The Blind and Disadvantaged society might be better off than a society where all children are born with DNA from their parents. That's the conclusion from an article in a local Rhode Island newspaper. We are joined by Dan W. Brock, a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health.
00:01:33.000I was a professor until the end of last year at Brown University.
00:01:39.000I'm now at the National Institutes of Health, though any views that I state to you now are only my own views, not the National Institutes of Health.
00:01:50.000Oh, so you work with the federal government then?
00:03:37.000When I was at Brown University, where I was for over 30 years, I was half in the philosophy department there and half in the medical school where I directed a center for biomedical ethics.
00:03:49.000Ah, and now some of the guidelines written there at Brown, aren't those used in a lot of hospitals?
00:03:57.000I mean, there are hospitals that have guidelines, but the Center at Brown and Brown doesn't write guidelines.
00:04:06.000I have just read in past articles that Peter Singer has helped write some of the guidelines adopted by many hospitals.
00:04:12.000I doubt that's the case, frankly, because Peter's views are very controversial.
00:04:18.000And I imagine that they would not be adopted in guidelines that hospitals would undertake.
00:04:27.000Alright, we're talking to Dan W. Brock, Biomedical Ethicist.
00:04:33.000Now, I'm trying to understand something here.
00:04:35.000Now, I've read some articles on the BBC a few weeks ago where they were saying they're discussing genetic screening by law.
00:04:42.000Of course, because it costs everybody money having to take care of these people, these blind and disabled and others.
00:04:49.000And some of Singer's colleagues, in one of their books, Back to Eden, I believe is the name, I read it about a year ago, said that they need to take control of human evolution.
00:05:00.000Now, you say these are your views, What are your views?
00:05:06.000What exactly do you do there in your government office?
00:05:11.000Well, there's a department of clinical bioethics here which does research on bioethics issues.
00:05:18.000We have training programs and so forth, but mostly I do research and publish on bioethics issues.
00:05:24.000I've only been here since this past summer, so I have most of my career been in a university.
00:05:36.000I think most Americans find it chilling, kind of Orwellian, or a type of Brave New World, like Huxley wrote about, and of course his brother, the UNESCO head, that are talking about eugenics and how wonderful it was.
00:05:51.000It sounds chilling to say, set up programs for people to No, I didn't talk about that at all.
00:06:01.000What I talked about is a practice that goes on now that I think isn't all that controversial.
00:06:09.000The idea is that if we can prevent very serious diseases like Tay-Sachs disease or Huntington's disease, then most people think it would be desirable to do so.
00:06:22.000Forget about any cost to the broader society.
00:06:25.000These are extremely disabling diseases to the persons who have them.
00:06:29.000They often involve very severe suffering.
00:06:31.000Sometimes they involve early death of a child, as with Tay-Sachs disease or Leishnian disease.
00:06:36.000So these are serious afflictions and some diseases, like the ones I just mentioned, are transmitted genetically, in effect.
00:06:50.000If you have the gene in question, you'll develop the disease.
00:06:53.000What we can now do is to do genetic testing for, as I say, whether parents are at risk for passing on this disease, or one can do, again in some cases at least, genetic testing of an embryo or fetus to determine whether it has the genes for the particular disease.
00:07:47.000That's a paraphrase, but that's a reasonably accurate paraphrase.
00:07:51.000So they misquoted you because they have it in quotes?
00:07:55.000Yeah, I don't think I, well, I was, I don't know whether I don't know whether it's an accurate quote, but it's a reasonably accurate paraphrase in any event.
00:08:07.000In any event, it reasonably represents my view.
00:08:11.000Are you aware of Wesley Smith, Wall Street Journal writer, bestselling author?
00:08:30.000The Wall Street Journal wouldn't let him run it because the liability wasn't true.
00:08:34.000We've got this creature Singer calling babies mackerels, saying they have the same worth as mackerel fish, calling retarded children subhuman.
00:08:45.000I mean, these are chilling statements, and there is a large body moving towards forced screening, and obviously it starts out as a voluntary thing.
00:08:59.000I mean, I can't be responsible for what somebody else says or for somebody else's account of what somebody else says, so I have no comment on what Leslie Smith says about what Peter Singer says.
00:09:12.000But, of course, I'm concerned about the shift from doing any of these practices Voluntarily, when it's the parent's decision, and involuntarily.
00:09:24.000Just as I have been a supporter of patients' rights to make decisions about their own medical treatment, I would be concerned if we moved to forced decisions by someone else about patients' medical treatment.
00:09:39.000Here's a London Telegraph article today, sir, where it says that if people do not take all the vaccines ordered by the government, though it's not the law, all their health care will be denied, period.
00:09:52.000It's usually about three years ahead of us.
00:09:55.000I haven't seen the article, so I don't know whether that's true or not.
00:10:50.000One's getting vaccinations for infectious diseases where there's not just a risk to the child, but there's a risk to others if that child... No, that's a mandate.
00:12:03.000We're talking to Dan W. Brock, who is a biomedical ethics, bioethics person in the federal government, and we have the Webster's Dictionary here, and it says eugenics.
00:12:25.000And the 1883 definition, a science that deals with improvement as by control of human mating of hereditary qualities of race and breed, and the other nine definitions are similar.
00:12:51.000Since we're coming on after your commercial, I want to repeat that I speak only for myself and not for any branch of the federal government.
00:12:57.000The term bioethics was coined in the early 1970s.
00:13:04.000Most of it has not had anything to do with issues about eugenics.
00:13:09.000It's had to do with, for example, end-of-life care with patients, with issues like the definition of death.
00:13:23.000Getting rid of the retarded folks, the blind, the old.
00:13:28.000When I talk about end-of-life health care, I'm not talking about getting rid of any of those persons.
00:13:33.000There's been a large movement, as I assume you know, in this country over the last several decades through things like advanced directives whereby people can gain control over their own healthcare.
00:13:47.000Near the end of life, and that I don't think has anything to do with getting rid of people.
00:13:51.000Wait a minute, in Norway and other areas, they wear toe tags and carry cards saying, please don't euthanize me, and they're moving for that here.
00:13:59.000Look, it says, I've got your quote right here, I want to define genetic testing in a strictly reproductive context.
00:14:05.000What that means is that, that quote is inaccurate.
00:14:08.000What I said is, I'm going to talk about Reproductive testing in, I'm sorry, about genetic testing only in a reproductive context.
00:14:18.000What I distinguish that from is testing, for example, of individuals as to whether they have genes for breast cancer and so forth.
00:14:27.000Well look, abort the blind and disabled, that's the headline here.
00:14:31.000They've got your quotes in here which are now saying aren't accurate.
00:15:41.000It doesn't seem to me an obviously bad thing to want the children that we give birth to to be healthy as opposed to having devastating diseases.
00:15:54.000It's what the other bioethicists are saying.
00:15:57.000It may or may not lead to the other things.
00:15:59.000I would oppose many other things that you think it would lead to, and I would make distinctions between them.
00:16:08.000Okay, let me ask you another question, Mr. Brock, because this is very important.
00:16:12.000Look, we have this movement, it's out there, the other bioethicists are saying this horrible stuff, calling babies mackerel, the rest of it.
00:16:20.000In this article, they've got you in this speech before all these people at the University of Rhode Island saying, you know, that abort blind babies.
00:16:29.000I've got friends that are blind, that were born blind.
00:16:31.000We've got great scientists, philosophers, people with ideas.
00:16:35.000Many times, handicapped people I know are more intelligent, more loving, wonderful people because they didn't become these mindless, satanic yuppies running around, these materialistic idiots.