By Jingyi Xu, Zhongxuan Liu, Jiayou Shi, Yue Wang. The 2018 CRISPR-babies incident, involving the controversial editing of human genomes, significantly impacted China’s approach to the ethics governance in medical research. The event underscored the need for a shift from a reactive, post hoc framework to a more proactive and anticipatory model. As a global […]
Category: Bioethics
Martha’s Rule and trust in healthcare: Beyond the ‘right’ to a second opinion
By Isabel Hanson. After the tragic death of thirteen-year-old Martha Mills in the UK, Martha’s mother Merope Mills said that she was told to “’Trust the doctors’… It turned out to be the worst advice I will receive in my whole life”. Martha had developed sepsis from an abdominal injury. Her mother knew that something […]
Respecting and learning from the dead: Ethical research involving the recently deceased
By Brendan Parent, Mary Homan, Olivia Kates, Wadih Arap, Brian Childs, and Kathy Kinlaw. Our bodies can have value after our death. Organs can be donated to save multiple lives through transplantation. Preserved cadavers or body parts may contribute to medical education to prepare future physicians to practice medicine on the living. Dead bodies can […]
Institutional Duty of Rescue: An obligation to vaccinate against seasonal influenza
By Abigail Harmer. Vaccines have always been a hotly debated subject, invoking incredibly strong opinions, whether this be for or against their use. This has particularly been the case in light of covid-19. Towards the end of 2020, when the first vaccines to protect against coronavirus were approved for use, vaccines were everywhere you looked; […]
Research by any other name: The case of MEURI
By G. Owen Schaefer. Sorting and categorization is a classic and sometimes entertaining parlor game. Is a taco a sandwich? Is a couch a chair? Are calculators computers? Other times, though, the stakes are higher, particularly when classification has moral or legal implications – such as the question of whether corporations are people, or whether […]
Sweet melancholies
By Charlotte Duffee. William Blake’s famous painting, Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils, pictures the devil pinning the Old Testament saint to the ground while afflicting his flesh. We see Job in great physical distress: neck bent—almost broken—backwards; fingers splayed stiffly; widened eyes wild with alarm. In his drawing of this same scene, Blake places […]