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“Reanimation” and Taking Organs from Living People
One of the greatest fears associated with organ transplantation is that the person from whom organs are taken is not really dead. That nightmare was almost realised in France last week when a French patient “came back to life” after 30 minutes of unsuccessfully heart massage. In 2007, in order to address the shortage of…
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My Genes, not a Doctor’s
California has sent cease-and-desist letters to firms offering Web gene tests to consumers. The legal reason is that California law requires a licenced physician to order any lab tests. This follows from a similar crackdown in New York. Wired responds by top 10 reasons that regulators should not hinder genetic testing. Is there any good…
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Setting a Minimum Price for the Sale of Organs
Professor Maqsood Noorani, a leading surgeon made the headlines asking for legalisation of the sale of organs to prevent the exploitation that exists in the black market. Yet his comments show that he is uneasy with the concept of a market in organs. He believes that the sale of organs in richer nations would ‘tarnish…
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Helping others to save the rainforest
The Congo basin rainforest is a natural resource of staggering scale, second only to the amazon in size. It stretches across six countries in the centre of Africa and provides shelter, food, income and fuel for millions of local people. However, like most of the world’s remaining forests, it is being destroyed at an unsustainable…
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A pill-full of sugar helps the medicine go down
A medicine for children is to be released in the UK and is already available in the US that has been shown to be effective in a wide range of conditions. It has been exhaustively studied, and has no side effects. It is extremely cheap to produce, and will be readily available. Yet GPs, academics…
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Lex Orwell: When is a Surveillance Society OK?
The current Swedish debate about a bill to allow military intelligence to intercept phone and Internet communications has produced something most unSwedish: a grassroots "blogquake" that has upset the staid logic of traditional politics. Given the threat that the bill may fall because of MPs disobeying their party whips (normally unheard of in Swedish politics)…
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Same species, different needs: could ‘genes for’ improve the way we treat animals?
Delineating moral status along species lines may be convenient, but it is crude. It encourages the view that all humans have equal needs, and that it is acceptable to treat non-human animals in ways that we would never treat even those humans of comparable sentience and cognitive abilities. Focusing on genetic similarities and differences between…
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Is there a duty to execute prisoners humanely?
An article published this week in PLoS Medicine discusses the ethics of research on US lethal objection protocols. The authors conclude: While lethal injection and the death penalty present a host of ethical questions, the specific, pressing issue now faced by 36 US states, the federal government, and the 3,350 prisoners on death row is…
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Who is watching the watchmen?
Today, British MPs approved the government’s highly controversial plan to extend pre-charge detention of suspects to 42 days. This proposal initiated a discussion, though unfortunately still fairly sparse, on Britain’ s headlong way towards a surveillance state (see for example this editorial in the Guardian). Technologies that allow the state to monitor aspects of private…
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Cloned Animal Meat
The Food Standards Agency in the United Kingdom has released the results of a study it commissioned on public sentiment about cloned animal meat, reports James Meikle in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/06/foodtech.food. It seems that the majority of the British public are resolutely opposed to the commercial use of cloned animal meat. The study reported a…