In an opinion piece on the BBC website this week Professor Simon Baron-Cohen has questioned the wisdom of adopting pre-natal screening for autism, raising the possibility that it would prevent the existence of future great mathematicians. T…

These days the Vatican’s statements sound a bit like a broken record, repeating continuously “Non possumus”. It started at the beginning of December when Benedict XVI refused to support President Sarkozy’s proposal that encourages the gover…

A 79 year old euthanasia campaigner in New Zealand has attracted local and international publicity after having the words ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ tattooed across her chest. Although this seems unlikely to be widely emulated her action highligh…

Reuters reports: Brain-boosting drugs: why not?, experts say (various follow ups in different media). The story is based on an opinion article in Nature, where a number of medical, legal and philosophical researchers argue that society must…

We are surrounded by many ethical issues, and their complexity makes it tempting to treat each in isolation. But we need to remember that to justify any position requires reference to universal principles, and these principles may well have…

Despite the protestations of those opposed to the use of animals in research, the fundamental differences between people over the treatment of animals seems to lie with the weight that we are prepared to give to animal suffering and death i…

The struggle against child porn goes on. An Australian judge has ruled that a cartoon showing a character from The Simpsons engaged in sexual activity is child pornography. Australia is also trying to implement Internet filtering for the wh…

Last Sunday, 30th of November, Switzerland, by a narrow majority, approved a constitutional modification doing away with any statute of limitations for paedophile crimes. The initiative proposing that modification had been opposed by the go…

Nicholas D. Kristof reveals a plan to massively boost intelligence worldwide using a chemical additive.The additive is iodized salt. About 2 billion people worldwide suffer insufficient iodine intake, making it the most common cause of prev…

On April 16 2007  a solitary gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, killed 32 of his fellow students at Virginia Tech, and injured many more http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/18/vtech.shooting/index.html .  This came to mind again as I was listening …