Once in every while an ethical dilemma will swim across the horizon, a dilemma whose wake will induce in me a bout of moral seasickness. My compass spins, my bearings […]
Julian Sheather
Julian Sheather is specialist adviser (ethics and human rights), policy directorate, BMA.
Julian Sheather on Mandelson’s distemper
Reader I am sick, sick if not quite unto death then very nearly unto despair. There is a gnawing within that will not let me rest. I have searched in […]
Julian Sheather on the trouble with Darwin
As this is a scientific journal, I imagine its readers will have more than a passing interest in Darwin. It is hardly surprising. Darwinism is a scientific hypothesis of such revelatory […]
Julian Sheather: Our daily bread
A few days ago I was reading an account by a journalist of a visit he had made to the refugee camps on the Nord pas de Calais coast just […]
Julian Sheather on fat and human freedom
It was the White Queen who told Alice that she had at times thought six contradictory things before breakfast. We humans have a remarkable tolerance for incompatibility, happily living with […]
Julian Sheather on playing God – again
So they’ve been at it again, the men in white coats. Putting on their grey beards and playing God, getting the jump on poor old mother nature. There are times […]
Julian Sheather is anti anti-psychiatry
In my early twenties I was felled by a bout of mental illness. It started with a panic attack. I was standing on the station at Leamington Spa waiting for […]
Julian Sheather: Where’s the harm in it?
It is often said of military planners that they spend their time preparing to fight the last battle, not the next one. The same could be said of regulators. Take […]
Julian Sheather on once upon a time in the west
Audiences can be fickle things. Last week I clambered down from my ivory tower and emerged, blinking, onto a brilliantly-lit podium at the Cheltenham Science Festival. The theme of the […]
Julian Sheather on the day that human nature changed
At a certain point in life you start eyeing the word ‘crisis’ suspiciously. Inflationary pressures in the media devalue the linguistic coin and you could be forgiven for thinking that […]