The gays amongst us

I had never heard of Tracy Morgan until he appeared on The Daily Show a few weeks ago and I took an instinctive dislike to him. He seemed kind of obnoxious. I did not know if he was really like that or was playing a part and I did not really care.

The next thing I heard was that he had let loose a nasty homophobic rant during his stand up comedy routine.

Tina Fey, who plays his boss on a TV show, criticized his comments and in the process said something important that I hope all people will take to heart: “I hope for his sake that Tracy’s apology will be accepted as sincere by his gay and lesbian coworkers at 30 Rock, without whom Tracy would not have lines to say, clothes to wear, sets to stand on, scene partners to act with, or a printed-out paycheck from accounting to put in his pocket.”

Even if you don’t like gay people, you would be wise to keep your anti-gay bile to yourself, not because they will threaten you, but because they are all around us and we depend on them whether we are aware of it or not.

Informative budget chart

cbppdeficit.jpgWith all the talk of the deficit and national debt, it is illustrative to see the chart that the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has published that shows the source of the projected budget deficits.

The main sources are the Bush-Obama wars and the Bush-Obama tax cuts for the rich, not ‘big government’, as is claimed by those who want to use the deficit as an excuse to further reduce government services and, more importantly, reduce government oversight over business.

This should come as no surprise to those who follow the numbers but it is worth periodically reiterating.

Patenting DNA and genetic tests

In an article titled Patently Unjust in the June 2010 issue of The Progressive (not available online), Kari Lydersen describes a similar issue to the one involving Henrietta Lacks, where private companies are making a bundle out of publicly funded research. In this case, the publicly funded Human Genome Project has made freely available the full human genome but some private companies have obtained patents over individual genes.

The particular case that Lydersen deals with involves the genes known as BRCA1 and BRCA2. Certain mutations in these genes are predictors of breast and ovarian cancer, since women with such mutations are five times more likely to develop breast cancer and ten to thirty times more likely to develop ovarian cancer. We are now able to test if a woman has these mutations in which case they have to make difficult decisions about whether to preemptively remove their breasts and ovaries. These genes were discovered as part of the genome project.

It turns out that a single company named Myriad Genetics holds several patents on the genes and as a result claims exclusive rights to the tests they developed to detect the mutations. They charge about $3,000 for the test, which prices many women out of the market. They claim that if companies could not make money, they would not have the incentive to develop the tests. There is some truth in this but it is also true that a huge amount of federal (i.e. public) research funding went into the research that provided the basis for the company’s work, which should also be a factor. If the public funds something, the public should also benefit.

The reasons given by the company’s founder for the high price they charge for the tests is revealing about the why medical costs are so high in the US. He says, “In the U.S. what you charge for a test is a complex equation of what it costs you to do it and what people will pay” (my italics). This is part of the problem in a system with employer-based private health insurance coupled with monopoly providers. Well-to-do groups with power can pressure their insurance companies to cover the costs of tests which enables the testing companies to charge higher prices than they need to merely cover costs and provide a reasonable profit. The price then becomes prohibitive for those without insurance and drives up the cost of health care. I have written about this before.

As Lydersen writes, this is a widespread problem.

Myriad is far from the only patent holder on human genes; about 20 percent of the human genome is patented. This basically means that only the patent holder can offer testing and other services related to a specific gene. Patents currently cover genes related to other diseases, including Alzheimer’s, asthma, colon cancer, muscular dystrophy, and spinal muscular atrophy, a hereditary disease that kills children at a young age.

What is worse, because the company claims exclusive rights to the genes, women cannot get a second opinion on such a major question. At a minimum, what is needed is at least for more than one company to be able to provide services so that they can compete with each other. Giving private companies monopoly power over the use of research results that were largely publicly funded seems wrong.

The intricacies of patent law are too subtle for me to get into but on the surface the U. S. Patent Office seems to have been too generous in allowing companies to patent genes. It is illegal to patent a product of nature but the US Patent Office has granted Myriad and similar outfits patents on the genes on the basis that they were able to isolate them from their natural state and purify them. But others argue that this is far too expansive a view. After all, just because you develop a technique to highly purify gold (say) should not enable you to claim the patent to gold. I can understand patents being awarded to the purifying process because that is something the company did develop. That would reward their intellectual contribution while yet preserving the right of other companies to invent alternative methods of purification of the same gene and thus develop competing tests.

The right of private companies to patent genes was litigated and Lydersen writes that in March of 2010 US District Judge judge Robert W. Sweet ruled that Myriad’s claims did not meet the test of what makes something derived from nature patentable and invalidated the patents, saying in his ruling:

“The patents issued by the USPTO are directed to a law of nature and therefore were improperly granted,” Sweet wrote. “DNA represents the physical embodiment of biological information, distinct in its essential characteristics from any other chemical found in nature…. DNAs existence in an ‘isolated’ form alters neither this fundamental quality of DNA as it exists in the body nor the information it encodes. Therefore, the patents at issue directed to ‘isolated DNA containing sequences found in nature are unsustainable as a matter of law and are deemed unpatentable subject matter.”

Patents are valuable things and protect the rights of inventors and other creative people but the Patent Office should be wary of taking the claims of private companies too much at face value, especially when it comes to patenting things in nature like bits of DNA.

Myriad has appealed the ruling to the US Court of Appeals and much hangs in the balance.

Who should own the rights to one’s tissues?

People generally do not think about what happens to the blood and tissue samples they give as part of medical tests, assuming that they are eventually discarded in some way. Many are not aware that your samples may be retained for research or even commercial purposes. Once you give it away, you lose all rights to what is subsequently done with it, even if your body parts have some unique property that can be used to make drugs and other things that can be marketed commercially.

The most famous case of this is Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman in Baltimore who died from cervical cancer in 1951. A researcher who had been trying unsuccessfully, like others, to have cells reproduce in the test tube, received a sample of hers too. It turned out that her cancer cells, unlike other cells, could reproduce endlessly in test tubes, providing a rich and inexhaustible source of cells for research and treatment. Her cells, called HeLa, have taken on a life of their own and have travelled the world long after she died. Her story is recounted in the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

The issue of whether one’s cells should be used without one’s permission and whether one should be able to retain the rights to one’s tissues is a tricky one for law and ethics.

“Science is not the highest value in society,” [Lori Andrews, director of the Institute for Science, Law, and Technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology] says, pointing instead to things like autonomy and personal freedom. “Think about it,” she says. “I decide who gets my money after I die. It wouldn’t harm me if I died and you gave all my money to someone else. But there is something psychologically beneficial to me as a living person to know I can give my money to whoever I want. No one can say, ‘She shouldn’t be allowed to do that with her money because that might not be most beneficial to society.’ But replace the word money in that sentence with tissue, and you’ve got precisely the logic many people use against giving donors control over their tissues.” (Skloot, p. 321)

It does seem wrong somehow for private companies to hugely profit from the lives and bodies of others without owing them anything. In the case of Henrietta Lacks, her family remained very poor and lacked health insurance and proper medical care even while her cells became famous and they bitterly resented this. They did not even know about the widespread use of her cells until two decades later.

On the other hand, it would put a real crimp on research if scientists had to keep track of whose tissues they were working on. Since we all benefit (or should benefit) from the results of scientific research, one can make the case that the tissues we give up are like the trash we throw away, things for which we have voluntarily given away our rights. If the tissues are used for medical research done by public institutions like the NIH or universities and the results are used not for profit but to benefit the general public, this would, I believe, remove many of the objections to the unaccredited use of tissues.

You can see why scientists would prefer to have the free use of tissues but what I don’t understand are those scientists who go overboard in making special exceptions for religion.

David Korn, vice president for research at Harvard University says: “I think people are morally obligated to allow their bits and pieces to be used to advance knowledge to help others. Since everybody benefits, everybody can accept the small risks of having their tissue scraps used in research. “The only exception he would make is for people whose religious belief prohibit tissue donation. “If somebody says being buried without all their pieces will condemn them to wandering forever because they can’t get salvation, that’s legitimate, and people should respect it,” Korn says. (Skloot, p. 321)

This is another case where religions try to claim special privileges denied to everyone else. Why is that particular claim legitimate? Why should religious superstitions get priority over other irrational beliefs? Our bodies are in a constant state of flux. It sheds cells all the time in the normal course of our daily lives, which is why DNA testing has become such a valuable forensic tool for solving crimes. Since we are losing old cells and gaining new cells all the time, it is a safe bet that hardly any of the cells that were part of me as a child are still in my body. So the whole idea that the afterlife consists of ‘all of me’ is absurd since that would require bringing together all the cells that I have shed during my life, resulting in me having multiple organs and limbs, like some horror fiction monster.

Rather than pandering to this fantasy, we should educate people that our bodies are in a constant state of flux, that our seemingly permanent bodies are actually transient entitites.

Undermining Social Security

The oligarchy has had its greedy eyes on the Social Security trust fund for a long time, seeking to divert all those funds to Wall Street to goose up the stock market and enrich themselves with it. The problem is that people are rightly suspicious of efforts to tamper with their one secure source of retirement funds.

Since the Republicans have traditionally been seen as the servants of the oligarchy, people have quickly reacted when they make any moves to undermine Social Security, as George W. Bush painfully discovered in his second term. The oligarchy knows that they have a better chance when Democrats are in power, which is why we need to be especially vigilant and oppose the current moves by the Obama administration. The reduction in payroll tax contributions by employees that was part of Obama’s budget deal at the end of 2010 was for me a sign that he was seeking to undermine Social Security by reducing its revenue stream, thus artificially creating a crisis where none should exist.

His latest proposal to give employers a similar reduction in their contribution to payroll taxes, thus further exacerbating the problem, is confirmation of the fact that he wants to set in motion the wheels to privatize Social Security.

We need to realize that Obama, although he may make some positive moves on some social issues dear to liberals, is barely distinguishable from the Republicans when it comes to being a servant of the oligarchy.

God and the stock market

In this article in the New York Times, one paragraph jumped out at me because it touched a nerve.

“On the one hand the markets want a deal,” said Howard Gleckman, an editor and analyst at the Tax Policy Center, a joint effort of two centrist research organizations, the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. “On the other they don’t want a deal that’s going to send the economy back into recession.”

I find it really annoying when people speak so glibly about what ‘the markets’ want and don’t want. How could they possibly know? The stock markets involve millions of people trading billions of shares each day for all manner of reasons. The idea that one can look at the behavior of stock market indices and deduce what is causing it to behave in a particular way is ludicrous except in the case of major events (like the financial collapse) in which case almost anyone can assign cause without being a Wall Street market ‘expert’. And yet these people do it on a daily, or even hourly, basis.

Bob Garfield of the radio show On The Media had a droll piece on this glib single factor analysis. (Note: The audio is wrong and different from the transcript. To hear the seven minutes audio report, click on the link below, and begin at the 24:50 minute mark.)

The way these analysts speak so confidently about something they cannot possibly know reminds me strongly of theologians who also speak confidently about the properties of god and what he wants, even though they have no idea either. The way that politicians try so hard to propitiate ‘the market’ by doing things that will raise the stock indices also reminds me of the way that religious people try to do things to please their inscrutable gods.