Communication Scenario 10

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The orbitofrontal cortex is so-called, because it’s the area of prefrontal cortex near the orbits of the eye.

This finding has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience: : G. Sescousse, J. Redouté, J-C Dreher (2010) The architecture of reward value coding in the orbitofrontal cortex. J Neurosci, 30 (39)

The paper is available here.

Guillaume Sescousse, Jérôme Redouté, and Jean-Claude Dreher. The Architecture of Reward Value Coding in the Human Orbitofrontal Cortex. J.Neurosci. 2010 30: 13095-13104; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3501-10.2010

There could be a dissociation between so-called “primary” rewards, such as food or sex, which satisfy basic vital needs and have an innate value, and more “higher order” rewards such as money or power, which are not essential for survival and whose value is assessed by association with primary rewards. I note the paper calls them “secondary” not “higher order”, but actually I feel that, as there is such a complex inter-relationship between different “secondary” rewards, “higher order” is a safer term.

To verify these hypotheses, Jean-Claude Dreher and Guillaume Sescousse conducted an original experiment in the form of a game that rewarded 18 volunteers with money or erotic images, while their cerebral activity was monitored using an fMRI functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The experiment showed that the rewards are indeed evaluated in partially shared cerebral regions, namely the ventral striatum, insula, mesencephalon and anterior cingulate cortex.

The researchers have also confirmed that there appears to be a dissociation between primary and secondary rewards in the orbitofrontal cortex. Its posterior region (more primitive) is specifically stimulated by erotic images (a primary reward), while its anterior region (which is more recent in man) is activated by monetary gain (a secondary reward). The more abstract and complex the reward, the more its representation stimulates the anterior regions of the orbitofrontal cortex.

The results are interesting because, arguably, they  provide the first evidence of a dissociation in the brain between two types of reward, suggesting the existence of distinct regions corresponding to various gratifications.  Dreher and Sescousse themselves propose that this research could lead to a better understanding of certain psychiatric disorders, including gambling addiction.

However, the most striking observation for me was the fact I have long felt that the brain reward systems go badly awry in early behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia. It has long been a mystery why such patients suddenly develop an otherwise predilection appetite for sweet foods and drinks (including chocolate and Crest lemonade), and why a minority of patients become overtly hypersexual and disinhibition.

I provided detailed descriptions of patients of Prof John Hodges at Cambridge in my paper in Brain from 1999, which has become a classic in its own right, with almost 250 international citations.  It is likely that pathology in the orbitofrontal cortex is one of the earliest hallmarks of this condition, a finding that has been well embraced in the intervening decade.

I therefore welcome enormously this research contribution by , and look forward to a similar fMRI study in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia.

Dr Shibley Rahman, PhD FRSA LLB(Hons)

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The website is located here: http://www.lawandmedicine.org.uk

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What is the difference between a right and a responsibility, and does the difference matter in healthcare policy?

The advert in Gumtree read as follows.

“Law and Medicine” is a brand new, innovative project designed to encourage interest in the medical sciences, and their relevance to law and society.

Currently, the “Law and Medicine” project is looking for students at all levels wishing to contribute to a serious blog about news in law and medicine, and to develop its potential. The blog has a special emphasis occasionally on the legal and ethical issues arising from modern medical research.

This project will be most suitable for A level students who are currently studying law and wishing to study law at university, university students applying for training posts in the law, students of the Graduate Diploma in Law, Legal Practice Course or Bar Vocational Course, Ph.D. students in medical law, and finally LL.M. students in medical law and ethics. Such experience is valued enormously by people reviewing CVs.

The blog is already established. We are hoping that contributors might wish to contribute in particular articles on

Intellectual property
Information technology
Electronic evidence
End of life issues
Consent
Mental health care
International public health
Forensic law and psychiatry
Safety and law in biotechnology
New technologies

We should like to emphasise that no previous experience is required, and, if anything, this job might suit a person with a passion for conveying complicated ideas in a simple manner, whatever the field.

The ideal candidate should be:

* passionate about English (and, ideally, international) law
* have good writing skills
* should be enthusiastic about public engagement in the law and medical science
* prepared to write material on ad hoc material, to reflect trends in the law reports and in medical research

Although this is supposed to be a community project which would involve unpaid volunteers, it is hoped that some monies will become available for those who can show a commitment to writing for the blog with a high standard.

Informal enquiries should be made in the first instance to the Director of Scientific Education, Law and Medicine Limited (management@lawandmedicine.co.uk) through e-mail, or using the reply facility here.

No CV / photo / portfolio / references required.

The “cloud” can be an external, public cloud such as Facebook or Hotmail, or an internal, private cloud within one organisation. The phenomenon is rapidly growing both for individuals and amongst commercial entities. The increasing prominence of cloud computing has sprung from technological developments that have enabled widespread access to large bandwidth and servers s able to store huge amounts of information in highly secure data centres, allowing suppliers to provide services to multiple users from a single server. The main stakeholders are the potential suppliers (e.g. Amazon or Google), customers (e.g. small or medium enterprises or individuals), and the legal community (including corporate law). If successful, both the customers and the suppliers stand to make a lot of money, and customers benefit principally from greater flexibility and improved costs. The legal threats predominantly come from whether there is any breach of contract (e.g. the hardware or the software compoentns computing facility itself go wrong), there is a breach of privacy or security.

In the wake of the economic downturn, companies have focused on such technology to reduce the impact of falling sales, revenues and profit margins. Cloud computing users indeed potentially can avoid capital expenditure on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they use, with little or no upfront cost. In general, users can terminate the contract at any time (thereby avoiding return on investment risk and uncertainty), and the services are often covered by service level agreements (SLAs) with financial penalties.

However, there is currently little regulation specific to cloud computing.  There are undoubtedly enormous privacy issues. Data protection regulation will be relevant where the services are used to handle personal data. Where a business is located in the UK, it will be subject to the Data Protection Act 1998, when handling personal data.  As a result, if that business decides to use cloud computing, it will need to ensure that the cloud computing services comply with the Act.  Furthermore, there are undoubtedly considerable security issues. For example, when negotiating the contract for cloud computing services, customers are usually advised to seek as much information as possible about the likely third parties that may potentially access the data.  The nature of cloud computing indeed means that many third parties may access the data across a number of jurisdictions.

I feel that this topic is still exciting, as customers who are businesses, of whatever size may seek commercial legal advice, for a number of reasons: the suitability of cloud computing according to their business plan, raising finance, corporate restructuring, intellectual property (“IP”) issues (such as data protection and privacy). Suppliers will need advice for themselves on similar issues, particularly in further IP issues (such as the suitability of their work as IP rights such as patenting of computing or trademarking). This topic is still very young.

Generally, this episode comes under various branches of law, including administrative law, toxic tort law, evidence and criminal and maritime law. There is no real history on the law of oil-tankers, which have only really existed since the Second World War. The deep oil spill is therefore a very modern phenomenon.

On 20 April 2010, 
the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, with 11 workers killed. The rig was licensed to BP, drilling for the oil giant’s Macondo project at a depth of 5,000 feet. The 115 remaining workers evacuated from rig. On 22 April 2010, Deepwater Horizon, worth in excess of $560m, collapsed into the sea – producing a 5-mile long oil slick.

Almost from the outset, BP acknowledged that it was the “responsible party” (under oath) that it would be required under the law to pay for the cleanup initially. In early congressional testimony, though, company officials implied that other companies were to blame for the explosion (such as TransOcean, perhaps, the sub-contractor who produced the pressure detector in the first place). The natural parties include the wildlife, but the other human parties include the BP workers, fishermen, tourist industry workers, seafood processors, to name but a few.

The relevant law The US Oil Pollution Act [1990] (“OPA”) statute is very clear, and requires a company which the U.S. Coast Guard says is responsible for a spill to pay as much as $1 billion to clean it and repair natural resource damage and as much as $75 million to compensate victims for lost income. Hundreds of human spill victims utilising OPA, the result of the Exxon Valdez tanker spill in Alaska 21 years ago, and developments in maritime law, have prompted lawyers to question how far protections extend and how long victims must wait to receive compensation. Other US statutory acts may be offended, such as the clean water legislation.

Fisheries and wetlands have been impacted by the oil spill, but the extent of this is uncertain. There has then be consequential damage to the various industries such as fishing, seafood industry and tourism. One of the major problems is that we do not know the limit to the extent of the leak (cf Exxon), and current estimates are wildly fluctuating. However, there could be further loss, but it would be for a court to decide whether the damage is too remote. For example, there has a higher incidence of alcoholism and suicide attempts around the vicinity of the Exxon disaster.

There are practical time-limits to making a claim. Furthermore, it’s difficult to quantify the damage which has been done – which includes human death and damage to wildlife ecosystems (and, specifically, the impact on the foodchain). Various laws could help limit BP’s liability for this disaster – for example, there could in theory some limitation on liability through an antiquated ‘Ship Owners’ Act’ in the US, based on the tonnage on the maritime vehicle. So far, Transocean, which owns the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, already has asked a judge to limit claims against it to $27 million under an 1851 maritime law limiting liability. As a result, a judge suspended more than 100 claims against Transocean, which leased the rig to BP, until the issue is decided.

The past record of BP would clearly be relevant in ensuing legal issues. In 2005, 15 BP employees were killed and 170 were injured in an explosion at a refinery in Texas; the following year its pipelines in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, ruptured because of corrosion and spilled more than 200,000 gallons of oil. In 2007, the company pleaded guilty in both cases and agreed to pay $70 million in penalties. When weighing whether to file criminal charges in connection with the Gulf spill, prosecutors will look at BP’s past violations and whether it has cooperated with the government, and will size up the final environmental and economic toll.

The hard reality is that the clean-up and economic damages could in fact cost BP billions of dollars. The company is expected to try to protect its own legal rights and corporate image — and it has a duty to its shareholders to do so. In recent weeks, however, this stance has run counter to demands that the company be more forthcoming about what caused the spill, how much oil is spewing out and how to clean it up. BP has told the US Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) that it will use less Corexit but will continue to use it at the seafloor because alternatives are not readily available. Some scientists have warned that dispersants used in large quantities at that depth could make the spill worse; the impact of these dispersants on marine life is indeed uncertain, so only the best estimates unfortunately can be made. BP is currently being actively sued on behalf of Gulf Coast commercial fishermen and other businesses on public nuisance grounds. Commercial fishermen can sue for loss of profits. Furthermore, there has been damage also to personal fishing, as well as the tourism industries.

BP and its contractors could pay more than that if the federal government’s investigation finds negligence, deliberate (knowing) misconduct (much harder to prove), or violations of federal regulations. The federal government also could file criminal charges based on several federal environment-related laws, and have the powers to insist on clean-up expenses and natural resource damages. These are hard to quantify (what is the cost or price of a bird or fish?).

So is there a financial cap on liability? There is a ‘limitation of liability’ act. These caps can be broken. Under OPA, the threshold for breaking the cap is one of the lowest in the world. For example, if anyone with which BP is associated is grossly negligent then BP would lose the cap. It is not customary for oil companies to ‘hide behind the cap’, not least because they would get very adverse publicity if they tried to do so. The highest estimate of loss of market value is put at $10bn, but the quantification of their initial decrease in shares is hard to produce. Even worse, there is nothing known about the long-term effects, especially in terms of ecological damage. There is a limited amount of information on this we can extrapolate information from the Exxon disaster regarding the final extent of environmental damage, apparently. And finally there could be claims made against BP on the basis of the tragic eleven deaths. This might come under the general rubric of ‘corporate manslaughter’.

It would be in the interests of the “responsible party” to try to mitigate the damage, when it comes to shelling out money as damages to the claimants. BP has offered themselves as the responsible party, but clearly wish to bring others including TransOcean into the picture at some later date. Frustratingly for BP, numerous efforts have so far failed; efforts to activate the well’s blowout preventer fail (25 April), the ‘top hat’ failed on 7 May, and indeed ‘top kill’ failed on 30 May. On 7 June,
BP announced that total clean-up costs have now reached $1.25 bn, and, on 11 June, the US Geological Survey doubles its estimate of the oil spill, announcing that as many as 40,000 barrels (1.68m gallons) of oil a day may have been spewing from the ruptured oil well before BP fitted a cap. A more permanent solution, by contrast, is the rebuilding of barrier islands off the Gulf Coast. Such a venture is considerably more expensive and time consuming, but it would not only help to alleviate the ill effects of the oil spill. Barrier islands, unlike sand berms, are hardier and would be more likely to survive a catastrophic natural disaster, such as a hurricane. Moreover, they would represent a concerted effort to restore the ecological health of Louisiana’s marsh and wetland environment, rather than a quick fix. Considering how much the environment of Louisiana has suffered in recent years, it is only appropriate that any major alterations should be long term and restorative, arguably. Also, scientists and legal experts said that BP’s decision to keep using Corexit, a chemical dispersant that the EPA says may be toxic to marine life, helps the company appear to be fighting the slick. This is, of course, the basis of ‘mitigation’. However, it also may hide how much oil is being spilled, which could help BP in court. BP clearly want to limit the amount of oil coming to shore; this is the public image of the oil slick. Other issues The company’s decisions, however, also are at odds with the kinder, gentler image that BP has tried to cultivate since a major corporate rebranding in 2000. The $200 million PR campaign claimed that the company was going “Beyond Petroleum” to investing in alternative energy, while it remained one of the world’s largest crude oil producers. BP has now been downgraded by ratings agency Fitch, whose estimates of the clean-up bill double to a maximum of $6 bn.

The development of this case, and its impact on human life and the rest of the environment will be very intriguing.

[None of the facts here should be relied on by any reader and should be externally verified.]