First Australian uterus transplant changes future of infertility treatment

Sylvia Jeffreys and Lisa Brown

Feb 26 2023

FRANK REDWARD/SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
Kirsty Bryant, right, received her mother Michelle’s uterus in a 16-hour surgery that may allow her to carry another child to term.

A 30-year-old woman has become the first Australian to receive a transplanted uterus in a medical breakthrough at the Royal Hospital for Women in Sydney.

Kirsty Bryant was told she’d never carry another baby after undergoing a life-saving hysterectomy during the birth of her daughter, Violet, in April 2021.

She now has a shot at defying that prognosis after undergoing marathon transplant surgery in January.

The organ was donated by Bryant’s 54-year-old mother, Michelle Hayton, who endured an 11-hour operation to remove her womb. Bryant told 60 Minutes she is still wrapping her head around the selfless gift from her mother.

READ MORE:

* Couple desperate to have baby before hysterectomy to end daily pain

* Heart parts harnessed for groundbreaking research

* First baby born using uterus transplanted from dead donor

“I am going to potentially, all fingers and toes crossed, carry a baby in the same uterus, in the same womb I was growing in,” Bryant said. “It will hopefully be a great story to tell my baby one day.”

Hayton met all the relevant criteria for a donor, including being fit, premenopausal and, crucially, willing to hand over her womb without expecting anything in return.

“Kirsty rang, she said to me, ‘Hi, Mum. What do you think about having a hysterectomy and giving me your uterus?’ I said, ‘Yep, it’s on. I have no problem with that’,” Hayton said.

The trial’s lead surgeon, Dr Rebecca Deans, who has spent years researching the project and securing ethics approval, described the 16-hour dual surgery as a success and one of the best days of her life.

“I couldn’t have been happier,” Deans said. “It was such a wonderful day to actually finally get there and be in that room. The buzz was amazing. And then it all went to plan, and Kirsty’s doing beautifully.”

Huge medical moment

The Swedish surgeon who performed the world’s first uterine transplant in 2012, Professor Mats Brannstrom, led the operations on Bryant and Hayton, sharing his expertise with the team at the Royal.

The donor surgery to remove Hayton’s uterus, which began at 7am, was by far the longer and riskier of the two operations, Brannstrom said.

“The difficulty is because the blood vessels are small, and you’re working in, like, a funnel. So, the access for you is very restricted. We dissect the organ, and that means that you actually remove all the other tissues around the uterus.

“There are small blood vessels going out, and we try to isolate those. The problematic thing is that there is a ureter on each side. And the ureter goes from the kidney to the bladder, and we cannot injure that.”

The uterus was lifted from Hayton’s body about nine hours in and was passed across to a table where it was flushed out over ice, before being stitched onto Bryant’s blood vessels using extremely fine threads almost too small for the naked eye to see.

The recipient surgery finished about 10pm, marking a huge moment in Australian medical history and opening an exciting new avenue in infertility treatment.

“Personally, professionally, it was just incredible, and I think everyone felt the same,” Deans said. “There were so many components to the team, the nursing staff, the anaesthetists, and everyone’s saying that they felt the same way, that they really felt like it was one of those moments you’ll reflect on professionally and never, ever forget.”
No guarantee, but no regrets

While the operations were free of major complications, the recovery for both patients has not been easy. Bryant experienced significant blood loss 24 hours after the surgery and required transfusions, while Hayton suffered a serious infection and is yet to feel any sensation in her bladder.

However, a month on from the biggest day of their lives, Bryant and Hayton said they have no regrets – even though there is no guarantee of the reward of a baby.

“To not put my hand up and give it a go, I think would be a massive regret for myself,” Bryant said. “Even if it doesn’t go to plan, the research and the information that they will get from this, in Australia, is going to be worth it. I just want to give hope and give options for other women out there.”

The next step for Bryant is still resting on ice at the IVF lab at the Royal: six embryos frozen months before the operation. Deans will determine when she is ready for the transfer, but the early signs are that the uterus is responding well and Bryant could be pregnant by Christmas.

“It could be somewhere between three and six months from the surgery where we can start implanting those embryos… and each of those embryos has a 30 to 50 per cent chance of success.”

‘I’m going to dream big’

While transplanted wombs are typically removed after five years, some recipients overseas have managed to carry two pregnancies in their donated organ; an opportunity that Byrant is very much open to.

“If we can dream a little, I’d love to carry two more pregnancies. After my hysterectomy, that was something that I really had to mourn – the fact that I wouldn’t be able to be pregnant again. And then to get that chance, yeah, I’m going to dream big.”

While the anxious wait for a baby begins for Bryant, the Royal will forge ahead with plans for 11 more transplants. However, the hospital’s foundation will need to raise a further AU$1 million to fully fund the three-year research trial, and to achieve Deans’ goal of one day making uterine transplants as mainstream as IVF.

“There is a good number of women coming forward saying, ‘I really would love to do this. I don’t have other options. We desperately want to have another child and we’d really love to be considered.’

“I’d love to be able to offer this to women in Australia.”

This article originally appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and has been republished with permission.

https://teoriaevolutiva.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/firestone-shulamith-dialectic-sex-case-feminist-revolution.pdf

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution 

In THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST. REVOLUTION, Shulamith Firestone cuts into the prejudice against women (and children)--amplified through the.

 HOMONUCLUS

Biotech’s repugnant new advance is worthy of everyone’s critical attention

Scientists have swapped human reproduction for a different process entirely.

Image by Gerd Altmann/Pixabay/Creative Commons

By 

Charles C. Camosy, Joe Vukov

(RNS) — Scientists have created a human embryo without the use of sperm or an egg — a true test-tube baby. Such embryos cannot (yet) develop into full-grown human beings. Even if transplanted into a uterus, the specimen could never attach to the uterine wall.

Yet, what we have here is still a (disabled) human embryo. Without parents. 

Are you disgusted? We believe that if you have a well-formed conscience, this is a good and proper reaction to this development.

We cannot always and everywhere trust a reaction of repugnance; at times, such a reaction is simply the result of ingrained biases and stereotypes. But there is often a certain wisdom in our repulsion. Repugnance can assert itself as a moral alarm and response to real moral distress.

This is such a time. 

The creation of a human embryo without sperm and egg shares some important similarities with other artificial reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization and certain surrogacy practices that involve the creation of human embryos outside the human body. Perhaps most strikingly, the procedure overlaps the process of modifying genes using novel techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9. In both cases, a manufactured human embryo is the result of direct human intervention. 

Tellingly, CRISPR-Cas9 has been known to be used only once on human embryos. The scientist who performed the procedure, He Jiankui, was roundly and firmly criticized by the medical and ethics community and served a prison sentence for his work. Meanwhile, leading scientists — including Emmanuelle Charpentier, one of the creators of the technique — have called for a moratorium on its use on human embryos.

The creation of a human embryo without sperm or egg also goes beyond what we have seen in previous artificial reproductive technology and genetic engineering techniques. In vitro fertilization and even CRISPR-Cas9 involve direct human intervention in the reproductive process. Yet, all of them work by modifying or intervening with existing human embryos or gametes. 

The manufacture of a human embryo without sperm or egg, by contrast, aims to build a human embryo from scratch. The process is less a tweak to human reproduction or bending it to our own will than replacing it with something different altogether. Heretofore we have aimed to eliminate variability, inconvenience or inefficiency from human reproduction. With this new development, the aim is different: to swap human reproduction for a different process entirely. 

The charge of playing God comes to mind. The charge is over-attributed and sometimes reveals more about our biases than something morally real, but in this case it is apt. There are at least two kinds of playing God: An overstepping by humans into spheres of action that should be reserved for the divine, and a hubristic attempt to meddle with the world in ways that our all-too-human intellects simply do not understand. In creating human embryos from scratch, we risk playing God in both senses. 

One of us is a philosopher and the other a theologian. We are both convinced that a Catholic understanding of reproduction could be a cultural antidote to the toxic understanding of reproduction that has led to the development of an eggless, spermless embryo. Our position is not aligned with some kind of revisionist attempt to “take us back to the 1950s” (or some such dismissive phrase), but is rather at the heart of the perspective that Pope Francis and the Vatican reaffirmed just a few months ago. 

As Christianity yields to a consumerist reproductive throwaway culture, the logic of the marketplace takes over. Instead of seeing the creation of new human beings as pro-creation with God (our ultimate creator), who offers them as an unmerited gift, we now think of it as yet another transaction between individuals. I have resources (money, insurance) and you have skills and facilities (medical training and fertility labs)? Well, then who is anyone to come between autonomous actors pursuing their self-interests?

Our post-Christian culture is already well advanced down this pathway, as couples, individuals and even “throuples” demand control over the embryos and future children they purchase in the marketplace. We’ve had decades, actually, of privileged people demanding the ability to purchase ova and sperm based on the donor’s IQ, attractiveness, participation in varsity athletics, and more. Sex selection is par for the course in many contexts. And of course our throwaway culture simply discards the prenatal human beings who don’t fit the market-based criteria. 

But here again we have something that is genuinely new. Instead of modifying or intervening (albeit dramatically!) into the process God created for procreation, this new technology has the potential to obliterate it. Catholics, other Christians and all people of good will must make our voices heard on this and work to make creation of such embryos illegal.

It may seem, and we may be told, that we can trust the process to stay where it is — that no actual reproduction would ever take place using this new technology. But the history outlined above shows that is a very, very bad bet. In a culture that becomes more and more dominated by the logic of the marketplace and by a commitment to a kind of relativism that welcomes virtually any vision of the good, who are we to impose our view onto others who think differently? They should be able to make their transaction and we should butt out.

It will do us no good to pretend that this is a retreat to a kind of moral neutrality. The marketplace has its own logic and its own goods. It rewards the privileged while exploiting the marginalized. There is no view from nowhere on this question. No neutral place to hide. We can and must explicitly and firmly take a stand with a particular vision of the good. And the Catholic vision stands ready to provide precisely what is necessary in this context.

Unfortunately, there are forces even within the church itself that are apparently trying to undermine the Church’s teaching in this regard — precisely where it is so obviously and importantly true and needed the most. Those of us who agree with Francis’ vision of resisting a consumerist, throwaway culture with the logic of gift and openness to life must redouble our efforts to make our voices heard on this new and repugnant biotechnological development.

September 18, 2023

(Joe Vukov is an associate professor of philosophy and associate director of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago. He is also the author, most recently, of The Perils of Perfection. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Teoriaevolutiva.files.wordpress.com

https://teoriaevolutiva.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/firestone-shulamith-dialectic-sex-case-feminist-revolution.pdf

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution 

In THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST. REVOLUTION, Shulamith Firestone cuts into the prejudice against women (and children)--amplified through the.

 

Tech bros propose replacing women with ‘synthetic wombs’

Taking away the responsibility of pregnancy from women could result in less wealth inequality by gender, one billionaire argued

© Getty Images / JGI;  Tom Grill

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia proposed synthetic wombs as a solution to gender inequality

Several prominent tech entrepreneurs discussed the possibility of replacing natural birth with synthetic wombs, arguing that such technology would remove the “burden” of pregnancy and allow women to work more.

After Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk warned on Tuesday that society “should be much more worried about population collapse,” Musk’s fellow tech leaders came up with one solution for declining birth rates.

“We should be investing in technology that makes having kids much faster/easier/cheaper/more accessible… Synthetic wombs, etc,” proposed Sahil Lavingia, the founder of digital product trading platform Gumroad.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of cryptocurrency Ethereum, agreed, arguing that women would be able to continue working if the “burden of pregnancy” was replaced with synthetic wombs.

Buterin – who has an estimated net worth of $1.46 billion – claimed that outsourcing pregnancy to machines could mean “significantly reducing the inequality” of wealth between genders.

Though Lavingia and Buterin received some support on social media, the majority of reactions were overwhelmingly negative, with critics comparing the idea to the lab-grown humans from ‘The Matrix’.

“This is so dystopian… why not create a system where anyone contributing to society earns enough to build a family, buy a house and live instead of constantly being priced out by inflation?” suggested one person.

READ MORE: Are motherless babies f

Journalist Amil Niazi tweeted, “The reason the majority of ppl [are] choosing not to have kids aren’t having them is not because they’re lacking quick and easy synthetic wombs it’s because it increasingly feels like you need to be a millionaire to have them.”

In 2019, scientists in the Netherlands claimed they were within 10 years of creating the world’s first artificial womb. That technology, however, is intended to be used to protect premature babies rather than to replace natural pregnancy altogether.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 

#Accelerate
The Accelerationist Reader
Robin Mackay
Armen Avanessian
(Editors)

ORIGINAL EDITION
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536pp
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Published with Merve Verlag
Cover Design: Leaky Studio
Type: Norm

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E-book available direct from Urbanomic

Accelerationism
Artificial Intelligence
Capitalism
CCRU
Cyberpunk
Singularity
Technology

An engaging, eccentric anthology…it’s refreshing to encounter a ‘left’ project for the future that wants to reclaim the idea of technology, industry and planet-scale thinking.
—JJ Charlesworth, ArtReview

Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.

#Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.

On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own ‘Prometheanism’, and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century.

At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #Accelerate activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment and capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of ‘reasonable’ contemporary political alternatives.

CONTENTS
REVIEWS/PRESS
Introduction Robin Mackay Armen Avanessian PDF
Anticipations
Fragment on Machines Karl Marx
The Book of the Machines Samuel Butler
The Common Task Nicolai Fedorov
The Machine Process and the Natural Decay of the Business Enterprise Thorstein Veblen
Ferment
The Two Modes of Cultural History Shulamith Firestone
Decline of the Capitalist Mode of Production or Decline of Humanity? Jacques Camatte
The Civilized Capitalist Machine Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari
Energumen Capitalism Jean-François Lyotard
Every Political Economy is Libidinal Jean-François Lyotard
Power of Repetition Gilles Lipovetsky
Fictions of Every Kind J.G. Ballard
Desirevolution Jean-François Lyotard
Cyberculture
Circuitries Nick Land
LA 2019 Iain Hamilton Grant
Cyberpositive Sadie Plant Nick Land
Cybernetic Culture CCRU
Swarmachines CCRU
Acceleration
Terminator vs Avatar Mark Fisher
#Accelerate Alex Williams Nick Srnicek
Some Reflections on the #Accelerate Manifesto Antonio Negri
Red Stack Attack! Tiziana Terranova
Automated Architecture Luciana Parisi
The Labor of the Inhuman Reza Negarestani
Prometheanism and its Critics Ray Brassier
Maximum Jailbreak Benedict Singleton
Teleoplexy Nick Land
Seven Prescriptions for Accelerationism Patricia Reed

Black Magick and BioTech

Came across these interesting articles equating bio-technology with black magick and alchemy.

One could say that the current food crisis resulting from biotechnology applied to mass production of foods as well as their commodification into bio-fuels is an act of black magick.

Fulfilling the prediction made by Shulamith Firestone back in the seventies when she did her feminist critique of reproductive biotechnology warning of its return to the creation of the alchemists homonuclus; the creation of life without the mother.

Black Magic, Biotech & Dark Markets


“On some islands mana [magic] is the word for money”
Marcel Mauss

The characterisation of biotech as black magic is primarily meant to indicate the
ambivalence of instrumentality in biotech, an ambivalence which actually enables the connection between biological life and economic value. Traditionally, black magic refers to the use of magical actions for maleficent purposes (spells, witchcraft, demonology). The idea of black magic took a particularly strong hold in Renaissance Europe, where it coincided with trends in Jewish and Christian mysticism.

The infamous black magicians of the period and after – from Cornelius Agrippa to Eliphas Levi – were often seen as instrumentalists, manipulating the forces of the natural world (in the Hermetic tradition) or of the traditions of ‘white magic’ (occultism, cabala, alchemy).14 At the root of black magic was the fear induced by an instrumentalisation of the natural world, in order to gain
‘unnatural’ control.
Curiously enough, the tropes of black magic specifically, and magic generally, are not uncommon in popular accounts of the biotech industry. For instance, Cynthia Robbins-Roth’s book From Alchemy to IPO provides a hero-narrative of the biotech industry, recounting the development of recombinant DNA techniques and the formation of Genentech, the first biotech start-up.15 For Robbins-Roth, the biotech industry realises the dream of alchemy, not only through its ability to control matter, but in its ability to generate value through this transformation of matter. Robbins-Roth does not mention black magic, because this alchemical biotech activity is seen as the ultimate in humanistic endeavor. But neither does she explore
in depth the controversies genetic engineering experiments prompted in the 1970s.

But what if we take this trope of biotech as magic seriously? We would, first of all, have to point to a definition of ‘magic’ that would warrant the connection to biotech.

A number of historians of religion, including James Frasier, have positioned magic as incommensurate with technology (for Frasier magic is situated between religion and technology, for it has a logic, but that logic is not rational or ‘scientific’). Indeed the division persists to this day, along the lines of the rational/irrational.

In this context, Marcel Mauss’ famous study, A General Theory of Magic, is useful, for it attempts to conceive of magic as deeply connected to both the social and the technological.

Mauss’ study, though not without its problematics (including an exclusive focus on
‘primitive’ cultures), is noteworthy in that it redefines magic according to social and technological criteria. It suggests that magic is not transcendental (above and beyond social reality), but immanent to collective and individual practices in daily life. Mauss’ theory of magic also points to the implicitly pragmatic and instrumental character of magic in society; magic rites associated with healing and medicine are among his most common examples. To this we can add several more qualifiers, for we want to suggest that biotech is a form of black magic, and not just magic generally speaking. If magic is both immanent (social) and instrumental (technological), then black magic is an instrumental use of the immanent qualities of magic. That is, black magic folds the instrumental back upon the immanent, it folds technology back upon the social. When this happens, the object of the magical action becomes the social body itself. Instead of magical practice constituting orcontributing to the social (as in Mauss’ theory), in black magic it practices on the social.
(This is biopolitics with smoke and mirrors.) In this folding back of the instrumental upon the immanent, the social body is ‘shaped’ according to the hermetic dictates of the technological (the technological becomes synonymous with its efficaciousness). This can be said to constitute the maleficent character of black magic. It results less from a desire for world domination and more from a confusion specific to black magic, a confusion of the interrelation of the immanent (social) and the instrumental (technological).
What does this have to do with biotechnology? On one level all of this is perhaps too
abstract. But, if we keep in mind our notion of black magic (aided by Mauss’ theory), then it is hard to deny certain analogies in the biotech industry. For instance, consider the pharmaceutical industry. The manufacture of drugs has long been the single most lucrative output for bioscience research. Even when discussions of ‘post-genomic complexity’ abound, the output for such research is first and foremost in drug discovery. Drugs operate not only by sympathy (vaccines), antipathy (anti-virals) and contiguity (GM foods), but the integration of the pharmaceutical industry with health care systems means that a network for regulating
“biovalue” operates in the long term (health insurance, drug prescriptions and subscriptions).
Likewise, any computer based laboratory technology achieves a magical
transfer of properties, simply by encoding and decoding DNA into a computer. Finally, the biological database can be seen as a means of ‘capturing’ or possessing biological life via the various property and patenting structures and health care systems.
Recall our initial question: how does biotech create a link between biological life and economic value? And how does it do this as a network which displays control-without-control?

In short, biotech as a form of black magic mediates between ‘life’ and ‘property’ via
the use of information technologies. Information is the ‘medium’ – in both senses of the term. The space in which black magic biotech operates is the space which separates and connects biological life and economic value, matter and property. ‘Information’ has become the equivalent of mana in the biotech industry. The notion of information – genetic codes, computer data, stock quotes – covers a wide range of meanings, and in doing so it functions as the means by which biotech establishes and regulates the interactions and transactionsbetween life and property. For contemporary biotech, ‘information’ is mana.


Notes on Alchemy, Metonymy and Engendering Simulacra
Growing Things: Banff New Media Institute, 2 – 4 June, 2000 and Australia, 1 July – August, 2000

The representational imaginary of Nature “disappears with simulation – whose operation is nuclear and genetic …genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation” according to Jean Baudrillard. From this situation forward many scenarios are possible. Many proximate universes and combinations could evolve. It is possible that a benign biotechnology will take place in controlled environments such as isolated fields and greenhouses and will be economically viable in these special regulated areas. Nanoscience and nanoengineering could develop new and improved material properties including ones with enhanced electrical conductivity, optical properties and mechanical strength that will lead to breakthroughs in classical electronics, architecture, pharmacology and artificial life forms. Materials that are actually intelligent surfaces and films could perform everything from photosynthesis and camouflage to building materials that last longer and sense weather conditions, modifying their structures in order to be more or less permeable to humidity, air and light. Intelligent antibodies could find and destroy malignant cells in the body. Nanochemists and engineers are also designing nanometer-scale machines and molecular motors that are capable of interacting with the environment as well as within the human body. In all of these instances nanotechnology is characterized by a kind of organicism that imitates nature at the atomic and molecular level and is exemplified by a non-linear, distributed, redundant, parallel and overlapping intelligence. Nanoengineering aspires to transform inexpensive, abundant and inanimate constituents into self-generating, self-perpetuating, self-repairing, self-aware entities that are capable of communicating with each other and responding to the environment. These new technologies represent formal ways of organizing architectures of all kinds from cities to computers and telecommunication systems and seemingly provide humanity with unprecedented control over the material world. This research is in its earliest stages, and as is often noted, it is similar to the transistor technology and silicon-based research of the 1940’s and 1950’s. Early experiments indicate that at least at a certain scale these goals are attainable.

At the risk of presenting a classical binary critique, much of nanoscience and nanotechnology is not the result of multidisciplinary research, and is following more formal rather than content-based developments typical of the early stages of research. Although much of this breakthrough science is a positive result of pure research, it is now time for more multidisciplinary work by artists and scientists in order that new applications, forms of content and visualizations can evolve simultaneously with technological advances. In this sense, as artists, we are moving further away from mimesis and representation that have typically positioned us across a critical gulf (distance) between art and life and moving further into the integration of life-like art. These developments are occurring at the same time that many scientists are becoming more involved with mimesis and representation (at least on the nanoscale) even though they are of course modifying the world. It is essential that these new technological developments incorporate a cultural component that includes re-thinking humanism or what it means to be human in these changing terms. We need to explore ways of using these new tools to access our past and future within the present in order to maintain our cultural diversity while creating rich new hybrid forms of art, entertainment and life. The decisions of what it means to exist within this world that science fiction has been charting during the past several decades should not be left to scientists, engineers, politicians and the military – industrial complex. Issues that address what can be built and accomplished in the nanoscale universe need to be explored by the public in ways that are experimental and critical while communicating the implications of future developments.

In another scenario of refictionalization, one could see that escaped and mutant versions of modified plants would begin to spread and a situation similar to the Borges story where the map becomes the territory actually takes place. Only it is the territory that finally remains in tattered shreds in various regions of the profuse desert of prolific and disease resistant plants that aren’t plants. In the case of nanomaterials replacing organic surfaces with ones that are impervious to decay and erosion, but not to mutation and change, we could end up with a new world built on the premise that it would require little maintenance, while actually needing constant reading and interpretation. In fact this simulation could require more maintenance to control mutations and the catalytic changes of positive feedback that could result in out of control rapid, accelerated growth, rather than slow evolutionary change. At this point where information and material properties would be intelligent and self-propagating, we would also change. Through molecular and quantum computing we would co-inhabit the world with intelligent artificial life forms who perhaps initially become the farmers of this extensive simulation whose purpose is to control and maintain the simulation within certain boundaries. It is possible that massively parallel quantum computers and devices would be ideal for maintaining this simulation. This is a scenario of the near future and it may be that we never create quantum and molecular computers that are capable of these phenomena, or that the applications development will be slowed by competing technologies. However I believe that it will be possible to create quantum devices and quantum algorithms surprisingly quickly.

SEE:

Mad Science-Flourescent Pigs

GMO News Roundup

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
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biology, technology, work, labour, labor, surplus-value, Marxism, industrial-ecology, environment, market, free-market, capitalism,
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Five Things Feminism Has Done For Me

I got tagged in the Five Things Feminism Has Done For Me meme by John Murney, thanks John. You can read here to find out what its about.

Also Today the Progressive bloggers will be doing a pro feminist blog burst...october is women's history month, a call to post or re-post "5 things feminism did for me" anytime on the 2nd

I won't blog about five things rather I will blog about feminists I consider historically important. Feminism has been essential in the development of my libertarian and pagan perspective.

I will blog about those who did not take State funding to fight for womens rights and against patriarchical society. In fact their autonomous activity showed that women had to organize despite the State, academia, capitalism, and Christianity. I am not here to support the Status of Women or the State. It is reformism pure and simple. That being said I donot support the attempts by the vile rightwhing to get rid of the Status of Women. This is political correctness from the right, attempting to impose their Christian fundamentalist values on secular society.

I think Status of Women is a liberal sop and it is irrelevant to historically authentic feminism and to women organizing for themselves as the proletariat.

Since it is womens history Month I thought I would post my selection of Greatest Feminists Not Supported By the State in historic waves of Feminism. And my waves fit historic periods. While mainstream Feminism says there are three waves of Feminism historically there are actually six. And those who claim we are in some sort of post-feminist period are deluded as are the post-modernists.

I look at when these women were active or published. When dealing with their ideas and influence it is interesting to note when they actually published. Margaret Mead for instance published her works on Samoa back in the late 1920's while her influence continues right through till today.

And yes I have included liberated women who embrace sexuality as a positive affirmation of themselves. "Yes, I am a revolutionist. All true artists are revolutionists." Isadora Duncan.

And in keeping with this meme I tag the following five:

Larry Gambone

CathiefromCanada

RustyIdols

Daveberta

DearKitty



Feminist Wave 1 1790-1899

1. Mary Wollstencroft

2. Sojourner Truth

3.Victoria Woodhull

4. Anne Besant

5. Lucy Parsons

6. Eleanor Marx

7. Mother Jones

8. Voltairine de Cleyre

9. Florence Farr

10. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

11. Sophia: British Feminism in the Mid Eighteenth Century


Feminist Wave 2 1900-1950

1. Jane Ellen Harrison

2. Emma Goldman

3. Margaret Sanger

4. Alexandra Kollanti

5. Dr. Margret Murray

6. Sylvia Pankhurst

6. Mary Beard

7. Helen Keller

8. Mujeres Libres

9. Simone de Beauvoir

10. Margaret Mead

11. Dion Fortune

12. Isadora Duncan

13. Gypsy Rose Lee

14. Bettie Page

15. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn


Feminist Wave 3 1960-1970

1. Gloria Steinem

2. Betty Friedan

3. Evelyn Reed

4. Raya Dunesevkeya

5. Madalyn Murray O'Hair

6. Clara Fraser

7. Rachel Carson

8. Jayne Mansfield




Feminist Wave 4 1970-1980

1. Jane Godall

2. Shulamith Firestone

3. Selma James

4. Maria Della Costa

5. Kate Millet

6. Sheila Rowbotham

7. Angela Davis

8. Barbara Ehrenreich

9. Sharon Presley

10. Robin Morgan

11. Ti-Grace Atkinson

12. Betty Dodson

13. Jo Freeman

14. CWLU

15. Marge Piercy


Feminist Wave 5 1980-1999

1. Maria Gimbutas

2. Wendy McElory

3. Camilia Paglia

4. Stephanie Coontz

5. StarHawk

6. Annie Sprinkle

7. Nina Hartley

8. Dawn Passer


Feminist Wave 6- 2000-200?

1. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards

2. Kathy Pollitt



For more lists of women see:

Women in Science.

WOMEN WRITERS

Literary Resources -- Feminism and Women's Literature (Lynch)



For my blog articles see:

Feminism


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
feminism, women, blog, writers, scientists, feminist, US, Canada, UK,

Grandmother of Second Wave Feminism Dies

Betty Friedan one of the Second Wave feminists, along with Simone de Beauvoir, and Evelyn Reed, has passed away today at the age of 85. Known for her groundbreaking work on the contradicitons of Post War American stereotyping of women; The Feminine Mystique.

Friedan was a classic liberal, a fighter for womens rights as individuals and a New York left intellectual, thus her recognition that womens struggle were collective as well as one of individual rights.

"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, `Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children," Friedan said.

The First wave feminists, are often thought of as those women who began the fight at the turn of the 2oth Century Suffragettes as well as anarchists and socialists like Emma Goldman and Elizabeth Gurely Brown, Helen Keller and womens reproductive rights advocate Margret Sanger. But in reality that was the real second wave.

The first wave really began in the 19th Century around the abolishionist movement which gained many women advocates who fought for Afro-American rights and labour rights ending up fighting a losing battle for their own rights.
Friedan and de Beauvoir I would class as Third Wave feminism in this light. As the later feminists of the late sixties and early seventies, Kate Millet , Shulamith Firestone , that continue that groundbreaking work would be known as.

The struggle for womens liberation is the essence of all class and revolutionary struggle. And it's at the root of classical liberalism and anarchism.

Rooted in the utilitarian philosophy of Godwin and Mills, the revolutionary athiesm and humanism of Byron and Shelly, feminism begins with Mary Wollestoncrafts famous essay on Womens Rights. Mary was married to Godwin. And was well versed in the arguements of utilitarianism and Godwins classic contractualism.

That contractualism is the basis of later libertarianism of the Prodhounian and Tuckers schools. Thus greatly influencing the libertarian school of thought in the U.S. including Ayn Rand.

A societies treatment of women, the role they play and the freedom they have is an expression of how liberal, plural and secular a society is. Those who would down play this who denigrate feminism, especially if they are women, and women on the right in particular, do a disservice to the women who fought for their rights. The fact they have a popular and respected voice regardless of their politics is because of the struggles of feminists like Freidan.

I expect to read critical apprasials of her life and work in the coming days. And we can expect the dissing of Freidan by the usual gaggle of right wing women in the next few days. They of course will give faint praise to her, and then damn her. But their voices would not be heard had it not been for Second Wave feminists like Freidan and de Beauvoir. And certainly they would not have been heard if the only womans voice that had been respected had been that of the hopeless romantic adulator of male indivdualism; Ayn Rand.

Friedans critique was one that challenged the dominance of Freud in American culture and the role of therapy that had become the method of social control. Therapy had replaced police and social workers in the fifies and sixties as the new science of mass control. Ironic that what had once been the science of the individual had now become what Reich called Mass Psychology. The dominance of the Fruedian mystique, which is the core of Fiedans critique, is well illustrated in the early movies of Woody Allen and his self parody of the neurotic New Yorker whose always on the couch.

The uncritical acceptance of Freudian doctrine in America was caused, at least in part, by the very relief it provided from uncomfortable questions about objective realities. After the depression, after the war, Freudian psychology became much more than a science of human behaviour, a therapy for the suffering. It became an all-embracing American ideology, a new religion. It provided a convenient escape from the atom bomb, McCarthy, all the disconcerting problems that might spoil the taste of steaks, and cars and colour television and backyard swimming pools. And if the new psychological religion – which made a virtue of sex, removed all sin from private vice, and cast suspicion on high aspirations of the mind and spirit – had a more devastating personal effect on women than men, nobody planned it that way.

But the practice of psychoanalysis as a therapy was not primarily responsible for the feminine mystique. It was the creation of writers and editors in the mass media, ad-agency motivation researchers, and behind them the popularisers and translators of Freudian thought in the colleges and universities. Freudian and pseudo-Freudian theories settled everywhere, like fine volcanic ash. Sociology, anthropology, education, even the study of history and literature became permeated and transfigured by Freudian thought. The most zealous missionaries of the feminine mystique were the functionalists, who seized hasty gulps of pre-digested Freud to start their new departments of ‘Marriage and Family-Life Education’. The functional courses in marriage taught American college girls how to ‘play the role’ of woman – the old role became a new science. Related movements outside the colleges – parent education, child-study groups, prenatal maternity study groups and mental-health education – spread the new psychological super-ego throughout the land, replacing bridge and canasta as an entertainment for educated young wives. And this Freudian super-ego worked for growing numbers of young and impressionable American women as Freud said the super-ego works – to perpetuate the past.

Mankind never lives completely in the present; the ideologies of the super-ego perpetuate the past, the traditions of the race and the people, which yield but slowly to the influence of the present and to new developments, and, so long as they work through the super-ego, play an important part in man’s life, quite independently of economic conditions.

The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, over-protective, life-restricting, future-deriving note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball, baby-sitting, mastering geometry almost independent enough, almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era – were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll’s house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science – anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now – kept them from questioning the feminine mystique.

The Feminine Mystique
Chapter 5 The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud

Also see:The Sexual Revolution Continues

Whose Family Values?

Tags
women
women's rights
feminism
Betty Friedan

 ADOPTION IS CHEAPER

Estimating costs of uterine transplantation

UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG

Research News

 

IMAGE: FROM LEFT: THOMAS DAVIDSON AND LARS SANDMAN, LINKOPING UNIVERSITY, AND MATS BRANNSTROM, UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO: EMMA BUSK WINQUIST, CHARLOTTE PERHAMMAR AND CECILIA HEDSTRÖM

Sweden's acclaimed research on uterine transplants has taken a new step forward: into the field of health economics. Now, for the first time, there is a scientifically based estimate of how much implementing the treatment costs.

The current research is based on the nine uterine transplants from living donors carried out in 2013, under the leadership of Mats Brännström, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, and Chief Physician at Sahlgrenska University Hospital.

The transplants were performed within the scope of the world's first systematic, scientifically based study in the field. After the first birth in Gothenburg in 2014, there were a further seven births before a woman outside Sweden had a baby after a uterine transplant.

Now that the survey of costs is complete, the results have been reported with certain reservations. First, the number of cases studied is restricted to nine; second, the treatment has taken place as part of a research project, subject to the requirements this has entailed. Nonetheless, the study represents an initial indication of costs.

The researchers arrived at a total average sum per transplant, now reported in the journal Human Reproduction, of EUR 74,564 in current monetary value. This figure comprises costs relating to the recipient and donor alike.

The total includes, first, screening examinations and treatments, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), in the year preceding the transplant; second, the actual operations on the donor and recipient; and third, costs in the two months after the transplant, including sick leave.

Sick leave (25.7%) was the single largest item in the cost calculation. The other categories were postoperative inpatient care (17.8%), surgery (17.1%), preoperative examinations (15.7%), anesthesia (9.7%), medication (7.8%), postoperative testing (4.0%), and readmission to hospital (2.2%).

The total is described as relatively high, due partly to the extensive scientific requirements. In a future clinical setting, the researchers say, aggregate transplant costs would likely be lower.

Thomas Davidson, Associate Professor in the area of Health Economics and Health Technology Assessment at Linköping University, and first author of the study, puts the matter in perspective.

"In terms of priorities, this study is important because it contributes key data for deciding whether to offer uterine transplants within publicly funded health care. A cost estimate is the starting point for upcoming assessment of whether the intervention is cost-effective."

Cost-effectiveness is usually measured in terms of cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) gained -- a yardstick that combines economic aspects with longevity and quality of life.

"In assessing cost-effectiveness, we have to relate both costs and effects, preferably measured in QALYs, to those of alternative treatments," Davidson says.

Lars Sandman -- Professor of Health Care Ethics, head of the Centre for Priority Setting in Health Care at Linköping University, and the study's co-author -- adds his comments.

"There are still essential issues we want to keep investigating. One is how we should regard the effects of a uterine transplant. Should the QALY gain generated include only the benefit to the mother of getting pregnant, giving birth and being the child's parent? Or should the benefit of a child being born and living on for a number of years, adding QALYs, be included as well? It makes a big difference in terms of the cost-effectiveness of the intervention, which is an important factor in the priority-setting context."

Professor Mats Brännström, corresponding author, sums up.

"All the costs of investigation, staff, and hospital care were funded through research grants. The grand total is close to what we'd calculated, and comparable to the current cost of kidney transplantation from a living donor. In all probability, future uterine transplantation will be more cost-effective thanks to the robot-assisted surgical technique we've developed, which means shorter hospital stays and patients returning to work sooner."

###

Title: The costs of human uterus transplantation: a study based on the nine cases of the initial Swedish live donor trial, https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/deaa301

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In THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST. REVOLUTION, Shulamith Firestone cuts into the prejudice against women (and children)—amplified ...

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