Scientists from the Medical College of Georgia in the US recently claimed to be able selectively to wipe out traumatic memories (http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/7685541.stm). These scientists experimented with mice and …

‘Is there a place for sacrifice in the modern world?’ a colleague asked during a conference in Oxford this weekend. To an extent the answer appears to depend on what we mean by sacrifice. The traditional religious version is arguably in dem…

Since the 1980s, the popularity of suicide attacks – primarily bombing – has grown rapidly. There are now hundreds every year. As I write, the BBC is reporting a suicide bombing which appears to have killed eight people in Pakistan: http://…

Debbie Purdy is a British woman suffering from multiple sclerosis. Worried about her degenerating condition, she has planned to end her life at the Swiss clinic, Dignitas, which practices euthanasia for people with crippling medical conditi…

A BBC report today suggests that “many” UK couples are going overseas to choose the sex of their children. What seems most odd about this is that in some cases they go to places where sex selection is illegal. What is interesting here is th…

A month ago, the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, called for the introduction of forced chemical castration for sex offenders. The call followed a particularly nasty case of incest and paedophilia in the country: a 45 year old man was fo…

By Julian Savulescu and Dominic Wilkinson Imagine you could save 6 lives with a drop of your blood. Would you have a moral obligation to donate a drop of blood to save six people’s lives? It seems that if any sort of moral obligation exists…

Prospective parents will be able to screen embryos for almost any known genetic disease using a revolutionary “universal test” developed by British scientists, led by Prof Alan Handyside  The £1,500 test, called karyomapping, which sho…

In a recent article in The Observer, philosopher Mary Warnock makes an eloquent plea for assisted suicide in relation to the case of Daniel James, a 23-year old rugby player from Worcester who requested to be helped to die after an accident…

A new test for carriers of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is under development, but it raises an ethical problem: should we test for untreatable deadly illnesses? And might it reduce the amount of blood donations?