Biomedical Ethics for the Contemporary Church

The course will be held over two weekends in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia

Biomedical Ethical Challenges Facing the Contemporary Church

STM TEE module

We are living in a time of a tsunami of change. Christians are often swarmed by newer and latest technologies without having a chance to examine the ethical considerations. This course will help to surf this tsunami by evaluating from a pastoral-theological perspective, issues that will involve everyone at some time in their lives. These issues include abortion, mercy-killing, advance medical directives, test tube and designer babies, gene editing, stem cell therapies, cloning, reproductive issues, gene therapy, prenatal testing, chimera research, life enhancement, aesthetic surgery, organ transplant, and regenerative medicine. These challenges are affecting every Christian in one way or other.

This non-technical course is for pastors, church leaders, counsellors and church members who are interested in surfing.

Speaker

Dr Alex Tang is associate professor of paediatrics in Monash University and consultant paediatrician at KPJ Johor Specialist Hospital. He is an ordained Presbyterian elder and lectures at several seminaries. He has authored two books on biomedical ethics; A Good Day to Die on euthanasia or mercy killing and Live and Let Live on abortion, cloning and reproductive ethics and published numerous articles. For more information, visit his website at www.alextang.org

Too Much Personal Information

Learning and sharing your genetic secrets are at the heart of 23andMe's controversial new service — a $399 saliva test that estimates your predisposition for more than 90 traits and conditions ranging from baldness to blindness. Although 23andMe isn't the only company selling DNA tests to the public, it does the best job of making them accessible and affordable. The 600,000 genetic markers that 23andMe identifies and interprets for each customer are "the digital manifestation of you," says Wojcicki (pronounced Wo-jis-key), 35, who majored in biology and was previously a health-care investor. "It's all this information beyond what you can see in the mirror."

We are at the beginning of a personal-genomics revolution that will transform not only how we take care of ourselves but also what we mean by personal information. In the past, only élite researchers had access to their genetic fingerprints, but now personal genotyping is available to anyone who orders the service online and mails in a spit sample. Not everything about how this information will be used is clear yet — 23andMe has stirred up debate about issues ranging from how meaningful the results are to how to prevent genetic discrimination — but the curtain has been pulled back, and it can never be closed again. And so for pioneering retail genomics, 23andMe's DNA-testing service is Time's 2008 Invention of the Year.

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The flood gates are opened for the loss of total privacy, even privacy regarding your future!

The insurance companies are going to have a field day.

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