GMO and climate change seem currently one of the more upsetting issues not only for environmentalists, but for the wider public as well. Carbon tax proposals like the one released by Canada’s opposition party last week (e.g Financial Times)…

It has been reported in the newspapers today that in many parts of the country smokers have been refused access to in-vitro-fertilisation treatment. This appears to be contrary to the national evidence-based guidelines for fertility treatme…

One of the greatest fears associated with organ transplantation is that the person from whom organs are taken is not really dead. That nightmare was almost realised in France last week when a French patient “came back to life” after 30 minu…

California has sent cease-and-desist letters to firms offering Web gene tests to consumers. The legal reason is that California law requires a licenced physician to order any lab tests. This follows from a similar crackdown in New York. Wir…

Professor Maqsood Noorani, a leading surgeon made the headlines asking for legalisation of the sale of organs to prevent the exploitation that exists in the black market. Yet his comments show that he is uneasy with the concept of a market …

The Congo basin rainforest is a natural resource of staggering scale, second only to the amazon in size. It stretches across six countries in the centre of Africa and provides shelter, food, income and fuel for millions of local people. How…

A medicine for children is to be released in the UK and is already available in the US that has been shown to be effective in a wide range of conditions. It has been exhaustively studied, and has no side effects. It is extremely cheap to pr…

The current Swedish debate about a bill to allow military intelligence to intercept phone and Internet communications has produced something most unSwedish: a grassroots "blogquake" that has upset the staid logic of traditional po…

Delineating moral status along species lines may be convenient, but it is crude. It encourages the view that all humans have equal needs, and that it is acceptable to treat non-human animals in ways that we would never treat even those hum…

An article published this week in PLoS Medicine discusses the ethics of research on US lethal objection protocols. The authors conclude: While lethal injection and the death penalty present a host of ethical questions, the specific, pressin…