Hello. I'm Colin Gavaghan, and this is my wee acre of cyber-turf.

Since 1998, I've been a lecturer in medical law and ethics at the School of Law, University of Glasgow. In 2005, I graduated with a PhD looking at the law and ethics of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis. Early in 2007, I published my first book, based largely on the arguments in the thesis; details on right of this page.

Apart from the teaching aspect (and the universally loathed marking) I write a bit and give the odd non-Uni talk. Sometimes very odd indeed.

I grew up and was 'educated' in deepest, darkest Ayrshire. The most interesting snippet about those days? My secondary school is sinking by a few millimetres every year, thereby confirming my lingering suspicion that I did indeed go to school over a Hellmouth.

As well as medical law/bioethics, I am also enthusiastic about a whole load of stuff, in no particular order: politics, food, football, wine, music, history, Football Manager, the former Yugoslavia, anarchism, artificial intelligence, CivIII, films, and science fiction. It is not unlikely that some of these will feature at some point in my Blog.

This web-page has very generously and adroitly been put together for me by my old mate Mr Lusiphur. Although the content is entirely mine, he can take a degree of responsibility for helping shape my views over (literally, and terrifyingly) decades of late-night discussions and (literally, and equally terrifyingly) gallons and gallons of coffee and wine. Respect, mate!
10.09.06 @ 08:09 PM GMT [link]

Response to madness
Here is a letter I sent to the Sunday Herald, in reply to a rather bonkers article by Patrick Reilly last week. Don’t know if they have published it – the letters appear not to be on the online version.

‘As well as projecting an entertainingly histrionic tone – who, in British politics, is really ‘trying to eradicate religion itself’? - Patrick Reilly’s analysis of the shifting relations between Scottish Labour and the Catholic Church (Sunday Herald, 20 July 2008) lacks much by way of historical context. Far from necessitating a ‘seismic’ shift, disagreements between social progressives and religious conservatives have been a periodic feature of the Labour Party almost since its inception. The Party may have famously been thought to ‘owe more to Methodism than to Marxism’, but liberal and radical views on contraception, abortion, gay rights and the role of women were always to be found in disproportionate numbers among its ranks.

As early as 1927, the Party Conference saw a schism over the prospect of state-funded contraception, and witnessed the now familiar sight of dire forecasts of Catholics defecting from the Party. Similar scuffles between progress and reaction have been a regular feature in the relations between Church and Party ever since. One of the more recent involved an attempt in 1996 by the late Cardinal Thomas Winning to make Tony Blair’s personal views on abortion an election issue. Throughout all of this, Scotland’s Catholic voters remained resolutely Labour, unswayed by the thinly disguised campaigning from the pulpit.

If a new schism has opened between the Party and the Church in recent times, it has opened on other ground. The traditional shared concern with poverty and equality has been strained to breaking point by New Labour’s apparent indifference or impotence in the face of the widening gap between the chronically poor and obscenely rich. But the Church leadership’s on-going obsession with sexual and reproductive morality, over all other moral concerns, has added to the strain. ( I might add that an organisation that would deny contraception to even the most overburdened and hard-pressed of families has always had, at best, a mixed record on helping the poor.)

Labour lost Glasgow East almost certainly because Labour was seen as having no answers to the problems of chronic poor health and a desperate life expectancy, of rising utility bills and rents, and about personal safety. It did not lose a referendum on Gordon Brown’s views about cytoplasmic hybrids or same-sex civil partnerships, however much it may suit the agenda of conservative religious leaders and their supporters to portray things this way.’

07.27.08 @ 10:23 AM GMT [link] [No Comments]

The truth about privacy
The Max Mosley privacy decision is one to be celebrated, not just as a kick in the teeth for Murdoch’s empire of hypocrites, but for anyone concerned that what consenting adults do in their bedrooms are not the proper business of the gutter press.

The only down side of the verdict has been having to read the usual trash from Colin Myler, blaming it all on crafty europeans sneaking in privacy laws ‘by the back door.’ Here’s a more accurate picture.
In 1997, the family of Gordon Kaye - a British actor famous for a corny sitcom called ‘Allo ‘Allo - tried to sue The Sunday Sport. Kaye had been involved in a serious accident that had left him in a coma. A photographer working for the Sport found his way into Kaye’s hospital room and photographed him in his unconscious state, being artifically fed, for the titillation of the people who read that most trashy of rags.

The judge in that case had to tell the family, with great regret, that they couldn’t win because there was no such thing as a right to privacy in English law. Come 1998, the Labour government chose to fulfil their election pledge by introducing the Human Rights Act. Contra the repeated f*cking lies of the f*cking scumbag liars at the NotW, this was not a question of a ‘‘creeping back-door privacy law … emanating from Europe’, but of a law applied by British courts after being introduced by a democratically elected British government. The Act mostly regulates relations between citizens and the state, but it also has a degree of ‘horizontal application’. Specifically in this case, it allowed (or maybe obliged) judges to recognise a right of privacy, not just against snooping state agencies, but against other individuals.

Obviousy, the gutter press hate this, because it means they can no longer sneak into the hospital rooms of comatose, critically ill people and splash their pictures all over their papers. Most decent human beings, it may be assumed, are quite pleased about this state of affairs.
So well done Max Mosley, well done Justice Eady, well done the ‘professionals’ who had the guts to testify, and well done Labour for introducing the HRA (and god knows I get little enough opportunity to say the last in recent times!). When the parasitic pond-slime of our gutter press are so p*ssed off about something, it’s a pretty good bet the rest of us should be cheering about it.

07.27.08 @ 10:18 AM GMT [link]

Deafness debate
On 9th April I took part in a debate on the new Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. This was organised by the Progress Educational Trust, and took place at Techniquest in Cardiff. It was a lively event, and I met some very interesting people (Anna Middleton, Sandy Starr and Ailsa Taylor in particular). Despite my best efforts stamping around outside the concert hall, though, I just could not find that hidden entrance to the Torchwood Institute.

Aaanyway, a transcript of the talks is available here. There are a few parts that got lost in transcription - I really didn't claim I could speak slowly in six or seven languages, but that I understood the imperative 'speak slowly'. Which is just about true. Generally, though, it's pretty faithful to what I remember saying.

The same morning, Anna and I gave an interview to Radio Wales, a transcript of which is available here. Safe to say, first thing in the morning is not my natural habitat, but I seem to have at least bordered on coherence.




04.24.08 @ 01:32 PM GMT [link] [No Comments]

Review: other side of the coin
My turn to be on the other side of the review fence this time; my review of McLachlan and Swales' From the womb to the tomb has just been published in Variant mag (pdf).

03.06.08 @ 02:28 PM GMT [link] [No Comments]

Review
The first review of Defending the Genetic Supermarket has appeared, in Medical Law Review. It's by Dr Gardar Arnason and I'm chuffed to say it's pretty damn favourable. (Would I be mentioning it here otherwise, you may reasonably wonder.) I've been kicking myself black and blue over some of the really obvious mistakes he's picked up, but I can't really complain about a review that concludes with:

‘The wide range of issues and arguments considered, clarity of discussion, and sharp analysis makes Defending the Genetic Supermarket an excellent introduction to the issues, with plenty of references for further reading. It is a brilliant contribution to the debates about ethical and policy issues in PGD, tissue typing and embryo selection. It should be required reading for anyone concerned with ethical and policy issues in PGD.’

Aw, shucks ...


02.11.08 @ 12:35 PM GMT [link] [2 Comments]

2008
Predictably, 2008 has been a bit slower out of the blocks than its predecessor; there be no books coming out at this point, and no other publications either. I did write a chapter on end of life issues for Tolley's 'Law and the Older Client', which should be out soon, and Sandy informs me that the final ms for 'Bioethics Through film' has been submitted, so with a bit of luck, there will be some things creeping into print in due course. But not yet.

The real excitement for '08, though, will hopefully be on the talk/conference circuit. In April, I've been invited to give a talk at the Tilburg Institute of Science and Technology. This came out of a very fruitful - and enjoyable - meeting with Han Somsen, with whom I look forward to meeting up again, and setting the world (and Scottish and Dutch football) to rights over a few pints.

In May, I'm giving a paper to the Institute of Psychiatry at KCL. And at the end of July - funding permitting - I'll be off to Recife, Brazil for the Medical Law Congress, and to meet up with another old pal, Eduardo Dantas. The rest of the year looks increasingly like a decent into environmentally irresponsible madness, with possible trips to Beijing and Chicago in the offing. Yup, I'm looking at another carbon footprint of sasquatch proportions.
01.22.08 @ 11:05 AM GMT [link]