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…

The Eighteenth International AIDS Conference is currently underway in Vienna, and one of the issues that has been under discussion is how to reduce HIV transmission within the various at-risk groups. One such group is the prison population,…

As an elite sportsperson you’ve almost no opportunity to defend yourself against the prevailing key-players in the sports-industry system, especially in the case of doping. Otherwise you’re going to risk your career or even your status as a…

At Harvard Medical School someone is screaming, reports the Boston Globe. ‘Death!’, he shrieks, ‘Why after all these years have you not appeared?’ He begs for euthanasia, tormented by his pain. Medical students listen to him. His lines were…