Roe v Wade ensured that women in the US had a constitutionally-guaranteed right to abortion protection from interference in decisions to terminate their pregnancy. What it didn’t do, though, was ensure that women could access an abortion easily. This means that there’s a number of means by which laws can be passed that make it extraordinarily […]
Month: April 2010
Graduate Workshop on Pain, Birmingham, 11th June
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Stuart Derbyshire (Psychology, Birmingham): “The difficulty of locating the beginnings of pain”. David Bain (Philosophy, Glasgow): “Pain and Imperatives” CALL FOR PAPERS If you are a postgraduate (taught or research) student working on pain, you are invited to submit an abstract for presentation at the workshop. Deadline is 30th April. A contribution to […]
You and Me and Baby Makes more than Three
News emerged last night of a new technique for avoiding mitochondrial disease. From what I can tell, the technique looks like a version of Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, and it involves removing the nucleus from a fertilised egg and placing it into an enucleated donor egg. Doing this means that any problems with the mitochondria […]
Muslims! MRSA! or: How Journalism Works
The increasingly-tabloid Freethinker is running an indignant story about how – apparently – rules about bare arms have allegedly been relaxed for Muslim staff within the NHS (scroll down a bit – they’re indignant about quite a lot). Female staff who follow the Islamic faith will be allowed to cover their arms to preserve their modesty […]
Slightly Gratuitous Abuse of the Blog…
Someone’s just asked me if it’d be possible to design a virus specifically to kill people with a certain given genetic signature. I have a feeling that the South African security services tried to cook up an ethnically specific biological agent in the ’80s, but am not sure whether this is an urban myth. Any […]
The Slow Death of the ACMD
One of the most galling political sights of the last few months – and there’s been quite a range – has been the slow collapse of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in the wake of the Nutt farrago. Ever since David Nutt had the temerity to bring facts to the table in […]