A convicted double murderer has won the right to have cosmetic surgery to remove a birthmark on the NHS.  Good.  Predictably, the foaming-at-the-mouth brigade is having a field day with this in the comments section of the Daily Fail’s coverage.  Equally predictably, they’re wrong.

The reason is straightforwardly to do with considerations of rights and justice.  I’m going to assume - fairly safely, I think - that the nub of the criticism is that being a convicted murderer means you lose the entitlement to certain social rights and benefits.  (Indeed, I’ve overheard many people at the bar saying things along the lines that, if you break the law, you lose all human rights - and it was only because I was busy serving other people that I could restrain myself from saying something withering in reply.)

The loss of rights claim is easily put to bed. more…

Interesting Research Ethics Conference at UCL in November, and I’m not just saying that because I am one of the speakers…

more…

It’s all very well to vanish off to a conference and put faces to names… but that can’t help with the important questions, like What does the internet think of you?.  Fortunately, this little app can tell you.  Type in your name, and it’ll do the Google version of a genetic fingerprint.

In the interests of openness, here’s what the internet thinks of your humble editors:

Possibly by virtue of having a more frequently-occuring name than either of the other two, David seems to have the most interesting “genome”, and I’m really rather dull compared to both - although I’m about as illegal as social, which must be because of all those parties.

Details here.  As David mentioned before, he, Søren and I are all going to be giving papers.