John West has updated Darwin Day in America (read free excerpt!)
 From Marvin Olasky:
When John G. West’s Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science (ISI Books) came out in 2007, I called it “a superb overview of what happens once we start seeing man as an overachieving worm. John West shows how a Darwin Day worldview affects everything from sex and philanthropy to crime and euthanasia.” So it’s great news that a new edition is coming out on Monday, with an update on recent developments.
Well, they do want to make it a national holiday.
Book.
Highlights
Excerpt at worldmag: From science to scientism in the Obama era
Our culture is witnessing the rise of what could be called totalitarian science — science so totalistic in its outlook that its defenders claim the right to remake every sphere of human life, from public policy and education to ethics and religion,” says West. “Science is a wonderful enterprise, but in the Obama era, it’s being twisted in ways that are unhealthy for both science and society.
Just how far some [Obama] administration officials were willing to take the idea that science should override ethical concerns became apparent with the disclosure of a multiyear experiment funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) involving more than 1,300 premature infants. As part of the experiment, premature infants were randomly assigned to receive higher or lower levels of oxygen. Those receiving lower levels of oxygen were more likely to die, while those receiving higher levels of oxygen suffered serious eye damage that could lead to blindness. Parents were not informed of the possible increased risk of death for infants enrolled in the study. Nor were most of them informed that researchers recalibrated oxygen equipment to generate false readings, thus preventing medical staff from adjusting oxygen levels based on the individual needs of the infants in their care.
[ The people involved in this experiment should be barred from medicine and medical research for life. ]
Medical ethicists were appalled. “The word ‘unethical’ doesn’t even begin to describe the egregious and shocking deficiencies in the informed-consent process for this study,” said Michael Carome, MD, the director of the Health Research Group at the nonprofit (and politically liberal) group Public Citizen. “Parents of the infants who were enrolled in this study were misled about its purpose. … They were misled to believe everything being done was in the ‘standard of care’ and therefore posed no predictable risk to the babies.” Carome, who previously served in the Office for Human Research Protections in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, helped lead the effort to expose the misconduct of researchers and to ensure that the abuses did not recur.
And get this:
Chief among the defenders of the premature-infant study was NIH head Francis Collins. One of Obama’s key science appointees, Collins was known for his work as head of the Human Genome Project as well as for being an outspoken evangelical Christian. Unlike most evangelicals, however, Collins had supported Obama for president in 2008, and many of his views were out of sync with those of other evangelicals. He was among the NIH officials permitted to review the OHRP’s second compliance letter, and according to Public Citizen, he led a public relations campaign to undermine the OHRP’s initial findings. Citing e-mail messages, Public Citizen accused Collins of seeking to have the second OHRP compliance letter issued the day before an article coauthored by Collins was to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine defending the premature-infant study. Public Citizen found it “disturbing” that Collins and his coauthors “essentially leaked” to journal editors “the fact that OHRP soon would be issuing a compliance oversight letter to UAB putting on hold all compliance actions related to the investigation.”
Hey, wait a minute. Francis Collins founded BioLogos, that Christians for Darwin outfit:
BioLogos invites the church and the world to see the harmony between science and biblical faith as we present an evolutionary understanding of God’s creation.
And sure enough, there’s Francis Collins’ face grinning away at BioLogos Basics.
Recall,
Medical ethicists were appalled. “The word ‘unethical’ doesn’t even begin to describe the egregious and shocking deficiencies in the informed-consent process for this study,” said Michael Carome, MD, the director of the Health Research Group at the nonprofit (and politically liberal) group Public Citizen.
So that’s what “the language of God” really means! Glad someone spelled it out.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/john-west-has-updated-darwin-day-in-america-read-free-excerpt/
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Axel February 11, 2015 at 8:26 am
‘Just how far some [Obama] administration officials were willing to take the idea that science should override ethical concerns became apparent with the disclosure of a multiyear experiment funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) involving more than 1,300 premature infants. As part of the experiment, premature infants were randomly assigned to receive higher or lower levels of oxygen. Those receiving lower levels of oxygen were more likely to die, while those receiving higher levels of oxygen suffered serious eye damage that could lead to blindness. Parents were not informed of the possible increased risk of death for infants enrolled in the study. Nor were most of them informed that researchers recalibrated oxygen equipment to generate false readings, thus preventing medical staff from adjusting oxygen levels based on the individual needs of the infants in their care.’
Come back, Dr Mengele. all is forgiven. The accounts of lynching/drawing and quarterings, castrations and other forms of mutilation, burning alive over fires, hot pokers down their African American victims’ throats, etc – all in combination, of course – by the good folk in the Southern States of the US make much more sense, now.’
Not to mention the other horrors inflicted on the health of African Americans and doubtless destitute whites, by the US authorities, such as infecting them with syphilis.
The use of our service people by the UK authorities, as guinea-pigs to test the effects on their health of atomic radiation, during the fifties, and perhaps other such imaginative, truth-seeking endeavours, seems more plausible too, though one would be a fool to have doubted it.
What I want to know is: Why are not the gaffers who authorise these research trials awarded Nobel prizes for science? At least nominated..?
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Because premature babies have immature lungs, they usually require treatment with supplemental oxygen to survive and to prevent brain damage and other problems caused by oxygen deficiency. In many cases, premature babies also need to undergo intubation (insertion of a breathing tube into the trachea, the main airway leading to the lungs) and treatment with a ventilator (an automated breathing machine). More than 50 years of medical research have demonstrated that for premature babies, treatment with too little oxygen can cause brain injury or death, whereas treatment with too much oxygen can lead to damage to the retina of the eye and blindness.
As part of routine care, the amount of oxygen given to each premature baby is individually adjusted based on a continuous assessment of many clinical factors by the baby’s medical team, which includes neonatologists, nurses and a variety of medical specialists. One of the most important factors used to guide oxygen therapy is the oxygen saturation level, a measure of blood oxygen content. Oxygen saturation levels have become so important in the care of critically ill patients that it is sometimes referred to as the “fifth vital sign” (the first four vital signs being pulse, blood pressure, breathing rate and temperature). Since the 1980s, technology has been widely available to monitor oxygen saturation levels continuously using a probe placed on a finger or elsewhere on the skin, which is then connected to a device called a pulse oximeter. All premature babies cared for in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) in the U.S. have been monitored with these devices for decades.
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The medical teams caring for babies enrolled in the study were only allowed to use these inaccurately reading pulse oximeters when caring for babies in the study. The combined experimental procedure of randomly assigning babies to low or high target oxygen levels without respect to their individual clinical needs, as well as providing intentionally inaccurate information to the entire medical team about blood oxygen levels — a vitally important parameter used to care for babies —represented a considerable deviation from usual standard of care. It is important to know actual oxygen saturation levels because that is a key parameter in deciding when premature babies should be intubated and placed on a ventilator and when they can be safely taken off a ventilator and be allowed to breathe on their own.
Providing the medical team with inaccurate information about oxygen levels could have adversely affected these critical clinical decisions. For example, the inaccurate oxygen level readings could have led the medical team to intubate and artificially ventilate some babies who did not need these medical procedures, thus unnecessarily exposing the babies to the risks of intubation and artificial ventilation. On the other hand, the inaccurate oxygen level readings could have led the medical team to not intubate and artificially ventilate other babies who did need these medical procedures, thus exposing them to risks of oxygen deficiency.
For many of the SUPPORT study babies, the overall level of oxygen they received was different from what they would have received had they not participated in the study. Many babies in the low-oxygen group predictably received less oxygen than they would have otherwise received, potentially increasing risk of brain injury and death. On the other hand, many babies in the high-oxygen group predictably received more oxygen than they would have otherwise received, potentially increasing the risk of eye disease and blindness.
Indeed, results of the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that babies in the high-oxygen group were twice as likely to develop the serious eye disease associated with prematurity as those in the low-oxygen group — 18 percent versus 9 percent. Not surprisingly, babies in the low-oxygen group had a higher death rate, with 20 percent of babies in that group dying before discharge compared to 16 percent in the high-oxygen group.
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Inadequate consent forms
Given the nature of the experimental interventions in the SUPPORT study and their serious, potentially life-threatening risks, one may wonder how the parents of more than 1,300 premature infants were willing to consent to enrolling their extremely premature infants in this experiment. A review of the final consent forms that were approved by the institutional review board (IRB) — a committee charged with conducting an ethical review of human subjects research — at each study institution reveals that parents were not informed about the true purpose, nature or risks of the study, thereby providing a plausible explanation for why many parents gave their consent.
For example, regarding the purpose of the oxygen experiment, most consent forms simply stated that the study would try to determine whether use of the lower oxygen range would lower the rate of eye disease and blindness. However, all failed to mention that the other primary purpose was to see if babies randomly assigned to the low-oxygen group would have a higher (or lower) death rate in comparison to the high-oxygen group.
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The failure to disclose critically important information regarding the purpose, nature and risks of the research to parents of the SUPPORT study babies represented an egregious violation of research ethics. These failures undoubtedly directly affected parents’ decisions to enroll their premature babies in this study. It is highly likely that had they been appropriately informed, many, if not most, parents would have declined to enroll their babies.
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http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=5971 |
