New Medicines for Schizophrenia
Many health care providers read this blog, although most focus on non-invasive healing methods.
But it is still important to know a little about conventional medications, and one of the basic tenets of Integrated Medicine is that we use orthodox medicine together with precisely individualized treatments aimed at harmonizing the whole person.
Last night the Food and Drug Administration in the United States granted final approval for a new medicine for the treatment of schizophrenia. It is called paliperidone, and will be marketed under the name Invega.
We have also heard that three other new medicines are in the late stages of development: bifeprunox, asenapine and iloperidone.
It is a sad fact that many people with severe mental illnesses are not well served by any currently available treatments, be they medicines, psychotherapy, nutrition or anything else. So it is good news that new treatment options are emerging. The next step is to see how these new medicines work in practice and if there are any side effect issues that did not show up in the clinical trials.
Paliperidone will become available in the United States in early January. You can read something about it here.
We expect that bifeprunox will be the next one to come to market, and you can read something about it here.
We shall continue to provide up to date and independent information about all the new approaches to treating major mental illness here.
Advertising Medicines
Web Mistress (that still sounds a bit rude) Carol Kirshner has just alerted me to something very important.
It looks as if there is going to be more oversight of direct-to-consumer advertising of medicines.
She posted this on Thursday:
"According to an article published today by Reuters the General Accountability Office (GAO) has published a report that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) needs to improve their monitoring of direct-to-consumer drug advertising. Specifically, the FDA should issue warning letters more quickly when misleading advertisements appear.
The GAO findings are based on an examination of 19 letters issued in 2004 and 2005 which took, on average, 8 months to send out. The GAO asserts that by the time the companies received the letters, most had already discontinued the ads. Additionally, the GAO found that even after the letters were received, some companies continued to break the rules on the same medications.
The GAO report found that the pharmaceutical industry spent 4.2 Billion dollars on DTC ads in 2005. This is almost double the amount spent in 1997. Breakdown of other spending includes 7.2 Billion dollars promoting directly to doctors and 31.4 Billion dollars spent on R&D.
Logic would seem to suggest that if spending on DTC advertising continues to grow exponentially, monitoring will become even more difficult. There will simply be too much volume to keep up with given the current resources of the FDA. In fact, the FDA has tried to proffer this as an explanation for the lapses. According to the article, the GAO is standing firm that the FDA could do more."
The first thing to say is that the vast majority of pharma companies do a great job of providing clear and accurate information, and I know of several for whom patient welfare always trumps the bottom line. But clearly there have been some problems.
Second, is that consumers need to be aware that the inofmration in the advertisements may no longer be 100% accurate, so check before you take anything. One of the reasons for creating this blog was so that I could be responsive to questions and quick to provide new information as it appears.
I also have a number three point, and it is something that surprises many of my friends and colleagues in the United States. Direct-to-patient advertising is prohibited almost everywhere else in the world. The rationale for that prohibition is most definitely not to disempower people! It is that careful prescribing of medicines is becoming an ever more complex art and science.
Regular readers may remember a report about the lamentable level of training of British doctors in how to prescribe and combine medicines. And British doctors do not have the added burden of patients asking for medications by name.
Some years ago I was at a meeting at which I was told a statistic that 92% of American doctors will prescribe a medicine if tha patient asks them to, while the figure throughout Europe was less than 20%. I’ve never been able to find any documentation for those figures, though they were given to me by a senior executive in a pharma company.
If those figure are anywhere near the truth they would worry me: there are just so many inter-individual differences in response to treatment and so many potential interactions between medicines, herbs and supplements. Explaining them all to someone who hasn’t been trained in phamacology can be tough.
Trust me! I’ve been teaching medical students, residents, junior attendings, pharmacists and nurses since the 1970s. All have biomedical backgrounds, but teaching them all the ins and outs of modern pharmacology can be a Labor of Hercules!
So this is absolutely not a criticism of members of the public asking about things that they have seen on TV or the internet. Neither is it a criticism of 99% of the pharmaceutical industry.
I think that it’s great for people to ask for what they want, the problem is this: How many doctors and nurses are able to say no?
And also to explain their reasons clearly?
Isn’t it just an extra stressor for patients and prescribers alike?
The Sixth Extinction
“Once we spread out into space and establish colonies, our future should be safe.”
— English Theoretical Physicist and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, 1942-
Five times before the world has almost died. Many experts believe that we are now in the Sixth Extinction. More accurately known as the Holocene extinction event, it refers to the widespread, ongoing mass extinction of species during the modern Holocene epoch that began 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.
The previous ones were all a very long time ago, and were probably caused by cosmic events:
- 444 million years ago: the End Ordovician
- 360 million years ago: the Late Devonian
- 251 million years ago: the Permian-Triassic transition
- 200 million years ago: the End Triassic
- 65 million years ago: the End Cretaceous (this is the one that you probably learned about in school: it was the one that is thought to have ended the reign of the dinosaurs)
The reason that so many people are becoming more conservationist in their outlook is that the observed rate of extinction has accelerated dramatically in the last 50 years to a pace that is greater than the rate seen during the Big Five extinctions.
Unlike the previous extinctions that were likely caused by astronomical events, most experts attribute the sixth extinction directly to human activities. So they can be a good barometer of where we are going wrong with the world. Since 1500 AD, 698 extinctions have been documented by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.
In the United Kingdom, the publication of the Stern Report that outlined the frightful impact not of extinctions but of global climate change, was endorsed by the current Prime Minister, Tony Blair. He endorsed it not out of the goodness of his heart, but because the report demonstrated the impact not just on people but on the economy. It seems a shame that it takes money to persuade some people in high places to do the right thing. Naturally the Stern report has had more than its fair share of criticisms. But the fact that more people in politics and industry are talking about global climate change and the impact of our activities on people and on many other species is obviously a good thing.
However I think that the real change in how we live with the earth lies not simply in understanding the impact on our bottom line, but in our own level of development. Rather tha following Stephen Hawking’s advice and heading off into space, we need to get ourselves in order, unless we want to take all the behaviors that have caused this catastophe with us.
In recent years I have been persuaded by the spiral dynamics model. As more people embrace the Green, Yellow and Turquoise Memes they understand not just intellectually, but viscerally, the importance of preserving the planet and terminating the headlong rush toward the sixth extinction. Ken Wilber has written eloquently about the downside of what he calls the “Mean Green Meme.” But once enough of us make the jump to second-tier thinking there are no longer these mean downsides. Just a constant desire, need even, to nurture and preserve the planet.
One of the reasons for my efforts to assist your personal growth and development is that neither health nor illnesses exist in isolation. They are born from and affect everyone in the individual’s social group, and their resolution requires the cooperation of everyone in the group. And that social group includes the planet and all the creatures around us.
I have been asked to start sharing yet more of the practical techniques that have helped thousands of students over the last 30+ years, so I am going to start creating a new set of podcasts to help anyone who would like them.
“By 2050, at bio-extinction’s current rate, between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of all species will have disappeared or be too few in numbers to survive. There’ll be a few over-visited parks, the coral reefs will be beaten up, grasslands overgrazed. Vast areas of the tropics that have lost their forests will have the same damn weeds, bushes and scrawny eucalyptus trees so that you don’t know if you’re in Africa or the Americas.”
–Stuart L. Pimm (English-born American Conservation Biologist, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology Environmental Sciences and Policy Division at Duke University and Originator of the “Food chain” concept in research into extinction of plants and animals, 1949-)
“Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.”
— Henry David Thoreau (American Essayist and Philosopher, 1817-1862)
Beer Goggles
With Christmas coming, your humble reporter felt it important to share some critically important research from the cutting edge of science.
Beer goggles is a Britishism to describe the infamous phenomenon by which “ugly” people are magically transformed into “beauties” as more alcohol is consumed. An effect that normally only lasts until the following morning. A couple of years ago the BBC ran an article on this common observation with the catchy title, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder!’
Your humble reporter has – of course – never experienced the phenomenon for himself, but he was nonetheless impressed to hear that even beer goggles has now succumbed before the onslaught of the scientific method.
Researchers at Manchester University report that while beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder (beer-holder?), the amount of alcohol consumed is not the only factor. They have identified some additional factors including the level of light in the bar, pub or club, the drinker’s own eyesight and the room’s smokiness. The physical distance between two people is also a factor.
Just to prove that this is real science, the researchers have generated a smart looking equation:
This is the key to the magic formula:
An = number of units of alcohol consumed
S = smokiness of the room (graded from 0-10, where 0 clear air; 10 extremely smoky)
L = luminance of ‘person of interest’ (candelas per square meter; typically 1 pitch black; 150 as seen in normal room lighting)
Vo = Snellen visual acuity (6/6 normal; 6/12 just meets driving standard)
d = distance from ‘person of interest’ (meters; 0.5 to 3 meters)
You can use the formula to calculate a final score, ranging from less than one – where there is no beer goggle effect – to more than 100. The higher the score, the higher the chance that the esthetically challenged will appear more attractive.
The leader of the research team, Nathan Efron, Professor of Clinical Optometry at the University of Manchester, had this to say: "The beer goggles effect isn’t solely dependent on how much alcohol a person consumes, there are other influencing factors at play too… For example, someone with normal vision, who has consumed five pints of beer and views a person 1.5 meters away in a fairly smoky and poorly lit room, will score 55, which means they would suffer from a moderate beer goggle effect."
But why, one wonders, would alcohol have the effect of making other people more attractive? After all the disinhibitory effects of alcohol can also make people aggressive, and the drinker will likely be less attractive to the people around him. Unless, of course, they are in a similar state. And why should less visual acuity make others more attractive? We could probably construct a model based on evolutionary psychology, but inquiring minds need to know.
Your reporter was left with a question: at a time when everyone in academia is fighting over a dwindling research budget, who on earth funded this research? Then he found the answer: the eye care company Bausch & Lomb PureVision.
But come to think of it, isn’t this the opposite of the result that the company would have wanted?
Fake News
There was a report in the British Medical Journal in April that got very little publicity, and even came in under my pretty sensitive radar.
The Center for Media and Democracy, a public interest group based in Madison, Wisconsin, that exposes "public relations spin and propaganda," issued a report that tracked the use of 36 video news releases (VNRs) aired by news outlets over the past 10 months. VNRs are designed to look like independently produced news but they are actually prepackaged promotions containing film footage created by corporate publicists or their public relations firms.
The media is always hungry for new material, but I was surprised to see that during the tracking period stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety more than one-third of the time. The other point of importance was that VNRs were not only widely used but their source was usually not disclosed. Another worrisome thing was that when it came to pharmaceuticals the safety data was usually shortened or even removed.
I have no problem at all with advertising and marketing. But it is surely misleading to dress up a company release as a news story.
To be fair, most television networks have rules and disclosure policies, but they are obviously sometimes (often?) being ignored.
I have been looking to see if there has been any change since this report came out in April, and I don’t see anything.
This strikes me as an important issues, so I shall continue to track it on your behalf.
Arsenic and Water Safety
Here is a new study that may turn out to be one of the most important of the year.
Tens of millions on people around the world, most particularly in Bangladesh, are forced to drink water containing dangerously high amounts of arsenic. The very same stuff that has been used by countless poisoners.
The classic symptoms of arsenic poisoning are:
- Headache
- Abdominal pains
- Vomiting
- Difficulty breathing
- Light headedness
- Delirium
- Neuropathy
- Stroke
- Skin lesions: usually thickening of the skin of the palms and soles with wart-like excresences
- Reduced production of red and white blood cells
- Increased risk of cancers of the lung, skin, bladder, liver, kidney and prostate
- Death
The exact pattern of symptoms depends on the acuity of the exposure, the amount of arsenic to which a person is exposed and the individual’s own makeup.
The new research – published this week in the journal Science – is from Rice University’s Centre for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology in Texas, and it may give us a quick and cheap way of getting most of the arsenic out of drinking water. The investigators used minute particles of iron oxide – very similar to common rust – to bind large amounts of arsenic. The iron oxide particles are really tiny: just 12 nanometres (billionths of a metre) across, about 5,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. When mixed into contaminated water, the tiny crystals became coated with the poison and began behaving like iron filings. The iron oxide/arsenic combination can then be removed from water using a simple hand-held magnet.
One of the investigators, Professor Doug Natelson had this to say, "The idea of using magnetic particles to filter and clean water is not particularly new. The trick here is that these particles are very, very small, which means they’re essentially all surface. So the arsenic sticks to the surface of the particles, and what we’ve found is that when the nanoparticles are in the right range of sizes, you can pull them out of solution with a relatively small magnetic field gradient that you could get from, say, a permanent magnet."
As an additional refinement, the scientists needed to develop a technology that would be usable in one of the poorest parts of the world. In one experiment flakes of rust were made into nanoparticles by heating them in coconut or olive oil at 350C. They could then be used in water purification.
This is excellent news, and if confirmed, it could save hundreds of thousands if not millions of livees, and unspeakably awful chronic ill health.
Conflicts of Interest
Last week I made some comments about the claims made in the new book by Suzanne Somers.
As expected, I had a good many people who said, “About time somebody said something,” and a few others who just felt that her publisher should have arranged for more fact checking.
To the people who agreed with me, thank you.
To those who did not, I respect your various positions, and I think that we have to look at this problem in a bit more detail.
By “this problem,” it is not simply about whether Suzanne needs to have some facts checked. I think that there is a very real problem with someone who has no medical training giving medical advice.
The more so if that person or persons is unable to undertake a critical review of published research.
This is much the same as the monstrous comments made by Tom Cruise earlier this year. He abused his position to make comments that made no sense. I saw several people who were weeping and distressed by what he had said. Many were saying things along the lines of “These medicines have saved my life, how can he say something so terrible?”
This is similar to the recent problem with Kevin Trudeau, who has made a great deal of money out of peddling highly questionable advice. He can do so in the United States because of the First Amendment. Nobody would want to change a constitutional right, but I get very worried about people saying anything that they want about health, and if anyone gets harmed, they say that it’s not their fault.
Some don’t even seem to have the wit to understand that their recommendations may cause harm. Harm that can come not just from commission – taking something harmful or being given a harmful treatment – but also of omission: not getting a treatment with proven efficacy. Trudeau claims that he is fighting on behalf of the American public. In which case, why has he not contributed the entire proceeds from the sales of his books to an independent central fund to educate the public about health?
I certainly do not think that people with an MD, DO or ND have all the answers: none of us does. But when we are talking about people’s health, I think that we all have to be extremely careful about dishing out advice.
I am also very aware that there are millions of people – mainly, but not exclusively women – who have severe problems with hormonal imbalances, and that they have not always been well-served by the medical professions. Giving unsubstantiated advice to people who are suffering is so unfair.
A number of people who are known for their work in hormone replacement have published an open letter that they have written to Suzanne Somers’ publisher, Crown House, expressing their dismay over some of the claims in her book. The signatories include Christiane Northrup and Diana Schwarzbein. Neither of whom would be called pillars of the establishment.
The Endocrine Society has just published a position paper about bioidentical hormones that I would urge you to read if you want further clarification about the whole issue of hormone replacement.
The front cover of the magazine Life Extension gleefully proclaims “Suzanne Somers Versus the Medical Establishment.” Life Extension is a fine looking glossy publication that looks like a peer reviewed Journal. It seems, though, to be a medium for disseminating information about supplements. Some of the articles are really quite good, but there is always the subtext that they are written in order to promote products.
The Journal uses a familiar tactic in some of these magazines that are selling products. This tactic is that they are letting you in on A Secret. A secret that is being kept from you by those terrible doctors or, shock horror, pharmaceutical companies that are trying to keep you sick. I’ve worked with countless pharmaceutical companies, and I’m well known for speaking my mind. But I have to tell you that in every company that I’ve worked with on five continents, the vast majority of the people involved have had a genuine concern for human welfare. Yes, they have a business to run, but pretty much all the people that I’ve known in the industry have been in that particular industry because it meshes with their own life goals of helping humanity. And as I pointed out a moment ago, the open letter to the publishers was not penned by pharmaceutical company lackeys.
Is Suzanne Somers making money out of her claims? Well, of course she is. She is using her celebrity and her extravagant claims to sell books. I’m quite sure that far fewer people would be interested in reading her material ff she just stuck to the facts.
That in itself presents some important ethical issues. Clearly, if she stuck to the data and gave a clear account of the pros and cons of what she is suggesting, she’s not likely to sell so many books.
As a spin off, she is also getting large numbers of people to visit her website, where they may buy products that may not contain bioidentical hormones, but ARE touted as being “anti-aging.” In other words the products on sale make some of the same claims that are associated with the hormones. This is a well-known marketing tactic. She claims to have one million people in her database, though we have not been able to confirm those numbers.
People all over the Internet are trying to find out if she is receiving any payments for endorsing products. I know that because several have contacted me. Of course she can do any kind of business deals that she wants, but there are ever-evolving rules about conflict of interest. Some new rules have just been proposed in the medical literature, and it would be excellent if the same standards were applied in all publications, whether print, online, in infomercials, interviews or any other kinds of medium of communication.
An important article on conflict of interest and full disclosure has just been published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Most major scientific journals now require that authors fully disclose ALL sources of funding. There are also strong, and I believe welcome moves to ensure that when patients receive medications, that they are fully informed if the prescriber has any relationships with drug companies. I have seen some people suggest that there should be a complete separation of pharmaceutical industry and the medical professions. A moment’s thought shows that would not be an answer to anything. If we can do this in conventional medicine, why not in every area of healthcare?
(As I’ve said before, my own list of disclosures is available to anyone who wants them, and they get updated every time that I do any work for which I get compensated. And not just me, any members of our staff. We are determined to remain squeaky clean.)
So what to do about the people who make wild claims about health, without disclosing their conflicts of interest?
Since we’ve just been through an election we’ve all seen how the squeaky wheel gets the grease!
People who say things loudly and repeatedly and appear to be saying something novel, do get attention. There’s no question about it, and there’s a good reason: Our brains are hard wired to notice and respond to loud noises and novelty. But when we are dealing with outrageous medical claims, the soft whispers of good data will ultimately drown the foghorns of dogma and opinion, however loudly they are blasted from the rooftops.
Some of the claim makers retire behind the fig leaf of saying, “Well there isn’t any data but if there were any, it would prove what I’m saying.”
Believe it or not, I’ve had that said to me on several occasions by several different people.
All of whom managed to keep a straight face…
The CSI Effect
Over the last three or four years, American lawyers and law enforcement have been struggling with something that has become known as the CSI Effect.
Following the phenomenal success of the TV show CSI and its spin-offs, a major problem has been developing in courtrooms across America. Jurors are drawn form the ranks of television viewers, and they may have unrealistic expectations about the nature and quality of the evidence that they will be asked to examine. It is being claimed that cases are being lost because the evidence offered might fall far short of what the television-trained jurors have learned to expect.
I have not been able to find any god evidence for the CSI effect, and it may just be a case of attorneys who are upset about losing a case, but I don’t think so. I’ve spoken to quite a number of lawyers as well as physicians who do legal work, and there does seem to have been quite a shift in the courtroom. Most jurors now appear to rate scientific evidence much more highly than eye-witness accounts and confessions by defendants.
Even allowing for artistic license, I’m constantly astonished by the largesse of whoever is funding the CSI laboratories! I spent years working in basic research, and know only too well how hard it can be to make ends meet. Many of the reagents that they slosh around on the set would cost thousands of dollars in the real world.
One very good consequence of CSI is that it seems to be enhancing the status of scientists. At least it is in the United States. The idea of the super-smart well equipped team being able to out-fox the villain is very popular. I’ve recently had to spend a bit of time in England, and the difference in the cops and robbers shows is remarkable. The current crop of English detectives seem to be conflicted and charismatic, and it is they with a combination of street smarts and intuition who solve the crimes, with only an occasional nod toward the backroom boffins. (And yes, I know, “boffin” is a Britishism. Guilty as charged M’lud.)
I recently read that all over the United States, young people are flocking to enroll in science courses. So long as they have something to do with forensic science. A University in West Virginia now boasts 500 students studying forensic science, compared with only four in the 2000-2001 academic year. Another positive for CSI and for science is the key role of female and minority investigators, who all play equal roles in bringing the guilty to book.
The jurors’ demand for scientific evidence reflects a broader trend in society. In these uncertain times, people like to have certainty: The kind that you can get from a printout or a picture. It’s the same in medicine, where people demand certain diagnoses where none might be available. The combination of defensive medicine and the patient demand for certainty have between them fueled an unprecedented rise in the number of tests being ordered, to the exclusion of common sense and clinical skills. I’m a huge fan of what the new technologies are helping us do for people. But it is essential for us to remember that tests are meant to complement and not replace clinical skills.
There is still no good way of understanding a person and his or her distress by doing a scan, inserting a scope or taking a blood test. They all need to be used together. But even when we do that, medical decision making, just like weighing the evidence in court, remains a balance not just of objective data, but also of experience and intuition.
And we need to continue to explain that not all in this world is certain and predictable.
“Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing, though the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.”
–William Congreve (English Playwright, 1670-1729)
The Death of Fish
“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”
–Henry David Thoreau (American Essayist and Philosopher, 1817-1862)
The BBC has just run a gloomy report based on an article published this week in the journal Science.
For years now, fisherman have been reporting that many of the larger
game fish have been getting smaller and younger, and the same has been
reported of smaller fish in the major fishing grounds.
Now this research, which seems quite impeccable, predicts that there will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by 2048 if current trends continue. Stocks of fish have collapsed in nearly one-third of sea fisheries, and the rate of decline is accelerating.
When the first reports came out, they quickly became fodder for the late night comedians: “You think they use a lot of batter now? Just imagine how much they’re going to have to put around a minnow, come 2050.”
But that quickly gave rise to an understanding of he gravity of the situation: the decline in numbers of fish is closely tied to a broader loss of marine biodiversity. And that is the point. I’ve heard people say, “I’m a vegetarian, so I don’t care,” or “I don’t like fish anyway.” The ocean, like every other known ecosystem, is like a vast interlocked organism.
Everything that lives in the ocean is important. The diversity of ocean life is the key to its survival. The areas of the ocean with the most different kinds of life are the healthiest. If we knock out entire species the whole will cease to function, and then we have dead oceans. Ocean fish filter toxins from the water. They protect shorelines, and they reduce the risks of algae blooms such as the red tide.
In addition, a large and increasing proportion of our population lives close to the coast; the loss of services such as flood control and waste detoxification can have disastrous consequences.
These findings are not a computer model, or some prediction of future trends. They are based on actual observations of what is happening right now.
Why are we talking about this issue in a blog dedicated to personal growth, integration and wellness? Because seeing the larger You – the You that is interconnected with the rest of the Universe, the You that transcends your physical body, your brain and your emotions – is crucial to all of those three goals.
Yes, you can certainly feel a lot more healthy by eating better. Breathing exercises are valuable too. Do the two together and you get the advantage of synergy: they leverage each other. But you will really make progress when you begin to feel, really feel in a deep down visceral way, that You are something much larger and more grand. And that You also have responsibilities for the welfare of the planet. Because You are part of it, and it is a part of You.
Once You – the whole Big You – really “gets that,” you will feel the need to leave an enduring legacy, and You become an unstoppable force for good. Then you progress rapidly. Not because you are working on yourself, but because you are now acting from your Higher Self.
“I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself.”
–Carl G. Jung (Swiss Psychologist and Psychiatrist, 1875-1961)
“In the end we all must turn to the inner Source of all our best human sources, to the Guru of all the gurus, to the Overself. Then why not now?”
–Paul Brunton (English Spiritual Teacher and Author, 1898-1981)
DNA Databases
Regular readers will have noticed that I’ve written a lot less over the last couple of weeks, as I’ve had to scuttle to and from the UK.
England has really changed in the last few years. I probably noticed more than most, because although being born and bred in England, with the exception of changing planes at Heathrow, I’ve been away for a few years.
It is just stunning how many closed circuit TV cameras there are now. I hear that the average Londoner now expects to be photographed around 20 times a day.
The cameras are said to have helped solve a lot of crimes. Apart from hordes of hapless drivers caught by the traffic cameras.
Something even more interesting to an American Citizen, is the rapid growth of the massive British DNA database, that now has samples running into the millions, and has lead to the apprehension of a number of villains and ne’re-do-wells. Though I am a huge proponent of individual liberties, I thought that this was a good use of technology that would probably never fly in the USA. I remember all the furor over those two youngsters who denial in the driving deaths of two innocent people was nailed by a sensor in their car. Many people cried “Foul,” but I rather thought that the idea of criminal penalties was to catch and re-educate people who broke the social contract. Instead some have suggested that the citizen should seek to outwit the law. A slippery slope, IMHO.
So though I knew that the FBI has established a DNA database in the USA, I wondered whether data from it will be admissible in court, and how circumscribed would be the use of the information in criminology. I had imagined that its use would be severely limited by the courts but now I’m learning otherwise.
USA Today reports that the national database of criminals’ DNA, originally designed by the FBI to help solve rapes and murders, is now increasingly being used to identify suspects in unsolved burglaries and other property crimes.
I learned that in 10 states — Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia and Wisconsin — the total number of DNA matches in property-crime cases has exceeded the number of matches in violent crimes.
In my home state of Georgia, of the first 171 matches, only 13 involved DNA from the scenes of unsolved burglaries. Of the 300 matches that followed, 79 were in burglary cases.
Civil libertarians have worried for years abut mass fingerprinting, and collecting DNA seems yet more intrusive. It is important that we have a good discussion about the ways that DNA is collected, stored and the data used.
Many of us are already worried about the ways in which some medical insurance companies may want DNA analyses to determine whether you are a good risk to insure. If you have, say, a gene for breast cancer, then they may decide not to give you medical insurance. This is one of the many reasons for our intense focus on the “New Genetics,” that are teaching us that biology is not destiny. In most cases, just because someone has a high-risk gene does not mean that they will inevitably develop an illness.
Because of the kind of work that I have done, my fingerprints are on file, and my DNA is preserved in a number of freezers around the world. Personally I have no problem with that.
With all that DNA sloshing around, perhaps I should scan the news more often. To see if someone’s announced that they’ve cloned me. If they did Dolly the sheep, maybe Petty the Doc will be next??
😉
