How much would I love to have been on the ethics committee that was faced with this? Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania were interested in a method of treatment for leukaemia that made use of modified versions of white blood cells. Cells were taken from leukaemia patients and genetically modified in two ways: first, they […]
Category: In the Journals
Assisted Dying: Physicians and Metaphysicians in the BMJ
There’s a slightly curious correspondence taking place in the BMJ at the moment that concerns assisted dying. Des Spence started things moving with this short piece. For the most part it is (sorry to say) a slightly pedestrian and simplistic overview of the state of the assisted dying debate. One of the arguments against AD that […]
Three Quiet Cheers for Uterine Transplants
Charles Foster’s post over at Practical Ethics about the news of the womb-transplant surgery that’s slated to take place in the near future is on the money in many respects. Foster points out that [p]redictably the newspapers loved it. And, equally predictably, clever people from the world’s great universities queued up to be eloquently wise […]
Stem-Cells: To Patent or Not?
In spare moments, I’ve been wondering about the Advocate-General of European Court of Justice’s recent recommendation that patents involving human embryonic stem-cells be prohibited, and the response that it’s generated. One of the best-publicised responses was the letter from Austin Smith et al that appeared in Nature, which complained that the recommendation would be bad […]
Assisted Suicide in Oregon: a Counterblast from the Antis
Ilora Finlay and Rob George* have a new paper in the JME that takes issue with Battin et al‘s 2007 paper, concerning who makes use of physician assisted suicide in Oregon and Holland. Battin’s claim had been that there was no evidence of heightened risk for the elderly, women, the uninsured (inapplicable in the Netherlands, where […]
Scientific Publicity and the Dilemmas of Publication (part II)
Following on from the post ↓down there↓ about the publication of potentially dangerous results, and as if by magic, into my inbox comes a cfp from the journal Medicine Studies for a special edition about responsibility in biomedical practices. Details are below the fold. […]
NHS Treatment and Failed Asylum-Seekers
A medical student from Newcastle writes: I am currently writing an ethics assignment relating to a paediatric placement I undertook earlier this academic year. During the placement I was involved in the care of 11-month old twins from Khartoum, Sudan, whose parents had brought them into hospital because they were suffering from recurrent generalised tonic-clonic […]
Bioethics as a Spectator Sport
Remember when the BBC and ITV had both used to pretend that the other didn’t exist, except in veiled references to “the other side”? I always feel that talking about papers in Bioethics is a bit like that. Oh, I know that journals don’t engage in rivalry, that it’s all collegiate, and so on. But, […]
How Important are Genetic Origins?
It’s something of a commonplace to suggest that genetics poses a number of problems both in and for bioethics as it’s traditionally done. One of the problems in bioethics is that there could well be times when giving genetic information to a person about himself based on a test that he’s had will mean, necessarily, […]
The Pro-Life Car-Wreck
You need to have registered to read the BMA News, and that would seem to require BMA registration – which is a shame, because I heard a rumour of a rantable letter that appeared there in June. A reformed medic friend has been good enough to copy and paste it for me. The rumour’s true. […]