Introduction In a recently broadcasted documentation about gene-doping, multiple award winning Swiss science journalist and author, Beat Glogger, reflected the issue of gene-doping in a sensitive and objective manner. In this Swiss-German c…

by Rebecca Roache I am over a month late reading the news of the Swedish couple who have chosen to keep the sex of their toddler a closely-guarded secret, but the story is too interesting to pass up the opportunity to write about it here. T…

Reading David Edmonds’ post here and the ensuing discussion about why journalists might be under an imperative to bring important information to light has got me wondering about the other actors involved in exposing cases of wrongdoing. Bef…

When should journalists censor themselves? Last week secret US military files about the war in Afghanistan were published on WikiLeaks. The reaction from the US government was swift and furious. The US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said th…

Yesterday Richard Ashcroft, Professor of Bioethics at Queen Mary College, London, wrote in a Facebook update: ‘I am fed up with being asked to come into science/medicine projects, add a bit of ethics fairy dust, usually without getting any …

by Alexandre Erler Technologies meant to help extend the human lifespan, such as cryonics, or the procedures investigated by gerontologist Aubrey de Grey under the name “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence”, are increasingly an …

by Rebecca Roache Human enhancement is a hot topic in bioethics.  Typically conceived as the use of technology to raise human capacities above what is merely healthy or normal, it attracts questions such as, Is it ethical?  Is i…

Simon Rippon has recently argued here that markets in organs lead to harms, harms which may be outweighed by benefits, but which must nevertheless be taken into account in deciding whether such markets should be legal. He has argued that th…

The rapid development of the cognitive science of religion over the last 20 years has led to a renewed enthusiasm for anti-religious debunking arguments. The typical form of these is that w thinks that she/he is motivated to believe the ten…

A recent study by Nyhan and Reifler has received quite a bit of attention recently. The study aimed to assess how people’s beliefs change in response to evidence.  The researchers gave participants mock news stories which contained mi…