A pill-full of sugar helps the medicine go down
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…
Read MoreLex Orwell: When is a Surveillance Society OK?
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…
Read MoreSame species, different needs: could ‘genes for’ improve the way we treat animals?
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…
Read MoreIs there a duty to execute prisoners humanely?
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…
Read MoreWho is watching the watchmen?
Today, British MPs approved the government’s highly controversial plan to extend pre-charge detention of suspects to 42 days. This proposal initiated a discussion, though unfortunately still fairly sparse, on Britain’ s headlong way t…
Read MoreCloned Animal Meat
The Food Standards Agency in the United Kingdom has released the results of a study it commissioned on public sentiment about cloned animal meat, reports James Meikle in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/06/foodtech.f…
Read MoreAbortion for Fetal Abnormality?
Abortion remains a crime for most Australians. Laws are inconsistent between states. In contrast, long ago the UK Abortion Act 1967 repealed and replaced its antiquated legal statutes on which much of Australian abortion law is still based.…
Read MoreCloning and animal exploitation
The Daily Mail reports this morning that 8 clone-offspring cows have been born in the UK. Also today, the first survey of public opinion on ‘clone farming’ has been released indicating significant unease and opposition to the idea of meat p…
Read MoreBetting on bad health (with inside information)
Personal DNA testing is here. For $1,000 you can send off a DNA sample to an american company and find out your genetic predispositions to a wide variety of illnesses and problems, from male pattern baldness to cancer. The Telegraph is runn…
Read MoreTwo approaches to climate control
The Guardian leader today drew what it called a crude distinction between “two sets of people who both want to fight climate change”. Some think we can carry on more or less as we are while pursuing technological means to counte…
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