additional funding by mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. and the corporation for public broadcasting. welcome. i'm bob abernethy. it's good to have you with us. as the crisis in egypt continued to unfold this week, many questions have emerged about the religious implications, what role will religion play in a new government? and in particular, what role will the muslim brotherhood play? how will the new situation in egypt affect the rest of the middle east, including israel and the peace process? and how will egypt's christian minority fare? we explore all this with qamar-ul huda, a senior program officer at the u.s. institute of peace. he's a consultant in many parts of the middle east on conflict resolution. dr. huda, welcome. >> thank you. >> in the demonstrations, in the streets, there wasn't much evidence of a religious influence. it seemed pretty secular but lots of people expect that in a new government there will be strong religious representation. is that fair to say? >> that's a fair assessment. we know that the mass protests in egypt is a mass public, crossing all ideologies, this is a national issue for egypt and it's not contained to any one group. the new government or the transitional government that will be formed in the near future, i think the religious voices or the religious parties will be at the table, but will not dominate the party. >> now there's a lot of fear around, as you know and have read, about the muslim brotherhood. what it is, what it means, what its place might be in a new government and what the implications of that are. >> well, the muslim brotherhood is almost seven decades old. it's basically a group that reacted to a secular nationalist movement in egypt. it's right now it's been regulated to do mainly social welfare and social services. >> is it, is it what you would call a radical islamic group? >> i think there are fringes of the brotherhood that had radical groups and voices. they've been, i think, mostly eliminated under mubarak in the '90s. right now it's a very small group that's mismanaged but also has very little influence as we speak today. >> and in a new government, whatever the name of it, you would expect there to be religious representation. and what does that mean? what does that imply? >> i think that, what that means, is that the religious representatives will try to push for more islamic values in the government, perhaps more islamic teachings and ethics in schools and perhaps have law to represent more islamic values but i don't think they'll have any real, any real influence in the beginning because the concern is now constitutional reform and unemployment. >> and what about the religious minorities, especially the christians, the copts? there are 10 million about? >> yes. >> what would the outlook for them? >> well at this time, we know they are participating with the protests. they are looking for a change in egypt. i think, right now, they are most likely positioned to take part in the government, and we're hoping, and many people are hoping there will be a more pluralistic government that will embrace the christian cops. >> they might even have a place in the government? >> i think they will. >> well, what about israel and the peace process between israel and the palestinians? what are the implications of that, whoever makes up the government, the new government in egypt? >> yes, i think this is the big question and the big concern for many of the western thinkers and analysts. what will happen to the treaty signed with israel? what is the security risk for egypt? but, for what it seems like, that right now, the government, the transitional government wil international treaties that it signed with israel. there's no indication that radical islam will come to the forefront and there's no indication that it will abdicate with current treaties. >> and what about between egypt and the u.s.? >> well, it's looking like on the streets, there's some discontent with western forces and american influence in terms of its delay in moving the regime out. but i think egyptians are very positive with their alliances with the west ad i think they will continue with those alliances. >> dr. qamar-ul huda from the u.s. institute of peace. thank you. >> thank you for having me. president obama said he's praying that "a better day will dawn" over egypt. at the annual national prayer breakfast in washington thursday, the president said he seeks god's help and guidance every day. in unusually personal remarks, obama said with his policies, he tries to follow the biblical command to serve "the least of these." he said his christian faith has sustained him since becoming president. >> the more so when michelle and i hear our faith questioned from time to time. we are reminded that ultimately, what matters is not what other people say about us, about whether we are true to our conscience and true to our god." in the tibetan buddhist community around the world, there was deep concern this week after authorities in india raided the monastery of a top spiritual leader. thousands of buddhists have been rallying in support of the 25-year-old karmapa lama, who is the third highest-ranking leader of tibetan buddhism. the karmapa has been living in dharmsala, india, since a dramatic escape from china in 2000. this week, indian authorities entered his monastery and seized more than a million dollars in cash. they also questioned the karmapa and his aides. the monastery says the money came from donations, but police are still investigating its source. the dalai lama has expressed his support for the karmapa. >> the group that represents catholic hospitals in the u.s. affirmed this week that catholic bishops have authority over doctors when it comes to questions of medical morality in hospitals. the statement from the catholic health association comes after the bishop of phoenix stripped a local hospital of its catholic designation because a doctor there had performed an abortion. the association supported the doctor's decision, saying the hospital had followed ethical guidelines by saving the mother's life. but, in a new statement, the group acknowledged that catholic bishops should have the final word on how to interpret those guidelines. we have a story today about a new kind of treatment for prostate cancer that costs about $100,000 dollars and could extend the life of a patient for about four months, maybe more. is it worth the price for a little more time? who should decide who gets it, and who pays the bill? bob faw reports. >> reporter: from his backyard dock, setting seems idyllic. with his devoted wife of 47 years, retired air force colonel jim horney should be enjoying the golden years. >> you know, you can look at me and say, golly that guy looks good for 70. but there's a worm in the apple. >> reporter: the "worm" is prostate cancer. jim's doctor first diagnosed it as an aggressive cancer eight years ago. >> i said, how long can i expect to live with this serious prostate cancer? her reply was, on average, about 2 1/2 years. this was in 2002. so 2 1/2 years, i am obviously well past my expirization, if you will. >> jim was kept alive during the past eight years by having his prostate removed and undergoing chemotherapy and radiation. but now the cancer has spread throughout his body. desperate, this fall he started a revolutionary new provenge. did you trar as a miracle drug? >> absolutely, absolutely did because i was tired, i was fatigued, i had no future looking at what i was doing now except a slow deterioration of >> provenge is the first so-called cancer vaccine-not a pill mass-produced in a factory, but an individual treatment. the patient's blood cells are first drawn, exposed in a lab to a protein which mimics prostate cancer, then put back in the patient's body. super charged if you will, to stimulate the patient's immune system to fight prostate cancer. >> the idea of having the body's own defenses revved up against this foreign invader is quite novel. it had never been applied to humans in a satisfactory and successful way, and this was, in that sense, a big breakthrough. >> approved last year to treat men with incurable prostate cancer, provenge extends life for many patients by roughly four months. >> that's the average. i'm well on to beating the averages. and i will work at beating the averages. it is a miracle drug, and so yeah, i have great expectations for this. huge expectations. will it? we'll see. >> reporter: but the price tag for this so-called miracle drug on average $ 93,000. jim horney's bill, 110,000. >> $110,000. my goodness gracious! how do you, how do you work with something like that? >> jim horney had to take out a $22,000 loan to pay for the first treatment while he waits to see if medicare foots the entire bill. >> they do have me over a barrel, and if push comes to shove i will probably suck this up. >> urologist-oncologist dr. paul schellhammer plans to use provenge one day to fight his own prostate cancer. he has recommended it to some of his patients knowing how some will struggle with the decision. >> for the person for whom it becomes a major hardship - i.e., do i mortgage my home, do my kids not go to college - i think that becomes an ethically based decision as to how important is life? most men in this situation have lived 60, 70 years, and how important is another one, two, three years or two, three, four months? >> yeah, it's not a long time. but, you know, when you're fighting for your life, four months, you know, is just four months more to be with your family, to be with your wife and to enjoy life. >> 62-year-old engineer bill mcchooski's insurance company is paying for his provenge. >> my father had prostate cancer. this stuff was not available to him. i feel lucky to be living at a time when new treatments are being developed, when there is hope for the future. >> reporter: and while the price is high, says mccloskey, in the long run it may prove anything but. >> this opens up a whole brand- new type of treatment and hope for cancer patients where you're utilizing the body's own immune system to fight the disease. this is not the end, this is just the beginning. >> dr. schellhammer says provenge has almost no side effects and costs about as much as chemotherapy. still, he is troubled by the skyrocketing cost of many cancer treatments. >> once the fda approves a drug, the pharmaceutical company or the biotech company then has carte blanche in establishing the price. i think there's been a disconnect between what it costs to develop, produce, and bring to market versus what it eventually translates into with regard to either a windfall or a fair profit. >> dendreon, the developer of provenge, says the price is fair for this revolutionary procedure, which it says took 15 years to perfect at a cost of over $1 billion. we're entitled, says the company, to a return on that investment. but as the cost of new cancer treatments continues to escalate, ethicists are asking how do you put a price tag on human life? and in a society with limited resources and virtually unlimited medical needs, who decides who will get that expensive treatment and who doesn't? if we think it's worth the money, right, do we find a way to squeeze it out of the allocation we've got from health care now? do we find places where we want to squeeze it out from something else? do we want to attach a higher value to extending the last few months of a person's life than we would to any other random four months over the course of a lifespan? >> ultimately, and unfortunately, says ethicist dr. ruth faden, director of the johns hopkins berman institute of bioethics, the basic question comes down to cost and benefit. >> it would be really nice in we could come up with a structure in which the price of the drug is attached to its value and we had a way of agreeing what that value was. >> reporter: there is no such mechanism. >> not yet. >> reporter: in fact, now say medical practitioners, there is no such mechanism. who gets provenge and who doesn't comes down to a basic proposition. the bottom line is economics. >> currently, that is the case. >> reporter: as to who gets the drug? >> yes. we have many more patients than the supply could provide, but many of them say, "i just cannot afford it, and that's not in my realm of possibility." so they are screened out by that fact. >> reporter: let's be candid here. they are screened out by economics. >> oh, absolutely. >> reporter: for some, however, economic considerations are secondary. getting that extra four months of life -- maybe more -- is priceless. >> my husband's worth it. if it means selling our house so be it. he's more important to me. >> reporter: what's his life really worth? can you put a price tag on life? >> no, certainly not. no, no. >> it is, then, an ongoing debate over a medical treatment which is new-and a problem which isn't. >> even before we get the provenges, we have lots of cancer patients in this country who can't afford their cancer medications as it is. we've got a messy health care system where we haven't figured out what we think constitutes good value for our money. it's that striking a balance -- easy to say, almost impossible to achieve so far. >> reporter: until that balance is reached, for bill, who recently completed his third and final treatment of provenge, and jim horney, still waiting to see how provenge affects his cancer, there will be both hope and anxiety. for "religion and ethics newsweekly," this is bob faw poquoson, virginia. for people interested in helping the world's very poor get out of poverty, micro-lending has been a very promising development. in india, there have been problems with these small loans, as we reported last week. but fred de sam lazaro found a woman in pakistan, roshaneh zafar, who is changing lives by making micro-lending work. >> i think poverty is definitely an issue that we need to resolve, and second is education. >> reporter: 15 years ago, roshaneh zafar began trying to understand and attack the roots of pakistan's poverty. it's been aggravated in recent years by civil unrest, religious militancy, and natural disasters. yet zafar says she's seen progress in some places, like this neighborhood in her native lahore. >> so you'll see a little slightly better infrastructure. you'll see that their homes have improved over the years. you may not see the same poverty that we saw over a decade ago. >> reporter: and you may not see any women, least outdoors. that's not uncommon in a conservative muslim society. but zafar says it creates the mistaken impression that women don't contribute to economic activity. so in 1995 she started a nonprofit organization called kashf or "revelation." it makes small-business loans to women to increase the impact and visibility of their work. >> the women businesses are home-based businesses. >> reporter: so behind a lot of these storefronts are homes and families run by women, and those are the targets of your loan program. >> absolutely. there's a whole, you know, back end that's being run by women and managed by women, and that's really the target. >> in the narrow by-ways and alleys of this ancient city are thousands of small family businesses financed with loans from kashf. the group now has 150 branches across pakistan and has loaned the equivalent of $200 million so far to more than 300,000 women. she took us to visit ruquia boota, who borrowed about $120 eight years and grew her business in embroidered textiles with the help of two more loans. she now employs her two daughters and occasionally up to 10 other women from the neighborhood. >> how do you know what is selling and how much material to buy? we get orders and then buy accordingly, and we also know what the trends are. >> where do you get your materials from? >> the questions are more than pleasant conversation. loan officers. kashf pay close attention to the affairs of borrowers. the relationship begins early with financial education. >> i'm going to show you this chart. it has four kinds of expenses: necessary, unnecessary, emergency, and wish list. >> reporter: prospective borrowers get basic tips on how to budget their expenses and rank their priorities. >> where would you put the cell phone? >> kashf gets most of its fund by borrowing from commercial and national banks, and it disperses loans, an average of $150 each, after rigorous evaluation, and every day young loan officers, most of them female, fan out to visit clients like sobia saeed. she has steadily expanded her salon business with three loans. >> i've been doing these kids' hair today. one more left to do. how much do you charge for each? thirty rupees. >> that's about 40 u.s. cents. this 27-year-old entrepreneur is doing a lot better than before, but like most borrowers is hardly well off. it's one reason zafar says her group makes sure that loan proceeds are put to their intended business purpose, not to household or even emergency use. >> if the money is misutilized -- let's say they spent half of it to fix the roof in the house -- then the loan officer goes and informs the branch manager, and we tag that loan, and we will then monitor it. 97% of our loans are spend on the businesses that were agreed on, 3% may be used on other -- may be misutilized. >> the vigilance comes at a time when microfinance has become a highly competitive business in several countries -- often a for-profit business. in india, where it became a multi-billion-dollar industry, an epidemic of nonperforming loans caused a near standstill in lending, hurting many deserving clients, zafar says. >> as competition is increasing, the microfinance institutions are targeting the same client. so one client may have two to three or four loans, and what that leads is to pyramiding and over-indebtedness, and ultimately the client is stuck with debt and can't repay it back. the idea is really to add value to the clients' lives. it's not to force the credit on them. >> the idea of giving small loans to poor women was popularized by bangladesh's nobel prize-winning and nonprofit grameen bank. a chance meeting with its founder, muhammad yunus, inspired zafar to leave her job as a world bank economist and start a similar social enterprise in pakistan. zafar says microfinance is a particularly good fit in pakistan, officially an islamic republic, since it complies with sharia law, which has strict rules on lending. >> there's a lot of compatibility between the notion of islamic finance and microfinance. that's how i see it, very simply. the first is you only do productive lending. in islamic finance you cannot do consumer lending, for example. similarly, in microfinance we are not really in the business of consumer lending. the second thing is you support the business itself, so you have to do a very detailed analysis of returns from the business. >> you're sharing the risk. >> you're sharing the risk. >> they also must share the high administrative costs. borrowers pay an effective interest rate of about 35%. zafar says it's the only way to sustain the model, because kashf has to pay between 14 and 16% on the money it borrows to make loans. from clients like sadhiya aijaz, there are no complaints. she and her husband, mohammed, worked for years cutting metal manually into short strips to be bent into chain links. their loan from kashf has brought them machines and a much improved standard of living for this couple and their five daughters. >> we're able to produce a lot more now, and the work is much easier. previously life was very tough, but now with money coming in life has become much easier. we can send our children to be educated, give them clothes, books, food. i want my children to become officers, to be educated