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Bad doctor, bad prosecutor or bad laws?
Ethics, medical practice and the law should ideally coincide. But as a current affair in Sweden shows, it is all too easy for them to collide. On March 2 police took a doctor into custody at the Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital in front of her colleauges, suspected of killing an infant. The background is tragic:
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The weight of conscience
President Obama is about to rescind the “conscience rule” the previous president G. W. Bush had instituted. This clause allows health care workers to refuse to do anything that might conflict with their conscience. This means that doctors, pharmacists and other workers in this field refuse to provide services or to give information about
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Just lose it?
A recent study by researchers from the Harvard Medical School concludes that getting angry at work, contrary to common opinion, may not be a bad thing, but may actually be beneficial to your career and your overall happiness (as reported by BBC News and the Guardian among others). The researchers nevertheless issue a few caveats: in order for anger to
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Designer Babies and Slippery Slopes
Designer babies are in the news again. The LA Fertility Institutes, headed by a 1970s IVF pioneer, have offered the opportunity for potential parents to choose traits such as the eye and hair colour of their children: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7918296.stm Unsurprisingly, slippery slope arguments have already begun to appear: http://www.theage.com.au/world/la-delivers-first-designerbaby-clinic-20090302-8meq.html Marcy Darnovsky, director of the Centre for
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Lotteries and Fairness
The English Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, is reported to be considering scrapping the lotteries which determine whether parents get their first choice of schools for their children. Balls is quoted as saying that the lottery system can feel “arbitrary” and “random”. Well, give that man a dictionary. The Telegraph adds that he ‘admitted that they were "unfair"’,
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Is doodling a form of cheating?
The public often complains about the fluctuating and conflicting attitudes of scientists. So often do things heralded as good for us one week turn out to be deadly the next (consider, for example, this recent report about vitamin pills) that there seems little point in trying to follow the advice of scientists. Some recent news
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Brain training and cognitive enhancement
If you were offered a treatment that claimed to be able to improve your memory and creativity, enhance neuroplasticity and increase cognitive ability, and prevent later cognitive decline would you take it? Many people would – at least if the recent popularity of computer-based brain-training exercises is anything to go by. Programs claiming to be
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Is Science Close to Defeating Religion?
On Sunday The Observer published an article by Colin Blakemore entitled ‘Science is Just one Gene away from Defeating Religion’. (See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/22/genetics-religion). After a necessarily brief overview of the history of tensions between science and religion Blakemore settles on a target, which is a well-known argument recently presented by Richard Harries, the former Bishop of
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Event Announcement: Direct to Consumer Genetic Testing Workshop May 21
The Ethox Centre and the Programme on the Ethics of New Biosciences are co-organising a one-day workshop to explore the ethical and regulatory issues surrounding the recent development and marketing of direct to consumer genetic tests. Companies such as deCODE Genetics, 23andME and DNADirect are already marketing direct to consumer genetic tests but there has
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Am I allowed to throw away *my* memories: does memory editing threaten human identity?
A paper has recently been published demonstrating that a previously learned fearful reaction can be weakened using a drug. The aim of the research is to ameliorate PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, where traumatic experiences cause an ongoing state of anxiety and stress reactions. In the media it of course became "drug can erase bad memories"