A story that has had a little airtime on the news over the last 24 hours or so concerns requests by US officials that details of research into a bird flu variant be held back from publication on the grounds that it might be of use to terrorists: The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity recommended […]
Latest articles
A Conscience Clause with Claws
There’s a flurry of papers on conscientious objection in the latest JME: Giles Birchley argues, taking his cue from Arendt, that conscientious objection has a place in medicine here; Sophie Strickland’s paper on medical students’ attitude to conscientious objection (which I mentioned in July) is here; and Morten Magelssen wonders when conscientious objection should be accepted here. […]
A Philosopher Writes on her own Infertility
Over at Feminist Philosophers, there’s a great little series of posts by an anonymous female philosopher about her experience of becoming infertile. It’s well worth a read: part 1 is here; part 2 here; and part 3 here. I’m going to take the liberty of reproducing the penultimate paragraph: My partner and I are a […]
Competition!
Alex Calladine has asked me to publicise this – and I’m only too happy to oblige: SYBHEL Short Story Competition Synthetic Biology & Human Health: Myths, Fables & Synthetic Futures Calling all writers, film makers, animators and artists – do you have a story to tell about the impact synthetic biology may have on future […]
Smoking in Cars and the BMA: The Counterwheeze
You can tell libertarians from the sound they make: it’s the faint rattle of a tiny intellect untethered in an otherwise empty mind. Cheap and all-too-easy insults aside, though, I’d been wondering how long it’d be, in the wake of the BMA’s recommendation that smoking be banned from cars, before we got a response from […]
What can we Learn from “The Exorcist”?
When John Sentamu stood up in the House of Lords a couple of weeks ago and spoke about the need for the NHS to concern itself with “spiritual” needs – and illustrated his claim with an anecdote about something resembling an exorcism – the response from a lot of the blogosphere was, at its friendliest, one […]
Personhood in Mississippi
Phew, I thought, when I heard that Measure 26, the proposal to redefine “personhood” to cover the unborn, had been thrown out by the electorate of Mississippi. To catch up: the prosaically-named piece of legislation would have amend[ed] the Mississippi Constitution to define the word “person” or “persons”, as those terms are used in Article III of […]
Discovering Consciousness in the “Permanently Unconscious”: What Should We Do?
Comment on “Bedside detection of awareness in the vegetative state: a cohort study” by Damian Cruse, Srivas Chennu, Camille Chatelle, Tristan A Bekinschtein, Davinia Fernández-Espejo, John D Pickard, Steven Laureys, Adrian M Owen Published in The Lancet, online Nov 10. Cruse and colleagues founds evidence of some kind of consciousness in 3 out of 16 […]
Following on from Last Week’s Post…
… I can’t resist this, from SMBC: Except that I’d want to insert the word “not” before the antepenultimate word. […]
C-Sections on Demand? Not Quite…
Stephen Latham has picked up a lead about NICE guidelines on the provision of caesarian sections: An update of a new guidance document being developed by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellenct (“NICE”) would permit caesarian section on maternal request, even when there are no medical indications for the procedure. […] The new […]