Behavioral Ecology Blog

Unless you are the FDA that is… A nice summary about why the FDA is wrong can be found over at 3quarksdaily

I gave blood recently, and the barrage of questions asked of all donors reminded me that I’d been meaning to write this article since June of last year. At that time, Art Caplan wrote that it’s time to let gay men donate blood, but he did not present much solid evidence for that position. As it happens, we can be pretty sure he is in command of considerable evidence, having served as Chair of the HHS Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability for four years, but the article was presumably written as an exercise in persuasion and contained just enough information to make me curious.

In trying to decide for myself whether Caplan is right, I found myself in something approaching the position in which I imagine legislators must regularly find themselves: I was trying to find answers to policy questions (”should gay men be accepted as blood donors?”), without being able to rely on a personal background in the relevant science. Policy decisions have to be made, but science will rarely give you a hard-and-fast answer even to those questions on which it has something to offer — and it becomes important to identify which questions those are, and which are not scientific questions at all.