Agnes Gereb, a midwife in Hungary, has been imprisoned for performing home births http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/hungary-midwife-agnes-gereb-home-birth. She faces various charges, including negligent malpractice and manslaughte…

The Register warns that Dixons risks future of humanity with Star Wars-themed ads: the electronics chain, not satisfied with merely human customers also as a publicity stunt broadcast its ads into deep space, presumably for aliens to receiv…

by Alexandre Erler Jerome Kagan’s latest book, The Temperamental Thread, is – as usual with Kagan – a fascinating read. It draws on the three decades of research done by Kagan on the topic of human temperament. In a famous series of studies…

by Dominic Wilkinson In an earlier post this week I argued that there are only two substantive reasons for doctors not to provide treatment that they judge futile – either on the basis of a judgement that treatment would harm the patient (a…

by Dominic Wilkinson Two recent cases in a Toronto hospital illustrate a dilemma that hospital doctors face all too frequently. What should they do if patients or their representatives insist on treatment that the doctor believes would be f…

Last week it was reported that police in Bangladesh had made a major bust at a factory that was producing counterfeit homeopathic drugs. The counterfeiters were attaching the labels of other drug producers to the remedies they were producin…

by Julian Savulescu Update: The same misunderstandings are still in evidence, 2 years on (May 2012), for example:  ‘Brain circuitry different for women with anorexia, obesity’ Having started to work in the field of neuroethics a…

A US group that pays drug addicts to undergo sterilisation visits the UK this week, having recently paid its first British client for undergoing a vasectomy. “Project Prevention” claims that its goal is to make addicts and alcoholics use lo…

Frequently in life there is some good available if you and I can agree on some split of that good between us. If we cannot agree the good never comes into existence. This fact can be modelled by what is called the ultimatum game. In the ul…

A number of clerics of various Christian denominations are claiming that the recent rescue of 33 Chilean miners was a miracle and, therefore, evidence in favour of the particular version of Christianity that they respectively represent. How…