Last Friday I attended a symposium on controversies in biomedicine at the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz. There were a number of talks and a round table discussion at the end. The event itself was not the scene of much controversy. It seems that most of the people attending had a positive attitude to biomedical research. At least there was not much sign of the contrary in the questions after the talks. I thought that an event like this might have attracted more participants with a critical view of the subject but that does not seem to have been the case. The one vein of controversial discussion was between some journalists who had been invited for the round table (from Bavarian TV, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) and the majority of the participants who were presumably scientific researchers in one form or another. The journalists expressed the opinion that scientists did not take part actively enough in public debates and the scientists suggested that journalists often sensationalized scientific subjects of public interest.
The first talk, by Christof von Kalle was about gene therapy. This taught me a number of things concerning this subject which I did not previously know much about. One example he discussed was that of X-linked SCID (severe combined immunodeficiency). The first choice of therapy for this fatal condition is a bone marrow transplant but this is dependent on the availability of a suitable donor. In other cases gene therapy was tried. It often cured the SCID but a high proportion of patients later got leukemia. A promoter in the inserted DNA had not only activated the gene it was supposed to but an oncogene as well. My one criticism of the talk is that the speaker packed in much too much information, sometimes flashing slides for just a couple of seconds. The next talk was by Bernhard Fleckenstein on pathogenic viruses. His main theme was biosecurity and biosafety. The first has to do with preventing voluntary misuse (such as bioterrorism) and the second with preventing accidents. I learned that this is still the subject of lively discussion. One amazing story is that there was an attempt to stop a paper written in Holland being published in the US by claiming that it was an export and that therefore an authority in Holland responsible for exports of goods had the right to forbid it. There is no doubt that experimental work on influenza viruses which are both highly virulent and highly infectious could be dangerous. However in my opinion it makes no sense to ban such research or to try to keep the results secret. This is because I think that somebody will do the research anyway, despite bans, and any important results will leak out. I think that the danger is minimized if the research is legal and open rather than illegal and secret. The next talk, by Martin Lohse, was on the necessity of animal experiments. One aspect which came out clearly was the tension between the legislation limiting research on animals and that requiring a certain amount of such research in the form of testing before a new drug can be approved.
Over lunch I had some stimulating conversations with other participants. The first talk after lunch was by Jörg Michaelis on the benefit or otherwise of screening, in particular for cancer. He recounted his own experience in organizing a large study on the use of screening of small children for neuroblastoma, with negative results. He then surveyed what is known about the value of various other types of screening. In particular he stated that screening for skin cancer, as paid for by the German public health service is not justified by any scientific evidence. Nobody in the audience contradicted this. The last talk of the day, by Uwe Sonnewald was about green genetic engineering. Among other things he presented statistics on the huge difference in the level of the use of these techniques in the Americas and in Europe, particularly Germany. If the bar representing Germany had not been a different colour it would have been invisible. The meeting ended with the round table. I just want to mention one point which arose there. In a recent post I mentioned the negative attitude to science and technology, particular in the area of biomedicine, which I notice in Germany. (This was one motivation for me to attend the event I am writing about here, with the idea of collecting arguments in support of science.) Of course this was a recurrent theme in the symposium in one form or another, particularly during the round table. An idea which appeared repeatedly, implicitly or explicitly, during the day was that the troubled relationship of the Germans to this subject could have to do with thinking of the abuses carried out by certain German doctors during the time that the Nazis were in power. This is maybe an obvious point but in the discussion someone (I think it was Christof Niehrs) introduced another idea, one which was new to me. He asked if it was possible that this troubled relationship perhaps goes back much further, namely to the period of romanticism when there was a reaction in Germany against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. I found this symposium very informative and it provided me with a lot of material which I can use in the future in discussions on this type of subject.
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