Here’s a useful resource for teaching about bioethics and the ethical implications of new developments in genetics. The PHG Foundation website has a large number of tutorials and other educational activities on these topics. You need to register with the site to see them, but there is no fee and the “cost” of registration seems only to be a periodic e-mail newsletter also containing helpful updates.
The PHG Foundation grew out from the Public Health Genetics unit
If I understand correctly funding for the educational developments at PHG has come and gone so nothing new will be appearing in that section of their site – but the stuff that’s already there is definitely worth a look.
The tutorial on moral theories is just one of the bioethics-related resources on the PHG Foundation site
Dr Adam Rutherford looks into misconduct in scientific research
A pair of 30 minute documentaries Science Betrayed have recently aired on Radio 4 (UK). In these programmes, Dr Adam Rutherford, Nature journalist and science interpreter for the broader public, investigates the murky world of scientific misconduct.
In the first episode, Rutherford looks at some historical and recent examples of misconduct ranging from the Piltdown Man hoax through to the case of South Korean stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-Suk. He and his interviewees reflect on some of the pressures that lead researchers to fabricate data.
The second episode focuses more specifically on the case of Andrew Wakefield and the alleged link between MMR and autism. The programme includes an interview with Wakefield himself as well as investigative journalist Brian Deer who was pivotal in uncovering evidence of malpractice.
The episodes can both be accessed via the BBC website. At the time of writing the BBC iPlayer gives no mention of expiry date so I am hopeful these are resources that will be directly available for some while. It appears that there is also an abbreviated version (18 mins) of episode 1 (and presumably episode 2, once broadcast) on the Discovery site where it is actually downloadable as an mp3 podcast – thanks to Joe (comments, below) for this tip-off.
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics produces authoritative reports on issues of ethical importance. Reaching Out to Young People committee (of which I am a member) aims to produce teaching resources to accompany the production of some of these reports. Most recently, we have released some materials to help students (particularly A level students) to explore Ethical Issues associated with Dementia. These resources are available via the Nuffield website.
For a while now I’ve been working with a couple of colleagues at the University of Leicester to produce some videos about the use of model organisms in research. The “big film” is still in gestation, but the project has generated a number of other videos which are now available on YouTube.
The most recent 3-minute video features the research of Dr Flav Giorgini and his team. In particular, the film focuses on their work involves the use of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to improve our understanding of the fundamental processes involved in Huntington’s Disease and other neurodegenerative diseases.
It is our hope that videos of this kind will help explain the relevance of work on other species, and especially, lower organisms. We would value any comments you have about the film and especially its potential as a teaching tool.
Other videos already available as part of this series include:
Established in 1991, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics has earned a reputation for production of authoritative reports of ethical issues raised by a variety of current and emerging technologies in biomedicine and bioscience.
The quality and depth of analysis of the Nuffield reports means that they are rather too ‘chunky’ for most GCSE and A level students to negotiate. Over the last couple of years the Council’s Reaching Out to Young People committee (of which I am a member) has begun to produce educational resources to offer some of the key curriculum-relevant content of the larger reports in a more teenager-friendly format.
The forensic use of bioinformation resources are derived from the Council’s 2007 report of the same name. The resources include curriculum links, lesson plans, teaching notes, activity sheets, background information and quizzes. We hope you find them useful.
Rebecca Skloot's book has received critical and popular acclaim in 2010
In hundreds of research labs around the world, including within my own Department, scientists carry out experiments using a human cell line known as “HeLa”. Most cells die after a defined period of time, but mutations within the HeLa cells have allowed them to continue dividing outside of these normal contraints, and as such they are said to be “immortal”. The original tissue sample from which HeLa cells are derived was taken from the cancerous cervix of an African-American woman Henrietta Lacks (the name of the cell line being an abbreviation of her name).
For the past three years we have been asking second year students to produce a short film on a bioethical topic as an assessed activity. This task allows the students to demonstrate their knowledge in creative ways. I have finally got around to posting some of their films on our own YouTube channel. The first of these focusses on the use of DNA in forensics and as well as the students’ own CSI-style story it also features an interview with Alec Jeffreys. More videos will be posted shortly.
(Warning: contains minor spoilers!) Not to be confused with Jodie Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper, which is about Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis, Rosamund Lupton’s 2010 novel called simply Sistercentres on a gene therapy trial.
The Hemming family know that they harbour the gene for cystic fibrosis (CF); Beatrice – the narrator of the story – has seen her younger brother Leo die of the disease and her pregnant sister Tess has been told that her child will also be a sufferer.
At the start of the book Tess has gone missing and Beatrice flies back from the USA to look for her. As Beatrice recounts the events that follow her search for her sister, it is clear that Tess’s decision to participate in a clinical trial of a gene therapy cure for CF lies at the heart of the story.
In terms of bioethics education and an explanation of some of the ethical tensions associated with gene therapy, the stand-out passage begins on p231 when Beatrice goes to visit Chrom-Med, the company behind the official trial. Chrom-Med use of an artificial chromosome to deliver a working copy of the CFTR gene, which codes for the Cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator protein.
The passage could be read to a class to introduce some of the issues. I would suggest starting with “At just before 9.30 a.m. I arrived at the Chrom-Med building…” on p231 and running through to “When will you be testing it on humans? You’ll make a killing then, wont you?” on p233. Reading this section aloud takes about three and a half minutes.
Alternatively – the novel was adopted as the Radio 4 Book at Bedtime for ten weekday nights (24th Sept to 1st Oct 2010) and was cited in Quentin Cooper’s Material World on 27th September 2010, so there may be valuable audio extracts there. Unfortunately these shows are no longer on iPlayer but I am investigating availability of audio recordings.
Construction of Bioethics in NewsFilm Online was principally the work of final year undergraduate Sarah Curtis
There are growing collections of online videos suitable for teaching about bioethics. Amongst these, one of the less-known resources is NewsFilm Online (NFO), a collection of several thousand news stories, of which a very respectable number include bioethics-related material. To raise awareness of this footage, we have developed an additional website Bioethics in NewsFilm Online, where many of the clips are rated and reviewed.
Unfortunately access to some service on the main NFO website, including the ability to download news clips, is constrained to member institutions (mostly UK Universities) – if you think you could make valuable educational use of these materials but are unable to access NFO, we suggest you contact EDINA who manage that site.
The tenth anniversary of the announcement that the human genome had been ’completely’ sequenced, has led to a large number of programmes and publications reflecting upon the impact that this information is having upon biomedicine. On 24th June, Today, the flagship current affairs programme on UK Radio 4, included a very interesting interview with John Sulston and Francis Collins the men who, respectively, had headed up the UK and USA ends of the publicly-funded consortia. The interview (7 minutes) can be heard via this link, and a transcript can be found here.
Posted by Chris Willmott 
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics produces authoritative reports on issues of ethical importance. Reaching Out to Young People committee (of which I am a member) aims to produce teaching resources to accompany the production of some of these reports. Most recently, we have released some materials to help students (particularly A level students) to explore 
