The Gender Perspective in Bioethics

Read about the International Conference on Gender and Bioethics.

Visit of Director General to the United States

UNESCO Director General Koïchiro Matsuura visited the United States in June, During that visit he met with senior American officials to discuss new avenues for collaboration in the fields of education, culture and science.

Mr Matsuura meet with Dr Esther Brimmer, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations. I quote from UNESCO's report of the visit:

Mr Matsuura first briefed Ms Brimmer on UNESCO’s work in education, especially higher education. He highlighted the Organization’s action to promote quality assurance and the mutual recognition of qualifications in response to the massive increase in student mobility and cross-border provision. Again, the Director-General pointed to the need for US engagement. He referred in particular to the role the US could play in enhancing the quality of science education and research and in attracting more young people to the sciences. “While student numbers are rising overall, enrolment in science and technology is on the decline; we must work together to curb this trend, which has serious implications for national development and economic growth”, Mr Matsuura stated. The Director-General said that this was an area where UNESCO was looking to partner both with governments and with private sector companies, citing the successful example of the UNESCO/L’Oréal initiative to promote women in science. Ms Brimmer noted that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had just established an office specifically devoted to advancing public private partnerships (PPPs)........

Finally, Mr Matsuura briefly outlined UNESCO’s normative action in the field of bioethics. The Director-General explained that UNESCO had established three international instruments which together provided a set of universal standards and practical guidelines (the 1997 Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights; the 2003 International Declaration on Human Genetic Data; and the 2005 Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights). However, he said that the ethical implications of many new scientific developments still needed to be discussed, such as human cloning and stem-cell research, in particular induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells).

While in Washington, the Director-General also spoke with Dr John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Dr Jane Lubchenco, Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. He underlined the vital importance of US partnership in several UNESCO priority areas, from science policy advice and capacity-building in developing countries to ocean governance and the monitoring of climate change impacts. “For UNESCO to expand its science programme we need the involvement of the US science community – its expertise, its creativity, its entrepreneurship”, the Director-General underscored.

Read more:

Some Readings About UNESCO's Ethics Program

The Avicenna Prize Medal
The Avicenna Prize is awarded every other year
for achievements in the ethics of science.

UNESCO has for several decades sought to build and reinforce linkages among ethicists, scientists, policy-makers and civil society to assist its member nations in enacting sound and reasoned policies on ethical issues in science and technology. UNESCO pursues its ethical mandate in primarily in the fields of

• Bioethics and
• Ethics of Science and Technology

There are also cross sectoral programs, such as the work in ethical education of children which resulted in the production of a book, Learning to Live Together: An Intercultural and Interfaith Programme for Ethics Education.

The Bureau of Public Information has produced some short bulletins describing aspects of UNESCO's ethics work:

• UNESCO and ethics: introduction
• Ethics and education
• Environmental ethics

Of fundamental importance are three UNESCO Declarations dealing with ethics:

• The Universal Declaration On The Human Genome And Human Rights
• The International Declaration on Human Genetic Data
  
• The Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights

The Eubios Ethics Institute provides a useful webpage on UNESCO's ethics resources with many links to UNESCO documents.

Why Do We Need Bioethics?

Henk A.M.J.ten Have, MD, PhD, director of the Division of Ethics of Science and Technology at UNESCO and an advocate for bioethics, explored the history of bioethics and its resurgence as a global activity on Friday, September 19, 2008, at The City Club of Cleveland.

Click here to hear a podcast of his lecture.

U.S, Member of the IBC

Carter Snead has been designated a member of UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee. That Committee is a body of 36 independent experts that follows progress in the life sciences and its applications in order to ensure respect for human dignity and freedom. The IBC provides a global forum for in-depth bioethical reflection, encouraged by its secretariat to expose the issues at stake. The IBC does not pass judgment on one position or another. Instead, it is up to each country, particularly lawmakers, to reflect that nation's societal choices within the framework of national legislation and to decide between the different positions.

Professor Carter Snead is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame and a Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He previously served as General Counsel to the President's Council on Bioethics. From 2004-2005, he served as the chief negotiator and head of the United States delegation to UNESCO for the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.

His research and scholarship explore the possibility, wisdom, and mechanisms of the governance of biomedical science, medicine, and technology according to ethical principles. He was the principal drafter of the President's Council on Bioethics' 2004 report, “Reproduction and Responsibility: The Regulation of New Biotechnologies,” a controversial assessment of the governance (both public and private) of the activities at the intersection of assisted reproduction, human embryo research, and genetics. He has also published on the implications of neuroimaging techniques in criminal legal proceedings.

Professor Snead received his B.A. from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, and his J.D., magna cum laude, from Georgetown University. He clerked for the Hon. Paul J. Kelly, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit from 1999-2000.

Read more in his Notre Dame website.

Editorial: Ethics and Neurosciences and Cognitive Sciences

Ethics of Science and Technology:
explorations of the frontiers of science and ethics
A collection of selected publications by
the first two laureates of the Avicenna Prize for Ethics in Science

Henry Greely has an editorial in Science magazine this week titled "On Neuroethics". Henry Greely is a Professor of Law at Stanford University who has long worked on legal and ethical issues in the biosciences.

Neuroscience and cognitive science have grown greatly. For example, on 3 November 2007, the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting is expected to draw more than 30,000 scientists to discuss brains. New knowledge has begun to spill out from the laboratory into society and as a result new ethical, legal, and social concerns are being created.

"The brains of "normal" people in some imaging studies yield clinically significant findings disconcertingly often: 8 to 10% of the time in some studies. What kind of information and follow-up do we owe those people? Other studies may have military implications: Suppose brain stimulation created an indefinitely awake and alert soldier or pilot? Will neuroscience be a new source of dual-use technologies such as those we worry about for biological or chemical warfare? Other researchers are studying "the neuroscience of ethics," as philosophers and neuroscientists explore how brains make decisions when confronted with moral dilemmas. The implications are unclear, but the work is fascinating."

Last year the Neuroethics Society was created as an interdisciplinary group of scholars, scientists and clinicians who share an interest in the social, legal, ethical and policy implications of advances in neuroscience. More generally,the growing interconnections between moral philosophy and research that draws upon neuroscience, developmental psychology, and evolutionary biology.requires serious attention from a broad interdisciplinary perspective.

Greely emphasizes that more work has to be done to develop Neuroethics:

In these days of tight federal budgets, money is hard to get. But to fund science without supporting work on its social consequences will ensure that the neuroscience revolution brings far too much social pain and chaos along with its scientific and medical breakthroughs.

UNESCO held a meeting in 1995 on the topic of Ethics and Neurosciences. Moreover, within UNESCO's Social and Human Sciences Program, there is an Ethics program with substantial programs on:

• The ethics of science and technology.
• Bioethics

The ethics of neuroscience and cognitive science and their expanding applications and technologies raises concerns that would benefit not only from discussion within the United States, but in an international forum. Not only could multicultural perspectives help to clarify the ethical issues, but would help to avoid and/or resolve intercultural misunderstandings and conflict.

UNESCO is the obvious venue for such discussions. It is to be hoped that the U.S. National Commission will strongly recommend to the State Department that the permanent delegation recommend UNESCO become more important in the evolving debates about the ethics of neuroscience and cognitive science.

Bioethics at UNESCO

The UNESCO Bioethics Program was created in 1993. It is managed as part of the Social and Human Sciences Program, and supports the International Bioethics Committee. In 1997 the General Conference adopted the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, the only international instrument in the field of bioethics, which was endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1998.

The UNESCO Bioethics Program website

UNESCO Bioethics Guides:

The program has published three guides, directed at those managing bioethics committees.

Guide #1 Establishing Bioethics Committees

Guide #2, Bioethics Committees at Work: Procedures and Policies

Guide #3, Educating Bioethics Committees

Also of interest from UNESCO:

A Cross-Cultural Introduction to Bioethics, Darryl R.J. Macer, Ph.D. (Editor), Eubios Ethics Institute, 2006

A list of UNESCO bioethics materials
(All of which can be downloaded free of charge from the list.)

Fourteenth Session of the International Bioethics Committee (IBC)
Nairobi, Kenya, 17-19 May 2007