Question: When is a crime not a crime? Answer: when it will never be prosecuted. The release this week by the Director of Public Prosecutions of his interim policy on prosecution of assisted suicide raises a number of questions – as discuss…

Are there neuroethical issues in sports? Dr Judy Illes thinks so, in a talk given in Canada on September 17. People are using neuroimaging to assess ability (which may also pick up unsuspected pathologies in the brain), intervening against …

As a result of a court ruling requiring clarification of the law, the UK's Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer, yesterday issued some guidelines concerning the legal grey area of assisted suicide. The DPP published a lis…

Chris Packham has recently (and not for the first time) suggested that we should stop trying to save the panda — an expensive exercise — and instead put our efforts and resources to ‘better use.’ This suggestion is worth some unpacking. His…

Economists have long used Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita as a proxy measure for the average level of wellbeing within a country. GDP is a measure of the goods and services produced in a country and is a fairly good proxy for materi…

A recent article in the New Scientist raises the prospect that alongside ‘gluten-free’, ‘GM free’, ‘sugar free’, and ‘dairy free’ our supermarket shelves may soon contain ‘pain-free’ meat. American philosopher Adam Shriver, writing in Neuro…

Should scientists be allowed to publish anything, even when it is wrong? And should there be journals willing to accept everything, as long as it seems interesting enough? That is the core of a debate that has blossomed since the journal Me…

The Times (as well as a slew of other newspapers) reports that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams is complaining that financiers have, in general, failed to feel repentance for the ‘excesses of the boom that led to financial me…

In the BBC Radio program Jeopardising Justice (here) Helena Kennedy QC spoke about the rise of ‘the victims’ movement’. The 1970s saw a legal reform that marked a watershed in the treatment of victims throughout the judicial system. Once ma…

An article in the Times argues that life extension will bring us problems: long-lived people will bankrupt the NHS, pensions would become expensive, the pension age would need to be changed, there would be a pressure for resources and life …