… read this from Current Oncology – “Pereira’s Attack on Legalizing Euthanasia or Assisted Suicide: Smoke and Mirrors” – if you haven’t already. (via the Bioethics International FB group… and a million others.) […]
Category: In the Journals
IVF and Birth Defects: Is there a Moral Problem?
It was reported a couple of weeks ago that researchers had found a link between certain forms of assisted conception and an increased risk of birth defects. The paper, published in the NEJM, suggested that ICSI (intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection) correlated with defets in just about 10% of births. The base rate is about 5.8%, rising […]
A Very Small Amount of Relevance
Some very strange papers have just appeared in Bioethics regarding homeopathy. Not so long ago, the journal published a paper by Kevin Smith that advanced the claim that homeopathy is not only ineffective, but ethically problematic. The position taken was that homeopathy “ought to be actively rejected by healthcare professionals”, and that it is in fact ethically […]
Drugs and Sex – or Drugs and Less Sex
Two slightly curious stories about drugs and sex. Or, rather, two stories about drugs and sex curiously juxtaposed. First, this story from Sunday’s Independent was inspired by this paper in The Journal of Sexual Medicine. Quite how much weight we should put on the JSM‘s paper is a moot point – it’s a case study involving one […]
A Small Solution for a Big Problem?
BioNews asked me to write something about Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg and Rebacca Roache’s paper on engineering humanity to minimise global warming. I’d been meaning to for a while, so this was the prod I needed. Anyway: my take on their paper is here; but I thought I’d also reproduce it on this blog. What […]
CfP: Criminalizing Contagion: Ethical, legal and clinical challenges of prosecuting the spread of disease and sexually transmitted infections
The BMJ Group journals Sexually Transmitted Infections and Journal of Medical Ethics, in conjunction with academics at the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy (University of Manchester) and the Health Ethics and Law Network (University of Southampton), would like to publish a collection of articles on the criminalization of disease and sexually transmitted infections. We invite article […]
Nothing to lose? Killing is disabling
Guest post by Dominic Wilkinson (Cross-posted from Practical Ethics) In a provocative article forthcoming in the Journal of Medical Ethics (one of a new series of feature articles in the journal) philosophers Walter Sinnott Armstrong and Franklin Miller ask ‘what makes killing wrong?’ Their simple and intuitively appealing answer is that killing is wrong because […]
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 […]
Reiki Research: Not Quite the Maddest thing on the Net.
Right now, physicists are pondering the fallout from the collision of high-energy particles. (Probably.) And I, for my part, am pondering the fallout from the collision of high-energy nonsense. Having had this brought to my attention, I’m led fairly quickly to this, then this, and, finally, this Mail on Sunday piece. All the links refer to […]
Fighting Fire with a Different Kind of Fire?
How much would I love to have been on the ethics committee that was faced with this? Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania were interested in a method of treatment for leukaemia that made use of modified versions of white blood cells. Cells were taken from leukaemia patients and genetically modified in two ways: first, they […]