Nothing as It Seems

An edited version of this article was printed in Village Magazine , November 2014   In October, Dublin City Councillors voted in favour of removing fluoride from public water supplies. The motion, which was passed by 22 votes , called for the removal of fluoride and to make it a crime for anyone that attempts to add it to water supplies. Dublin is not the first city to pass such a motion: in March, Cork City Council also passed a motion requesting the Government to end treating public water supply with fluoride. Christopher O’Sullivan , the Fianna Fáil councillor who tabled the motion, said he hoped its passing will produce a “ domino effect ” with other county councils.  Anti-fluoride groups, who are actively campaigning to end water fluoridation in Ireland, will no doubt consider these events as significant victories. Many argue that fluoridation is known to cause many health problems, such as cardiovascular and neurological disease, type 1 diabetes, osteop...

A version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , March-April, Vol. 145 (2014)   Should we legalise performance-enhancing drugs in sport? In July this year, American Tyson Gay and Jamaican Asafa Powell (the second and fourth fastest men of all time over 100 meters respectively) tested positive for banned substances.  Other athletes, such as Jamaican sprinter Sherone Simpson and 31 Turkish athletes also failed drugs tests just prior to the Moscow World Championships in August. Further recent drug scandals include the conviction of the sports-doping doctor Eufemiano Fuentes , who claims to be associated with top Spanish football league clubs, a long list of professional cyclists, tennis players, and past London marathon winners. The ruling of the Spanish court to destroy evidence from the Fuentes trial, however, means that we may never ascertain who was involved with his clinic. Over the past few decades, there have been several doping scandals i...

Should in vitro meat replace conventional meat production?   An edited version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , Nov-Dec, Vol. 143 (2013) The first public tasting of an in vitro beef burger , made from meat grown in a laboratory, using tissue engineering, was cooked and consumed at a news conference in London yesterday (5th August 2013). The burger, m ade completely from synthetic meat at a cost of €250,000, was developed by Professor Mark Post , a specialist in tissue engineering, at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands, using stem cells. It was revealed that Sergey Brin , one of the founders of Google, invested in the project. Post and his team of scientists took cells from a cow and converted them into strips of muscle that they joined to make a patty. The way it’s produced, in a sense, has more in common with how plants grow than sentient beings. One of the tasters at the London event, Hanni Rützler ,   said: "I was expecting...

A version of this article was printed in The Irish Vegetarian , Issue 137, Winter 2013 Perhaps it’s fair to say that the concept of lab-grown meat was originally conceptualised by Winston Churchill, when he declared in a 1932 essay " Fifty Years Hence " that by 1982 “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” Eighty years on and the idea hasn’t gone away. About five years ago the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) gave scientists until 30th June 2012 to confirm they could create "cultured" meat -- also known as in vitro or lab-grown meat -- in commercial quantities.  They launched a prize winning competition , awarding $1 million to the first scientific team that could prove that artificial chicken can be grown in large quantity, which would be impossible to differentiate from actual chicken flesh. This, you might suppose, sound...