An article recently published on PLOS Genetics showing that (and how) individuals can be identified by their DNA within large publicly accessible pools DNA has led to genetic data being removed from publicly accessible websites by the NIH a…

An eight-year-old Iranian boy has been released after spending nearly two months in Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/sep/06/immigration.humanrights). Child M, as he’s known, has been given body searc…

The nonsense you find on the web about “doomsday scenarios” is conspiracy theory rubbish generated by a small group of nutters, primarily on the other side of the Atlantic. These people also think that the Theory of Relativity is a Jewish …

Practical Ethics News will host the next Philosophers’ Carnival on 22nd September.  If you know of a particularly good philosophy blog post, please consider nominating it for inclusion via this link.  Posts need not be on th…

The current issue of the Royal Society’s journal (Philosophical Transactions) is devoted to geo-engineering. That is, very large scale engineering projects aimed at combatting global warming. For example, one proposal is to release su…

Victorian politicians are debating how to reform law on abortion. In Victoria, as in other states, abortion remains a crime. This is inconsistent with what happens. There are nearly 100 000 abortions every year in Australia. The Victorian g…

After a prolonged disagreement with patient groups, the NHS’s funding guidance body, NICE, has approved the £10,000-an-eye blindness treatment, Lucentis. The drug has been shown to halt the progression of wet age-related macular degen…

The last few years have seen some very bad droughts. In the UK, the drought of 2004-2006 was severe enough to nearly require the shutting down of domestic water in London and the fetching of water from public wells (called standpipes). Aust…

A recent survey by Myeloma UK, and reported on the BBC website, suggests that many doctors do not tell patients about drugs that may be beneficial and which are licensed in the UK. The trouble is that the drugs have not yet been approved by…

I wrote recently about the controversial news that surgeons in Denver had taken organs, including the hearts, from newborn infants who had died in intensive care. In recent years the retrieval of organs from patients whose hearts have stopp…