan

Given that the field of ethics in antiquity was derived from religion and philosophy, which are both essentially quests for truth, it is no surprise that ethics has moved into the modern era’s quest for truth, or science. It should also be no surprise that, for better or worse, the practitioners of science has also tried to resist that very spread of ethics into their field much in the same way priests did centuries ago.

As I’ve have tried to expound in the past, our topics aren’t so much concerned with the ethical dilemmas of the principles of science (ex: whether we should allow human cloning) but rather the ethical issues involved with the practice of science and research. For example, our Genetics and Cultural Identity topic deals with how to or should we protect minorities from the potential harms of genetic diversity mapping, not should we map human diversity. Our Research Standards topic will deal with how to reconcile the various ethics review board systems in place to create a strong international review system, not should we conduct research. Therefore, this post will mostly deal with the problems that can be uncovered when scientists and society have differing priorities.

(Just a side note: I’ve begun to read many of your papers that were turned in before the 2/1 deadline, and I’ve noticed that some of you seem to have missed the point I just made. I won’t dock points, as the issues are tough, but do be sure to realign your research for the conference.)

One area of great ethical concern is misconduct in research. When a research team uncovers a potentially groundbreaking discovery, the motivations for publication and consequently fame and additional funding are great. Often times however, those motivations are too great, especially when researchers are convinced of their discovery despite anomalies in data, procedural errors, or a demand for more conclusive tests. In extraordinary cases, senior researchers have in the past coerced junior researchers to assist in coverups, and junior researchers in turn have neglected to inform authorities (whistleblowing) in hopes of advancement.

Researchers have also at times fabricated data in what is known as the “publish or perish” phenomenon. The scientific world moves at such a fast pace that the fear is that if you don’t publish, someone else will and steal your glory. In addition, conflicts of interest are common in science, especially now since corporations and industry often work closely with universities, blurring the line between the public and private sectors.

Research is just one area in science that can be clouded with ethical issues, and I’ve chosen to focus on research simply because our second topic is dominated by it. Use this post to start thinking about how the ethical methodologies I laid out in the previous post can be used to analyze ethical issues in science, and as always, if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or email any of us.

-Bryan