The Top 10 . . .

. . . and the Bottom 10

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess they had made….”

I was reminded of those words, from the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, by last week’s news about the University of Colorado football team. More on Gatsby in a moment. First, the details.

After years of rumors about sexual assaults by players and about alcohol and sex being used as recruiting tools, the scandal broke into the open following an interview with a former place-kicker, Katie Hnida. She told Sports Illustrated that she had been raped by a teammate while playing for Colorado. When head coach Gary Barnett seemed to imply in a press conference that Hnida had it coming — because her teammates didn’t respect her, since “she was not only a girl, she was terrible” — University President Elizabeth Hoffman put him on paid leave and opened an investigation.

She was right to do so. But the investigation needs to go beyond allegations of rape that six other women also have leveled at Colorado football players. It must ask why these issues persist.

• Is there, at Colorado and elsewhere, an athletes’ subculture that fosters one set of morals for football players and another for everyone else?
• Do these schools’ recruiting methods instill a cavalier disrespect for women, setting teamwide standards for treating them as mere objects?
• Has today’s high-dollar, high-swagger college athletics outlived any logical connection to the purposes of higher education, and should amateur sports find other institutional sponsors?

These are large questions. Universities exude prestige and lend it to whatever they support, including big-time sports. If the behavior of some students is widely known to be morally repugnant — and if universities condone that behavior by turning a blind eye — they graduate into society individuals with serious moral deficiencies. They also risk equating, in the public’s mind, the terms “major university” and “institutional hypocrisy.”

But there’s another tragedy here, involving the players themselves. What’s to become of them? For that, go back to Gatsby. Sports provides a significant theme for this 1925 novel. Among Fitzgerald’s smaller characters is the fictional Meyer Wolfsheim, whom Gatsby describes as “the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919.” Then there’s Tom Buchanan himself, “one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven” and “a national figure in a way.” Though he is also “enormously wealthy” — and married to the fascinating and beautiful Daisy, with whom Gatsby is hopelessly infatuated — Tom is “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.” Restless, demanding, and brutish, he is having an affair with Myrtle, wife of a local Long Island garage owner. When she annoys him, he simply reaches out and breaks her nose with “a short deft movement” of his open hand. By the end of the book, he and Daisy, careless as ever, have been instrumental in causing the deaths of Myrtle and her husband, as well as of Gatsby himself.

Sex, violence, ego, moral vacuity, unfulfilled lives: For Fitzgerald, sports was part of this mix. That’s not to say the formula is universal: Most college athletes escape that mold. But there’s just enough truth in Fitzgerald’s characterizations to make us uncomfortable — particularly today and particularly at the professional level. Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Kobe Bryant is currently on trial for sexual assault in, coincidentally, Colorado. In addition, a number of athletes appear to have used an illegal steroid, THG, created by a California laboratory indicted earlier this month by the U.S. Department of Justice. And former slugger and Cincinnati Reds coach Pete Rose has admitted to gambling on baseball, an offense considered particularly heinous ever since eight teammates at the Chicago White Sox conspired to throw the 1919 World Series (in fact, as well as in Fitzgerald’s novel) to the Cincinnati Reds.

The remarkable nature of good fiction is that it goes beneath the facts to get at timeless issues of character and ethics. The remarkable nature of good reporting is that it keeps turning up uncanny examples of these issues. If Gatsby and the current news tell us anything about the Tom Buchanans of this world, it is, “Don’t go there. Don’t become that kind of person. And don’t be the kind of school that creates more of them.” Perhaps the University of Colorado’s well-regarded English department does, after all, have something to say to its scandal-drenched football program.

(c)2004 Institute for Global Ethics

“If the court has to weigh rights here, on the one hand you are talking about voting rights, and on the other you are talking about equal rights.”

– Judge Ronald Evans Quidachay, rejecting a conservative group’s request last week to impose a temporary restraining order on San Francisco, which began granting civil marriage licenses to gay couples. While a voter-approved California law defines marriage as a heterosexual-only affair, the city, led by Mayor Gavin Newsom, began granting licenses and then sued the state, arguing that the state’s constitutional guarantee of equal protection trumps the exclusionary provisions of the marriage law. In separate actions, Quidachay and another judge both rejected conservative groups’ lawsuits to immediately intercede, saying the groups had failed to prove they were being harmed by the civil marriages and that the matter could be considered slowly in the courts. The groups and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger say they will work to have the marriage licenses nullified and voided. (“Schwarzenegger Seeks Stop to Gay Weddings,” AP, Feb. 21)

HOUSTON
Former Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling was charged last week with nearly 40 counts of civil and criminal wrongdoing, making him the highest-level executive from the collapsed firm to face federal charges.

The accusations against Skilling came in two waves: civil charges from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and criminal indictments from the Justice Department.

The civil complaint accuses Skilling, who started at Enron in 1990, of engineering financial schemes to hide huge profits and mask steep losses faced by Enron and its subsidiaries, reported Dow Jones.

In addition, the SEC charged Skilling with insider training for dumping more than a million shares of Enron stock in 2000 and 2001, just before the company crumpled under the weight of bogus balance sheets.

The Justice Department accused Skilling of wire fraud, securities fraud, and making false statements to auditors. Richard Causey, Enron’s former chief accounting officer, also was charged last week with similar crimes, noted the Associated Press.

Skilling, Causey, and others were responsible for a “massive, complex scheme to give shareholders and the investing public the false appearance of financial strength and security at a time when Enron was, in fact, failing,” U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Comey said last week, announcing the charges.

Skilling, who could face up to 325 years in prison and fines totaling more than $80 million, pleaded not guilty and was released on $5 million bond.

“Jeff Skilling has nothing to hide,” one of his lawyers, Dan Petrocelli, told reporters, accusing federal authorities of scapegoating Skilling. “He did not steal. He did not lie. He did not take anyone’s money.”

Skilling is due back in court on March 11, according to the AP.

WASHINGTON
A coalition of the nation’s top police chiefs last week called on the U.S. Senate to defeat a bill that aims to give the gun industry nearly complete immunity from lawsuits.

“If you give them immunity, what incentive do they have to make guns with safer designs, or what incentive do the handful of bad dealers have to follow the law when they sell guns?” asked William Bratton, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, at a news conference last week.

Bratton and 80 other police officials have signed a letter urging the Senate to reject the pending bill, which is strongly backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA), reported the New York Times.

The measure, which is similar to a bill that passed easily in the House last fall, already has strong support in the Senate, where it is scheduled for a vote by early March. President Bush has said he will sign the measure into law, reported the Associated Press.

The measure would grant sweeping immunity to gun manufacturers, distributors, and dealers, according to critics. While the industry still would be subject to federal and state laws, claims alleging negligent marketing or abusive practices not yet illegal would be thrown out, voiding lawsuits pending across the country.

The measure, for example, would require dismissal of the lawsuit filed against Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply of Tacoma, Washington, which supplied a rifle used in the DC-area sniper shootings.

Plaintiffs sued Bull’s Eye for alleged negligence: One of the DC snipers claimed he shoplifted the gun from Bull’s Eye, which said it could not account for 238 guns missing from its inventory, according to federal investigators.

The suit against Bull’s Eye would be dismissed under the law being considered by the Senate, according to the Times, because no laws were specifically violated.

The NRA says the law is a matter of common sense, insisting that the gun industry already is sufficiently regulated. Opponents, including Bratton and the police chiefs of the nation’s 50 largest cities, say it gives the gun industry unreasonable protections.

“Gun stores and manufacturers must be held to the same standards of safety as any other industry. If they fail to act responsibly, they must pay the price,” said Bratton, who is headed to Washington to lobby against the measure.

“This is not about doing away with guns, but about trying to ensure the safety of police officers and the American public,” said Bratton, former police chief of New York City.

In related news, the AP last week reported that the government no longer is releasing statistics tracing the path from gun dealer to crime scene, and has sped up the schedule for destroying gun purchase records.

The changes, welcomed by the NRA and pushed by Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), were part of a little-publicized provision tucked into the mammoth federal budget bill passed by Congress last month.

The law now blocks the government from using its resources to release data tracking the origin of guns used in crimes. That data was pivotal to a widely noted study last month that found that roughly one-fifth of the 373,006 guns used in crimes between 1996 and 2000 were sold by only 120 dealers, reported the AP.

The new rule requiring the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to purge its records of background checks on gun buyers within 24 hours instead of 90 days has been championed as a matter of privacy by the NRA.

Critics include the FBI and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who denounced the change as “absolutely appalling.” A study by Congress found that 228 of 235 illegal gun sales in 2001 and 2002 took longer than 24 hours to detect, according to the AP.

MONTGOMERY, Alabama
A federal jury last week slammed Tyson Foods with a $1.28 billion verdict after finding the nation’s largest meat producer liable for using livestock contracts to manipulate prices paid to ranchers for their cattle.

The verdict stems from a 1996 lawsuit filed by independent ranchers who accused IBP Inc., later bought and absorbed by Tyson, of using long-term contracts to force down the price of cattle bought for slaughter.

According to the ranchers, Tyson used massive contracts to deliberately create long periods of inactivity in the market, depressing prices below natural levels. When prices went way down, Tyson would swoop in and buy again, cutting deeply into the independents’ profit margins, plaintiffs alleged.

Tyson, which buys roughly one-third of the nation’s cattle for beef, said its policies were legal, legitimate, and good for ranchers and consumers, who could count on stable contracts and steady supply.

“There isn’t an open, competitive market for us any more,” complained rancher Michael Callicrate, one of the six original plaintiffs. “The big packers took that away from us.”

Last week, a jury agreed with the ranchers, concluding that Tyson engaged in manipulation by effectively constructing an artificial market that worked according to the company’s rules, reported the New York Times.

Tyson said it will ask the case judge to overturn the verdict. If that effort fails, the company said it will appeal the decision, which covers the company’s contracts from February 1994 until October 2002.

The second half of the case — how to regulate Tyson’s behavior in purchasing cattle — will be argued later this year, noted the Times.

Similar suits already face two other large meat-packing firms, Excel and Swift, which together with Tyson and one other firm, control more than 80 percent of the U.S. cattle slaughter and processing market.

Last week’s ruling could trigger similar suits against the nation’s pork and poultry processors, which operate large-scale contracts resembling those at the heart of last week’s guilty verdict, observed the Washington Post.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

OTTAWA
The Globe & Mail is reporting that the U.S. Congress and some state legislatures are developing legislative initiatives that could stop Canadian call centers from dealing with customers for U.S.-based companies.

This initiative could start another trade dispute between Canada and the United States, although the initiative may be aimed at the massive outsourcing of jobs to countries such as India, where wage levels are much lower than in the United States or Canada.

The Globe reports that the United States has lost 250,000 call center jobs since 2001. Most call centers provide customer service for firms that contract with the centers.

The New Jersey Senate has proposed a bill that would require foreign-based call centers serving customers of U.S.-based companies to identify their location and offer to transfer the call to U.S.-based call centers within 30 seconds.

The Canadian government has responded by arguing that such legislative initiatives could be in violation of World Trade and NAFTA obligations of the United States and has asked U.S. legislators to ensure that if such legislation goes ahead, Canadian call centers get an exemption under such restrictions on foreign call centers.

BRASILIA, Brazil
Opposition lawmakers last week began calling for a formal investigation into alleged corruption within the governing Workers’ Party of Brazil, following last week’s release of a seemingly incriminating videotape.

The video, posted on the Web by Brazil’s Epoca magazine, shows Workers’ Party official Waldomiro Diniz apparently accepting illegal campaign donations from the head of a criminal gambling operation in 2002.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who founded the Workers’ Party in 1980, last week fired Diniz, who has been serving as deputy secretary of parliamentary affairs at the presidential palace, reported the Reuters news agency.

Political opponents of the Workers Party (WP) have begun signing onto an effort to form a parliamentary committee to investigate the videotaped transaction, saying a promised inquiry by the WP likely would be tainted by bias.

Last week’s developments provided opposition politicians with a long-wanted opportunity to score points against the Workers’ Party, which has been extremely aggressive in attacking government corruption.

The Associated Press noted that the scandal could hurt efforts by Silva, who took office in January 2003, to push through a package of “ambitious electoral, judicial, labor and bankruptcy reforms.”

“This seems like it could be a case of innocence lost,” for the Workers’ Party, political analyst Haroldo Britto told Reuters.

Political analyst Carlos Pio agreed, but noted that the WP’s postlapsarian image should not be too shocking to a Brazilian populace accustomed to entrenched political corruption.

“It is very difficult that in Brazil, whose economy is increasingly based on illegal sectors, a party political structure does not have blemishes,” Pio told Reuters. “In the past the Workers’ Party denounced all this, but the same is happening to it as to other parties.”

THE HAGUE
Propelled by conservative lawmakers, the Dutch Parliament took steps last week to force the expulsion of 26,000 people seeking asylum, despite criticism from a sizeable proportion of the public and human rights groups.

The bill, which passed the lower house of Parliament on an 83-to-57 vote along party lines, would eject the asylum seekers, many of whom have lived in the Netherlands for as long as 10 years, within 36 months.

The move follows the political rise of populist politicians, many of whom have ratcheted up the anti-immigrant rhetoric and won votes along the way, reported the Associated Press.

Nevertheless, the BBC noted that as much as two-thirds of the population joined human rights groups in opposing last week’s move, which grants asylum to only 2,300 people.

Most of those affected by last week’s parliamentary vote are refugees from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Somalia, and Yugoslavia, according to the Agence France-Presse.

The Netherlands has long had a reputation for a liberal approach to granting asylum, and the issue has sharply divided some segments of Dutch society.

In an open letter to the Dutch Ministry of Justice, Human Rights Watch called the measure part of a “disturbing trend on the part of the Dutch authorities to depart from the international standards on its treatment of asylum seekers and migrants,” noted the AP.

WASHINGTON
A bipartisan group of 60 highly esteemed scientists, including 20 Nobel Prize winners, last week accused the Bush administration of rejecting sound science in a push to let politics dictate the nation’s policies.

The group, which included 19 recipients of the National Medal of Science, conferred by the president for outstanding scientific contributions, called for an independent congressional investigation into the administration’s practices, reported USA Today.

“When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions,” the group charged.

“Other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systemically nor on so wide a front,” the statement continued, saying the White House has “misrepresented scientific knowledge and misled the public about the implications of its policies.”

The allegations were echoed in a report issued last week by the nonpartisan Union of Concerned Scientists, which similarly accused the administration of politicizing the scientific research that guides the nation’s policy decisions, reported the New York Times.

Both groups cited a litany of complaints, claiming that the White House has put gag orders on some government scientists, edited Web pages and written reports to omit scientific findings that conflicted with policy positions, ignored widely accepted findings on global warming, and removed highly qualified scientists from numerous studies, replacing them with industry representatives.

“We found a serious pattern of undermining science by the Bush administration, and it crosses disciplines, whether it’s global climate change or reproductive health or mercury in the food chain or forestry — the list goes on and on,” charged Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

President Bush’s science adviser, John Marburger, last week downplayed the charges of biased science, saying the “administration has in fact been very supportive of science” and raised some agencies’ budgets, reported Wired.

“I think there are incidents where people have got their feathers ruffled,” Dr. Marburger told the Times, saying the reports mischaracterize a few random incidents as a widespread pattern.

While some of the administration’s allies dismissed last week’s warnings as an election-year political ploy, the scientists insist that their concern is sound research and strong policy, not politics.

“We’re not taking issue with administration policies. We’re taking issue with the administration’s distortion … of the science related to some of its policies,” Kurt Gottfried, board chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Associated Press. “The scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression, and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration “makes decisions based on the best available science.”

NAIROBI
In a country long accustomed to headlines of government corruption, last week offered a welcome bit of good news: the promotion of two police officers for ethical conduct.

Constables Ezekiel Oduor and John Ogutu were promoted to the rank of corporal following separate incidents on January 15, when both men refused to take bribes from traffic offenders.

Instead of pocketing the proffered cash, the men pulled out the handcuffs and arrested the motorists, reported Kenya’s Daily Nation.

“The promotion of the duo will be a sure eye-opener for the rest out there,” Jambeni Bakari, the police boss in Nyanza Province in western Kenya, said at the promotion ceremony.

“It is time all officers avoided graft and served diligently for the good of the people,” he added, according to a report from the Daily Nation.

Last month, Kenya doubled the pay of junior police officers — a move designed both to boost morale and decrease the lure of taking bribes while on the beat, noted the BBC.

From Harris Interactive® and the Reputation Institute:

“For the fifth consecutive year, Harris Interactive® and the Reputation Institute have measured and ranked the corporate reputations of the most visible companies in the United States. The Annual RQ 2003 ranking of 60 U.S. companies shows that Johnson & Johnson places first, while UPS places second. The study measuring corporate reputation also looked at familiarity and trust in NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) and provided updates on the public’s perceptions of corporate sincerity, corporate citizenship, and ethical standards.

“According to the survey results, the majority of people (74%) continue to characterize corporate America’s reputation as either ‘not good’ or ‘terrible.’

“Joy Marie Sever, Ph.D., senior vice president at Harris Interactive and director of the company’s Reputation Practice, commenting on the 2003 study, says, ‘Many signs point to a growing skepticism on the part of the American public when it comes to their perceptions of the largest, most visible corporations. Collectively and individually, corporate reputations are declining — a decline that stems from a lack of trust.’

“Dr. Charles Fombrun, executive director of The Reputation Institute and the annual study’s co-founder, points out, ‘Not since the excesses of the gilded age that produced the stock market collapse of 1929 and the ‘Great Depression’ have we witnessed so much reputation fallout in the corporate sector.’…

“Highlights and Trends from the Annual RQ 2003

• “Johnson & Johnson maintains its first-place ranking for a fifth consecutive year with an RQ of 79.47. Not only does this represent a significant decline in reputation for J&J (-2.7 points) compared to 2002, but this is the first year in the five years the Annual RQ has been conducted that no company measured has achieved an RQ of over 80.0.
• “UPS moves into 2nd place with an RQ of 78.49 (and improves its 4th place 2002 rank).
• “In addition to J&J and UPS, Coca-Cola (3rd place), General Mills (6th), 3M Company (8th), and Dell (10th) maintained their Top 10 ranking.
• “Companies returning to the Top 10 this year include: Walt Disney (4th place), Microsoft (5th place), FedEx (7th place), and Procter & Gamble (9th place).
• “Both Eastman Kodak (12th place) and Home Depot (14th place) lost their Top 10 status. Harley-Davidson and Maytag, both of which ranked in the Top 10 in 2002, were not among the 60 most visible companies in this year’s Annual RQ study.
• “Enron remains at the bottom of the list of 60 with an RQ of 26.66.

“Other Notable Results:

• “Of the 50 companies measured in both 2002 and 2003, 21 experienced significant movement in their reputations 6 improved, and 15 declined. The most significant declines (each at 4 points) were ExxonMobil and Gateway.
• “The most notable improvement in reputation rank was Honda with an RQ of 75.84 in 2003 compared to 73.06 in 2002. This represents a 2.79-point increase for Honda, enough to move the company from 25th to 11th place among the list of 60. This is the highest ranking for an automotive company in the five years of the Annual RQ.
• “Ford Motor Company, SBC Communications, Qwest, Bridgestone/Firestone, and Global Crossing also enjoyed significant improvements in their corporate reputation from 2002 to 2003.

“Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft continue to lead the six RQ dimensions. J&J leads on Emotional Appeal, Products & Services, and Social Responsibility, while Microsoft leads on Financial Performance, Vision & Leadership, and Workplace Environment.

“…As Dr. Fombrun also points out, ‘The average person turns out to be a very insightful judge of corporate character and isn’t easily fooled by mere branding campaigns or media spin. If you look closely at top-rated companies like J&J, UPS, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, or FedEx, it’s clear that they invest heavily in doing what it takes to be visible, consistent, distinctive, authentic, and transparent. And that’s really a good thing for both financial and non-financial audiences alike.’”

“Two things only the people anxiously desire: bread and the Circus games.”

– Juvenal (Roman poet and satirist, est. 60-140)

Last week’s announcement from South Korea of the successful cloning of human embryos exposes sharp divides in public opinion. To some, cloning opens vast new frontiers of medical research. To others, it threatens to create dangerous humanoid deviants. On one point, however, all agree: Human cloning raises some of the most profound ethical issues of the age.

These issues center on the distinction between reproductive cloning, intended to create new humans, and therapeutic cloning, intended to advance research and cure disease. Reproductive cloning is almost universally condemned, not only because it smacks of playing God but because, even in the eyes of many scientists, it could create disease-prone life-forms. Therapeutic cloning, however, is a means of creating stem cells, the undifferentiated building-block cells that medical researchers believe may lead to breakthroughs in treatment and prevention of disease. Despite this clear distinction, public opinion remains deeply unsettled, and the U.S. Congress remains stalled over several bills that, in some versions, would outlaw reproductive cloning but legalize cloning to produce stem cells.

That stall reflects an ethical knottiness. It centers largely on the assumption that there is a slippery slope between these two camps. Will useful research slide irreversibly into designer babies? If sound arguments exist to justify a limited intervention — like creating embryos for research — what’s to prevent those same arguments from applying to larger interventions like making babies? Those who favor therapeutic cloning will need to respond to an arsenal of slippery-slope arguments that will be lobbed at them by their opponents:

• The ends justifies the means. This widely discredited pseudo-ethical formula, if used by their antagonists to explain the motivations of the therapeutic researchers, could prove damaging. Do researchers care only about the results, heedless of the ways they get them? Is the production of stem cells so important that it becomes an “anything goes” proposition? Researchers need to keep reiterating the larger principles, rather than just the immediate ends, that are front and center in their reasoning.
• The analogies are frightening. Science fiction is rife with medical fiends bent on controlling the world by creating Frankenstein-like monsters. More to the point, the name of research also has been invoked by those as different as Nazi doctor Josef Mengele at Auschwitz during World War II and the creators of the Tuskeegee Syphilis Studies in the United States in the 1930s. These are blatantly extremist analogies, to be sure. But they unfortunately will be used to focus attention on the perils of human-subject research. Researchers must make a convincing case that these comparisons don’t apply.
• Good intentions aren’t enough. The ethical argument commonly heard on the pro-research side — that we intend only to do research and will never use this methodology to create humans — will hit the same moral wall that crumples many similar arguments about intentions. The protestations of the alcoholic (”I didn’t intend to destroy my family”) or the teenager (”I didn’t mean to hurt anyone by driving recklessly”) demonstrate that while motives matter, they aren’t always the final determinant of rightness or wrongness. Researchers need to recognize that if reproductive cloning becomes the reality despite their best intentions, the public won’t hold them guiltless and won’t accept a “don’t blame me” response.

Behind these arguments, however, lies a larger and more complicated line of reasoning that, if not addressed, could terminate therapeutic cloning altogether. It involves the assertion, approvingly stated by the researchers, that they never allow embryos to grow into full humanhood before harvesting them for their stem cells. Those opposing the research will have a field day with this one, restating it to say that the researchers promise to kill all would-be babies before they mature. That leaves the researchers appearing to justify the creation of a life-form for the explicit purpose of destroying it.

But is it a life-form? When does life begin? Is a cloned human blastocyst in a petri dish alive, and is it human? If it isn’t, how should the researchers explain their interest in it? If it is, how do they refute the charge of murder? As with the abortion debate, the core ethical question here centers on the exact point at which a group of cells becomes a human. That question probably has no scientific answer, but depends instead on theological, metaphysical, and social arguments lying well beyond the professional expertise of the researchers.

There may be no area of science so tightly entangled with questions of ethics. Find the answers, and the research may be allowed to continue. Leave them unanswered, and the science, however exciting, may be squelched. In this matter, the ability of a few thinkers, needing nothing more than some paper and pencils, may determine the fate of billions of dollars of scientific experimentation. Science may be the key to human progress. But ethics, increasingly, is the key to science. Cloning reminds us how important it is that we get it right.

(c)2004 Institute for Global Ethics

“The trademark of our party is its ethical behavior and its honor.”

– Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, speaking last week at an event commemorating the 24th anniversary of the founding of his political party, the governing Workers’ Party. Shortly afterwards, the Workers’ Party leadership came under fire with the Web-based leak of an incriminating two-year-old videotape that appears to document graft and political corruption among a party long touted as the “clean” alternative to the country’s dirty politicians. (“Brazil Party Threatened by Videotape Showing Graft,” New York Times, Feb. 16)

WASHINGTON
Federal authorities last week indicted four men on charges of distributing drugs to top athletes, punctuating an ongoing investigation into “doping” and its effects on the international sports scene.

Last week’s 42-count indictment specifically targets Balco, a California firm hired by many star athletes, including super-slugger Barry Bonds, to improve their performance by providing nutritional supplements.

Prosecutors say that some of those supplements were illegal drugs — anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, THG, and the like — that boosted performance and skewed results in national and international competitions.

Balco founder Victor Conte, Jr., and vice president James Valente were charged with conspiracy to distribute steroids, possession of human growth hormone, and money laundering. Also charged were Barry Bonds’ personal trainer and longtime friend Greg Anderson, and track coach Remi Korchemny.

All four defendants last week denied the charges.

U.S. Justice Department head John Ashcroft, who announced the federal grand jury indictments at a news conference in Washington, said more charges may arise from the ongoing investigation, reported the New York Times.

“Illegal steroid use calls into question not only the integrity of the athletes who use them, but also the integrity of the sports that those athletes play,” Ashcroft said. “Steroids are bad for sports, they’re bad for players, they’re bad for young people who hold athletes up as role models.”

Barry Bonds, who has packed on forty pounds of muscle and vied for homerun records in recent years, has denied using any steroids or illegal substances, reported the Times.

NEW YORK
Federal judges last week issued split decisions on whether or not six U.S. hospitals must turn over abortion records subpoenaed by the U.S. Justice Department in a showdown between medical ethics and federal law.

The subpoenas were sent to hospitals in Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, where doctors have sued to block a 2003 anti-abortion law, reported the New York Times.

That law bars a process — called “partial-birth” abortion by opponents and “dilation and extraction” by defenders — that allows for late-term termination of a pregnancy.

A handful of doctors has sued the U.S. government over last year’s Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which they say fails to allow for the procedure in cases where the woman’s health is at stake.

To fight the doctors, the Justice Department has subpoenaed hundreds of patient medical records to find out if the abortions were performed not because they were necessary, but because they were “just the doctor’s preference,” Justice Department lawyer Sheila Gowan told a Manhattan federal judge.

That judge last week ordered the hospitals to surrender the records, threatening financial penalties and a lifting of the injunction against the 2003 law if they fail to comply. At the same time, a Chicago judge went the opposite way, rejecting the subpoenas as an intrusion on patients’ privacy.

While the Justice Department has said it will accept medical records with patients’ identities deleted, critics say enough details will remain to allow the identification of women who have had abortions, noted the Times.

Last week’s conflicting decisions thrust the issues of abortion, medical privacy, and alleged government bias — Justice Department head John Ashcroft is an outspoken anti-abortion supporter — into the spotlight.

WASHINGTON
Scientists from South Korea last week announced that they had cloned a human embryo and successfully harvested stem cells, prompting resumed debate over the ethics of cloning, especially when the process promises to lead to significant medical advances.

The announcement by Dr. Shin Yong Moon, head of the center that hosted the pioneering effort to create stem cells from an unfertilized embryo, marks a significant step forward for proponents of therapeutic cloning.

Therapeutic cloning aims to produce stem cells that can be converted into any other type of human tissue, portending life-saving advances in treating a wide number of diseases. Reproductive cloning, on the other hand, is aimed at producing actual human beings.

Critics last week contended that cloning, regardless of the end goal, is wrong because it destroys the embryo.

With last week’s news, the debate over cloning picked up again.

“We have to do this research because of its promise for treating disease,” said Dr. Shin Yong Moon told the Reuters news agency.

“To prevent reproductive cloning we would like to ask every country or every nation to have a law to prohibit reproductive cloning,” he added.

Ethicist Laurie Zoloth of Northwestern University agreed, saying it is urgent that a consensus be formed over how to proceed.

“It is clearly time — now that it is more tangible — to set in place a process where we can have some kinds of experiments supported and some things banned,” Zoloth said. “No one religion, no one moral authority, can claim to be the final arbiter of this work.”

Currently, the United States has shut down most cloning research. Research similar to the South Korean work would result in a $1 million fine and 10 years in jail if performed in Michigan, one scientist told the Washington Post.

Britain, on the other hand, has expressed firm support for therapeutic cloning, drawing the line at reproductive cloning. The United Nations has postponed the formulating of an official position, reported the Associated Press.

PARIS
Worried about rising costs brought about by new U.S. anticorruption laws, European companies have begun taking steps to evade the measures by asking for eased rules on pulling their shares from U.S. stock markets.

The companies’ primary cause of concern is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in 2002 in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom implosions, reported the New York Times.

Sarbanes-Oxley, which requires CEOs and corporate chairs to personally endorse their firms’ financial statements and have those results certified by outside auditors, is set to affect foreign firms starting in 2005.

Worried about the costs of such stringent policies, 11 organizations representing 100,000 European companies sent a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about delisting, the Times reported last week.

The letter asks the SEC to make it easier for them to pull out of U.S. exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, ahead of the Sarbanes-Oxley starting gun.

“The costs of Sarbanes-Oxley have been substantial,” London lawyer and former SEC general counsel Edward Greene told the Times. “There is a feeling [among European firms] of, ‘Why do you want to have a U.S. listing?’”

In a separate matter, the U.K. government has asked the U.S. to exempt British firms from a 1789 measure called the Alien Claims Tort statute, a law often used to sue foreign firms for alleged wrongdoing committed abroad.

Human-rights groups say the law is a vital tool needed to protect poorer people in nations with weak laws from abuses by powerful multinational firms.

The U.K. government says British firms should be exempted because they are facing “large damage claims,” reported the Independent.

The U.K.’s brief comes in the case of U.K.-based Shell, which has asked for help after being sued in U.S. court for alleged violence in Nigeria and support of the former apartheid regime in South Africa, according to the Independent.