The Problem With Ethics Councils
Over at Scienceblogs, there’s an excellent article about how Germany’s latest stance on genetic testing misses the mark, and it’s a real eye-opener for all people involved and interested in this particular area.
This new legislation once again displays a very worrying factor of the German law-making process in particular, but also law-making in general: The decisions are made, at least in part, by uninformed people. Sure, they go to great lengths to flaunt an informed decision-making, they’ve got all kinds of advisory panels — and they’ve got the German National Ethics Council to discuss bioethical issues.
First and foremost, the recommendations of that council are largely ignored. This is the opposite of informed decision-making, it’s ignoring available information.
Secondly, the Ethics council consists to a very large degree of laymen, people with no scientific education whatsoever. In fact, many of the members represent the Church. I see how this might appeal to the currently very strong conservative sense of German politics. Objectively, though, it’s horrible: these recommendations will be coloured by religious creed — in fact, that is the expressed intent of these council members. And while this is their personal right and all sounds very democratic, it still injects a heavily biased, subjective and entirely irrational component in a would-be rational decision-making process.
Bluntly put, this means that German healthcare policies are governed by supernatural belief and pre-science era dogma.
The horrible experiences of the Third Reich certainly contribute to the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding genetics but let’s not forget the elephant in the room here; putting the future of medicine into the hands of the Church is no better than putting it in the hands of witch-doctors. It belongs in neither, it belongs entirely in the hands of professionals who know what they’re talking about and can estimate the consequences of their doing.
Some people see a conflict of interest in letting scientists decide about the morality of their research but even if that were true, it isn’t helped by pitting them against the Church which has its own agenda in mind, and therefore the same conflict of interest.
Lest someone argue that almost half of the council’s members are scientists after all, and thus ensure a scientific view – this is simply not the case. By merely examining the past recommendations of the council it becomes clear that all these members can ever hope to reach is a stalemate; the democratic process imposes a compromise that lacks any rational reasoning whatsoever and is simply the centre of two diametrically opposed viewpoints.
Case in point, stem cell research. Creating, cloning (and destroying) embryonic stem cells in Germany is forbidden. However, importing them is possible, and so is research conducted on imported cell lines (since the may not be created in Germany).
But there’s a catch. The law from 2002 allowed importing cell lines only if the cells were created before January 1st, 2002 (”Stichtagsregelung”, deadline regulation). There is of course no rational justification for this regulation, it is merely a compromise between a complete prohibition (which would have been impractical) and unrestricted access to embryonic stem cells (which was bitterly opposed by the political right).
Since this date is now far behind and once again acquiring cell lines has become a massive hurdle, the law was reconsidered, quite successfully: the deadline is now May 1st, 2007. What a progress. Such a decision cannot be described as reasonable, or even as a success (although it has been claimed as one, by all sides) from any conceivable standpoint. From a religious point of view, this means that innocent embryos are still murdered, and from a scientific point of view it means that acquiring vital research material is still unnecessarily expensive and difficult to come by.
The complete process of arriving at such a result can only be described by one word: insane.
But that’s the everyday life in politics.