The move towards artificially engineered foods has taken a step forward after scientists grew a form of meat in a laboratory for the first time.

Telegraph | Nov 29, 2009

By Nick Britten

Researchers in the Netherlands have created what was described as soggy pork and are now investigating ways to improve the muscle tissue in the hope that people will one day want to eat it.

No one has yet tasted the product, but it is believed the artificial meat could be on sale within five years.

Vegetarian groups welcomed the news, saying there was “no ethical objection” if meat was not a piece of a dead animal.

Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, said: “What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue. We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there.

“This product will be good for the environment and will reduce animal suffering. If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it.

“You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals.”

The scientists extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig and then put them in a broth of other animal products. The cells then multiplied and created muscle tissue. They believe that it can be turned into something like steak if they can find a way to artificially “exercise” the muscle.

The project is backed by the Dutch government and a sausage maker and comes following the creation of artificial fish fillets from goldfish muscle cells.

Meat produced in a laboratory could reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with real animals.

Meat and dairy consumption is predicted to double by 2050 and methane from livestock is said to currently produce about 18 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases.

It was supported by animal rights campaigners. A spokesman for Peta said: “As far as we’re concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there’s no ethical objection.”

However the Vegetarian Society said: “The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered.

“It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust.”

The advent of meat grown for consumers could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals and help meet the United Nation’s predictions that meat and dairy consumption will double by 2050.

However, the latest breakthrough is certain to cause concern amongst the anti-GM lobby.

Last week Prince Charles, a fierce opponent of GM food, warned that people were creating problems by “treating food as an easy commodity rather than a precious gift from nature”.

His comments came as the results of a survey commissioned by the Food Standards Agency revealed concerns about long-term health and environmental impacts of genetically modified products.

It showed shoppers want to be told when meat and milk from cows is genetically modified through clear labelling.

GM supporters say they are aware of risks associated with “engineered” food but believe it benefits the Third World.

The rich could all be cyborgs in the future.

“Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.”

- Bertrand Russell, “The Impact of Science on Society”, 1953

The super-rich may evolve into a separate species entirely in the future due to enhancements in biotechnology and robotic engineering, American futurologist Paul Saffo has said.

Telegraph | Oct 25, 2009

By Amy Willis

Mr Saffo, from San Francisco, says in the future people will be able to grow their own replacement organs, take specially tailored drugs, and use genetic research tools to alert them from any possible hereditary health dangers.

He adds that tomorrow’s world will be a fusion of biology and technology, where robots do the chores, cars drive themselves and artificial limbs are better than real ones.

Mr Saffo’s comments reflect claims by American scientist Ray Kurzweil who only a few months ago said immortality was only 20 years away due to the speed of advancements in nanotechnology.

But Mr Saffo says these improvements would only be affordable to the super-rich. And because of this, he says, advancements may lead to a divide between the classes and eventually could lead to the super-rich evolving into a different species entirely, leaving his not-so-rich counterpart behind.

“In the 1980s it was the personal computer – came out of the garage, changed the world. In the 1990s it was the web. The next big device to wander into our lives is robots,” he told the Sunday Times.

“We may find we are absolutely dependent upon these electronic insects and that we don’t even know we are dependent upon them until something breaks.

“I sometimes wonder if the very rich can live, on average, 20 years longer than the poor. That’s 20 more years of earning and saving. Think about wealth and power and the advantages that you pass on to your children.”

The telepathic abilities that feature in the film X2 are a step closer to reality

It could herald a new Big Brother era, similar to that envisaged in the Hollywood film Minority Report, in which an individual’s private thoughts can be readily accessed by the authorities.

Psychic computer shows your thoughts on screen

London Times | Nov 1, 2009

by Chris Gourlay

Scientists have discovered how to “read” minds by scanning brain activity and reproducing images of what people are seeing — or even remembering.

Researchers have been able to convert into crude video footage the brain activity stimulated by what a person is watching or recalling.

The breakthrough raises the prospect of significant benefits, such as allowing people who are unable to move or speak to communicate via visualisation of their thoughts; recording people’s dreams; or allowing police to identify criminals by recalling the memories of a witness.

However, it could also herald a new Big Brother era, similar to that envisaged in the Hollywood film Minority Report, in which an individual’s private thoughts can be readily accessed by the authorities.

Jack Gallant and Shinji Nishimoto, two neurologists from the University of California, Berkeley, last year managed to correlate activity in the brain’s visual cortex with static images seen by the person. Last week they went one step further by revealing that it is possible to “decode” signals generated in the brain by moving scenes.

In an experiment which has yet to be peer reviewed, Gallant and Nishimoto, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology, scanned the brains of two patients as they watched videos.

A computer programme was used to search for links between the configuration of shapes, colours and movements in the videos, and patterns of activity in the patients’ visual cortex.

It was later fed more than 200 days’ worth of YouTube internet clips and asked to predict which areas of the brain the clips would stimulate if people were watching them.

Finally, the software was used to monitor the two patients’ brains as they watched a new film and to reproduce what they were seeing based on their neural activity alone.

Remarkably, the computer programme was able to display continuous footage of the films they were watching — albeit with blurred images.

In one scene which featured the actor Steve Martin wearing a white shirt, the software recreated his rough shape and white torso but missed other details, such as his facial features.

Another scene, showing a plane flying towards the camera against a city skyline, was less successfully reproduced. The computer recreated the image of the skyline but omitted the plane altogether.

“Some scenes decode better than others,” said Gallant. “We can decode talking heads really well. But a camera panning quickly across a scene confuses the algorithm.

“You can use a device like this to do some pretty cool things. At the moment when you see something and want to describe it to someone you have to use words or draw it and it doesn’t work very well.

“You could use this technology to transmit the image to someone. It might be useful for artists or to allow you to recover an eyewitness’s memory of a crime.”

Such technology may not be confined to the here and now. Scientists at University College London have conducted separate tests that detect, with an accuracy of about 50%, memories recalled by patients.

The discoveries come amid a flurry of developments in the field of brain science. Researchers have also used scanning technology to measure academic ability, detect early signs of Alzheimer’s and other degenerative conditions, and even predict the decision a person is about to make before they are conscious of making it.

Such developments may have controversial ramifications. In Britain, fMRI scanning technology has been sold to multinational companies, such as Unilever and McDonald’s, enabling them to see how we subconsciously react to brands.

In America, security agencies are researching the use of brain scanners for interrogating prisoners, and Lockheed Martin, the US defence contractor, is reported to have studied the possibility of scanning brains at a distance.

This would allow an individual’s thoughts and anxieties to be examined without their knowledge in sensitive locations such as airports.

Russell Foster, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, said rapid advances in the field were throwing up ethical dilemmas.

“It’s absolutely critical for scientists to inform the public about what we are doing so they can engage in the debate about how this knowledge should be used,” he said.

“It’s the age-old problem: knowledge is power and it can be used for both good and evil.”

A plastinate of a basketball player is displayed at the exhibition Body Worlds and ‘The Cycle of Life’ in Singapore Science centre on October 22, 2009. Anatomist Gunther von Hagens, inventor of plastination and creator of the world?s original and only anatomical exhibition feature approximately 200 new authentic human specimens, including whole bodies, individual organs and animal specimens is on display at the Singapore Science Centre from October 23 till March 6, 2010. Getty Images

Channel NewsAsia | Oct 25, 2009
By Claire Huang

The exhibition uses plastinated corpses for its displays, and the human bodies seem to come ‘alive’ as they engage in activities such as playing basketball and painting – a realism that organisers of the exhibition hope to achieve.

Dr Angelina Whalley, director of the Institute for Plastination, said: “Most of our visitors have never been confronted with a corpse so we want to appeal (to) them. We want to catch their interest and that’s absolutely mandatory to have specimens put in a very aesthetical and beautiful-looking way.”

Body Worlds is the brainchild of Dr Gunther von Hagens, creator of plastination – a process to preserve human bodies for medical studies.

While the exhibition has attracted some 28 million visitors in 50 cities, some religious groups have questioned the need to use real human bodies. However, organisers say it is purely for scientific study.

Dr Chew Tuan Chiong, chief executive of Science Centre Singapore, said: “I think the exhibition is really going to be a journey of discovery for many people, whatever their initial beliefs and perceptions are.

“So we think besides being very educational about human body and anatomy, it’s also going to allow people to understand fully what they’re concerned about, worry about death, worry about diseases, or even worry about things like superstitions and culture and so on.”

Compared to the first such exhibition here six years ago, organisers say the 200 new displays this time round are more varied and developed.

All exhibits come from the Institute for Plastination’s body donation programme, which comprises a donor roster of more than 10,500 living and dead donors worldwide. Organisers say donors have to give their consent before their bodies are used.

Singapore is the second site for this exhibition after its world premiere in London.

The exhibition opens until March 6 next year, and organisers hope to attract some 200,000 visitors. Ticket prices range from S$12 to S$21.

The previous Body Worlds exhibition in Singapore attracted some 160,000 visitors.

A system that creates “brain to brain communication” has been developed by British scientists, it has been claimed.

Telegraph | Oct 15, 2009

By Andrew Hough

The system, developed by a team at the University of Southampton, is said to be the first technology that would allow people to send thoughts, words and images directly to the minds of others, particularly people with a disability.

It has also been hailed as the future of the internet, which would provide a new way to communicate without the need for keyboards and telephones.

“This could be useful for those people who are locked into their bodies, who can’t speak, can’t even blink,” said the lead scientist Dr Christopher James.

The scientists claimed the research proved it could eventually be possible to create a system where people sent messages through their thoughts alone, although they conceded it was many years away.

Related

Scientists hail a thoughtful future with ‘brain-to-brain communication’

Scientists used “brain-computer interfacing”, a technique that allows computers to analyse brain signals, that enabled them to send messages formed by a person’s brain signals though an internet connection to another person’s brain miles away.

According to Dr James, during transmission two people were connected to electrodes that measure activity in specific parts of the brain.

The first person generated a series of zeros and ones, where they imagined moving their left arm for zero and right arm for one.

After the first person’s computer recognises the binary thoughts, it sends them to the internet and then to the other person’s PC.

A lamp is then flashed at two different frequencies for one and zero, the Times reported.

The second person’s brain signals are analysed after staring at this lamp and the number sequence is picked up by a computer.

“It’s not telepathy,” Dr James told the paper.

“There’s no conscious thought forming in one person’s head and another conscious thought appearing in another person’s mind.

“The next experiments are to get that second person to be aware of the information that is being sent to them. For that, I need to get my thinking cap on, so to speak.”

Scene from the 1927 film Metropolis where a woman is used by a mad scientist to create a robot replica to serve his evil plans.

Forbes | Oct 2, 2009

by Courtney Boyd Myers

Technology futurists love to talk about the Singularity as the point in time when technology starts to progress so rapidly that machine intelligence melds with and surpasses human intelligence. It is to futurists what the Rapture is to fundamentalist Christians.

Those who welcome or fear this eventuality are gathering this weekend in New York City for the fourth annual Singularity Summit. Speaking at the summit are some of the better-known tech soothsayers, including author and programmer Ray Kurzweil; Steve Wolfram, the founder of the novel search engine Alpha; and Aubrey de Grey, an expert on anti-aging science. Also giving talks are Australian philosopher David Chalmers, whose idea inspired the Matrix film series, and Pay-Pal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has donated in the six figures to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the organization putting on the event. Last year, the summit drew 1,000 curious academics and entrepreneurs in San Jose, Calif. (See our story on the 2007 Summit here.)

Michael Vassar, the president of the institute, gives the Singularity just under a 25% chance of happening by 2040 and a 70% chance by 2060. When we do cross that line, Vassar says nothing will be the same. “Humans living in the post-Singularity world will be as powerless as jellyfish are in today’s world,” he says. His odds don’t take into account the chances of the world plunging into rapid technological decline due to a nuclear war or a worldwide collapse into barbarism.

Vassar’s six staffers at the Singularity Institute, including Kurzweil, publish papers with titles such as, “Uncertain Future Project,” “Global Catastrophic Risk Project” and “Economics and Machine Intelligence,” and have developed software that supposedly predicts technology’s trajectories and generates odds on the occurrences of global catastrophes like nuclear war and global warming.

Singularists fall into optimist and pessimist camps. Optimists, such as Kurzweil, look forward to living in an age in which human intelligence is enhanced by brain implants that extend our memories, enhance our senses and allow us to solve problems faster and with greater accuracy.

The pessimists, and Vassar is one of them, see threats to humanity from the rise of an unfriendly machine intelligence that will want to enslave humans (think The Matrix) and use our brain matter for endless computation, much as we’ve used computers in the past 60 years.

Vassar says he and his colleagues at the Singularity Institute are working on seeing that a Matrix-like future never happens. Institute research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky coined the term “Friendly AI” to describe an AI that could be built to have a moral conscience. One of the institute’s chief goals is to encourage other scientists to create this Friendly AI. (Read “Vassar’s Machine Minds” in the AI Report.)

Many computer scientists and engineers remain very skeptical of the Singularity and the cargo-cult enthusiasm that surrounds it. They don’t believe in humanity’s ability to reach a point at which technology will be so complex as to render us inconsequential. It’s also likely that for economic reasons, technical progress and computer hardware performance will never accelerate at the speed required to reach the Singularity.

Will Wright, the creator of The Sims videogame series, has gone on record saying that machines will never achieve the kind of intelligence and creativity of which humans are capable. But he does believe that machines will one day be able to make themselves more intelligent, effectively reprogramming themselves until the first real AI achieves its own sort of sentience, one that is very alien to our own human cognizance.

Ariel Rabkin, a third year Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkley’s Computer Science program, doubts that many technical people take the Singularity seriously. “Human-comparable AI is really hard,” he says, “And we’re nowhere close to achieving it.” He adds, “I can tell you that nobody I work with at Berkeley or elsewhere has ever mentioned it. And just to be clear, I don’t just mean, ‘We don’t talk about it in courses.’ I mean, nobody mentions it, at all, ever. We don’t think about it.”

But the Singularity continues to pique the curiosity of the layman. Over the next 12 months, Hollywood will release several movies with trans-humanist themes, such as Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates, James Cameron’s Avatar, Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man and The Singularity is Near, with a script by Ray Kurzweil. In a time when the publishing industry is struggling, Better Humans LLC has just launched a new magazine called H+ covering the trans-humanism scene for fans of radical technological change.

It’s possible that because the Singularity is a relatively new idea, it’s embraced mostly by the youth and dismissed as a counter-cultural trend by an older generation of professors and scientists. “I’m the older side of the Singularists,” says Vassar, who is 30 years old.

The Singularity probably won’t destroy humanity in our lifetime, but it’s productive to keep asking the question of whether technology is serving us or if things are the other way around.

Named after the all-seeing Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel 1984, the programme enters its 11th series in the United States this year and its 12th in Britain. Ironically, De Mol says he is camera shy and insists he could never subject himself to the type of scrutiny popularised by the show.

The 54-year-old tycoon said the idea for the programme hit him one night in 1997, as he was unwinding with colleagues after a fruitless brainstorming session for a new programme for Catholic public radio.

tonight.co.za | Sep 30, 2009

Laren, Netherlands – John de Mol, the Dutch creator of the voyeuristic Big Brother reality show that turned 10 in September, never doubted his late-night flash of inspiration would change television forever.

“I told my team, even before the first episode was aired: there will come a time when people will talk about an era in television before Big Brother and one after ‘Big Brother’,” the billionaire media baron told AFP recently at his office in the affluent town of Laren in the western Netherlands.

“They looked at me like I was mad.”

The money-spinning series, now synonymous with the phenomenon of “reality television”, has seen tens of thousands of hours of footage filmed and broadcast in more than 60 countries including the United States, in Asia and across Europe, Africa and the Arab world.

Participants in Big Brother, currently on air in 36 countries, subject themselves to 24/7 camera scrutiny while locked up together in a house for about 100 days – even their ablutions are not private.

Among the show’s strongest drawing cards are the “shower hour” and occasional sexual interludes – all filmed as the “housemates” navigate a mine-field of social intrigue vying to outlast their competitors and take home a cash prize.

“There is a bit of a voyeur in each of us,” De Mol offers as part of the reason for the show’s success.

“When you walk in the street tonight and there is a lounge with the curtains open, you will look inside. Everyone has that. Call it voyeurism, I call it curiosity.”

The 54-year-old tycoon said the idea for the programme hit him one night in 1997, as he was unwinding with colleagues after a fruitless brainstorming session for a new programme for Catholic public radio.

He set up a working group codenamed Project X to flesh out the idea in the utmost secrecy. “I was afraid it would leak out,” he confessed.

It took a year to put together a workable show format and solve the technical and financial constraints – another year to find a willing broadcaster.

“It was very expensive, and few dared to do it,” said De Mol. “It was very controversial. There was a lot of negative publicity: people saying you can’t do this, you can’t lock people up for 100 days, you can’t put cameras in the toilet… all that nonsense.”

Despite widespread moral outrage, more than 10 000 people applied to take part in the first series broadcast in the Netherlands from September 16, 1999.

De Mol, a co-founder of entertainment company Endemol which has produced other hit reality programmes including Deal Or No Deal, Fear Factor and Extreme Makeover after Big Brother’s success, dismissed what he called “conservative” criticism of the concept.

“To participate in Big Brother, and to win, you need a form of social intelligence, a special way of interacting with people. Everyone can learn from that.

“I think you learn more about life from watching ‘Big Brother’ than from reading a book,” said De Mol, who has since left Endemol to start a new company, Talpa Media, producing reality programmes like Dating In The Dark.

Jaap Kooijman, media academic at the University of Amsterdam, sees Big Brother as “a turning point for reality TV” – early versions of which included such programmes as Candid Camera, in which hidden cameras filmed ordinary people reacting to unusual, scripted scenarios.

“One may have criticism of the ethical questions, of the so-called degradation of society’s values,” said Kooijman.

“But there are such diverse things on offer on TV that it would be difficult to argue that one genre alone is dragging down the standard.”

Highlights of Big Brother around the world have included a contestant giving birth, a race row and a housemate threatening another with a knife.

Does this go to far? “Yes and no,” said De Mol. “These things also happen in real life. And this is called reality television… a mirror of the world.”

Ironically, De Mol says he is camera shy and insists he could never subject himself to the type of scrutiny popularised by the show.

“I prefer not to be in the spotlight.”

According to Forbes magazine the programme helped make him the world’s 334th richest man in 2009 and puts his wealth at two billion dollars, though in good Dutch Calvinist fashion De Mol says he prefers not to talk about money.

Named after the all-seeing Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel 1984, the programme enters its 11th series in the United States this year and its 12th in Britain.

“Big Brother is synonymous with a genre of television that will never disappear,” said De Mol.

“If you ask me what I am proud of, that is it: I created the genre of reality television.” – AFP

USA TODAY | Sep 13, 2009

By Steve Sternberg

SAN FRANCISCO — Scientists are racing to launch the first major trials of a multi-drug flu cocktail to see if it can prevent complications in high-risk H1N1 (swine flu) patients, researchers said Sunday.

All three of the drugs — amantadine, ribavirin and Tamiflu — are already on the market. All are mainstays of flu treatment that have lost much of their punch because of flu viruses’ ability to throw up new defenses against antivirals. But research reported Sunday suggests that doctors may be able to breach viruses’ defenses by using them together.

Researchers said the triple combination is broadly effective against many different flu viruses, even those resistant to one or more of the drugs in the combo. The most unexpected finding was that each drug appears to regain some measure of its effectiveness against resistant viruses when given with the other two drugs, said lead researcher Mark Prichard of the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

“We were frankly very surprised,” Prichard told participants at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius on Sunday offered an upbeat vaccine report, saying on ABC’s This Week that some flu shots may arrive the first week of October, a few days earlier than expected.

Nancy Cox of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the first shipments will be small and reserved for priority groups such as young people and pregnant women “as far as possible.” She said evidence that one shot offers protection was a big confidence-booster that prompted the government to speed up its timetable.

Tests of the triple-drug combo are underway in the Southern Hemisphere and are starting in the USA, Canada and Europe, said virologist Amy Patick of Adamas Pharmaceuticals in Emeryville, Calif. Adamas sponsored the tests using a fixed-dose mix of amantadine and ribavirin and Roche’s Tamiflu. Researchers will pit the combo against Tamiflu alone in 250 people at 40 medical centers.

Jon McCullers of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis said Adamas has asked him to take part. Doctors may now use combination therapy, he said, but so far they haven’t had to because in most cases Tamiflu alone is effective against swine flu which is still vulnerable to it.

Combo therapy will be most useful when swine flu develops resistance to Tamiflu or when more drug-resistant viruses begin to circulate, crowding swine flu out, he said.

Medical ethics group says physicians monitored ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and studied their effectiveness

guardian.co.uk | Sep 2, 2009

By Ed Pilkington in New York

Doctors and psychologists the CIA employed to monitor its “enhanced interrogation” of terror suspects came close to, and may even have committed, unlawful human experimentation, a medical ethics watchdog has alleged.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a not-for-profit group that has investigated the role of medical personnel in alleged incidents of torture at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other US detention sites, accuses doctors of being far more involved than hitherto understood.

PHR says health professionals participated at every stage in the development, implementation and legal justification of what it calls the CIA’s secret “torture programme”.

The American Medical Association, the largest body of physicians in the US, said it was in open dialogue with the Obama administration and other government agencies over the role of doctors. “The participation of physicians in torture and interrogation is a violation of core ethical values,” it said.

The most incendiary accusation of PHR’s latest report, Aiding Torture, is that doctors actively monitored the CIA’s interrogation techniques with a view to determining their effectiveness, using detainees as human subjects without their consent. The report concludes that such data gathering was “a practice that approaches unlawful experimentation”.

Human experimentation without consent has been prohibited in any setting since 1947, when the Nuremberg Code, which resulted from the prosecution of Nazi doctors, set down 10 sacrosanct principles. The code states that voluntary consent of subjects is essential and that all unnecessary physical and mental suffering should be avoided.

The Geneva conventions also ban medical experiments on prisoners and prisoners of war, which they describe as “grave breaches”. Under CIA guidelines, doctors and psychologists were required to be present during the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques on detainees.

In April, a leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross found that medical staff employed by the CIA had been present during waterboarding, and had even used what appeared to be a pulse oxymeter, placed on the prisoner’s finger to monitor his oxygen saturation during the procedure. The Red Cross condemned such activities as a “gross breach of medical ethics”. PHR has based its accusation of possible experimentation on the 2004 report of the CIA’s own inspector general into the agency’s interrogation methods, which was finally published two weeks ago after pressure from the courts.

An appendix to the report, marked “top secret”, provides guidelines to employees of the CIA’s internal Office of Medical Services “supporting the detention of terrorists turned over to the CIA for interrogation”.

Medical workers are given the task of “assessing and monitoring the health of all agency detainees” subjected to enhanced techniques. These techniques include facial slaps, sleep deprivation, walling – where their padded heads are banged against walls – confinement in boxes, and waterboarding or simulated drowning.

The guidelines instruct doctors to carry out regular medical checks of detainees. They must ensure that prisoners receive enough food, though diet “need not be palatable”, and monitor their body temperature when placed in “uncomfortably cool environments, ranging from hours to days”.

The most controversial guideline refers to waterboarding, the technique where prisoners are made to feel as though they are drowning by having water poured over a cloth across their face. The guidelines stress that the method carries physical risks, particularly “by days three to five of an aggressive programme”.

PHR is calling for an official investigation into the role of doctors in the CIA’s now widely discredited programme. It wants to know exactly how many doctors participated, what they did, what records they kept and the science that they applied.

Pfizer to Pay $75 Million to Settle Trovan-Testing Suit

Washington Post | Jul 31, 2009

By Joe Stephens

Pfizer signed a $75 million agreement Thursday with Nigerian authorities to settle criminal and civil charges that the pharmaceutical company illegally tested an experimental drug on children during a 1996 meningitis epidemic.

Nigerian authorities say Pfizer’s test of the antibiotic Trovan killed 11 children and disabled scores more. Pfizer says the deaths and injuries were the result of meningitis.

An attorney for the state of Kano, where the charges were lodged, said the settlement was a long time in coming but welcome because it set the record straight about Pfizer’s culpability. “People and entities can and must be held accountable for the consequences of their conduct,” the attorney, Babatunde Irukera, said. “People around the world are no different and must be accorded the same levels of protections, always.”

Charges filed against Pfizer by Nigeria’s federal government, which is seeking about $6 billion in damages, are unaffected by the settlement, Irukera said. Two lawsuits related to the Trovan experiment also remain pending in New York.

In a news release, Pfizer said that it “specifically denies” any wrongdoing or liability. The company said its researchers conducted the clinical trial of the antibiotic Trovan legally, with the approval of the Nigerian government and the consent of guardians of the children. The company said the settlement was the best way to “allow Pfizer and the Nigerian governments to focus on what matters — improving healthcare for all Nigerians.”

Under the agreement, the world’s largest drug company agreed to pay $30 million over two years toward health-care initiatives chosen by the Kano state government. It will reimburse the state for $10 million in legal costs. And Pfizer agreed to create a fund that will pay up to $35 million toward “valid claims” for financial support submitted by patients who took part in the clinical trial. A panel appointed by Pfizer and Kano state will determine eligibility and levels of support.

In return, Kano officials agreed to drop civil and criminal actions against the company. Kano and the Nigerian federal government originally filed legal actions naming as defendants Pfizer and 10 individuals, including former Pfizer chief executive William C. Steere Jr. The actions sought $9 billion in restitution and damages and included 31 criminal counts, including homicide.

Details of the drug trial were first made public in December 2000 in a Washington Post investigative series. The articles reported that the trial did not conform to U.S. patient-protection standards and that the oral form of the drug used in the trial had not been previously tested in children. Pfizer had no signed consent forms for the children, the articles said, and the company relied on a falsified ethics approval letter.

Five years later, in May 2006, The Post obtained and published a confidential report that concluded that Pfizer violated Nigerian and international law in the experiment. That set in motion the criminal charges.

Trovan was never approved for use by children in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration approved it for adults in 1998 but later severely restricted its use after reports of liver failure. The European Union banned it in 1999.