It goes without saying that the deaths of Louis Wainwright and Nicholas Smith, apparently after having taken the legal high mephedrone, is a matter of deep regret. But it’s also a matter of sad predictability that the news has been hotly followed by calls for mephedrone to be banned; speaking on Today this morning, Chris Grayling, […]
Category: In the News
Resource: Bioethics in NewsFilm Online
By David Hunter This seems like a useful new resource. There is an archive :NewsFilm Online (NFO, www.nfo.ac.uk). This archive now hosts some 60,000 news clips produced by ITN and Reuters in collaboration with the British Universities Film & Video Council and EDINA went live in October 2008. Despite the fact that NFO includes footage […]
Don’t Go Outside… You Might Break the Baby
A couple of days ago, I made a post about Nicaragua’s abortion laws and their – ahem – unfortunate consequences. However, it would appear that the atmosphere that generated them is a model of liberalism in comparison to the atmosphere further north. I have in mind here Utah’s Criminal Homicide and Abortion Amendments (HB12), recently passed […]
DPP on Assisted Suicide, Redux
The Director of Public Prosecutions published his guidelines on assisted suicide yesterday, after consultation on the provisional guidelines that I discussed here. The most recent publication is slightly different from the consultation version and the full list of considerations is available here. Most of the considerations strike me as being well-intentioned, and pretty inoffensive – […]
Nicaragua’s Abortion Law and the Moral Cost of Saving Lives
Regardless of where you stand on questions about the permissibility of abortion, the nature of the debate is much less polarised than it would seem. Pro-choice types are perfectly capable of admitting that abortions are matters of regret in their own terms; pro-lifers, overwhelmingly, will admit that there are times when the termination of a […]
Acronym Overload: HoC S&TC report on homeopathy published…
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee’s report on homeopathy was published today (and is available here). The findings have not been diluted; the Committee didn’t sugar the sugar pill. […]
Wakefield – the Cooked-up “Controversy” that Will Not Die
I didn’t pay much attention the Wakefield MMR paper when it first started generating controversy: I wasn’t bothered whether its conclusions were correct or not, because I figured that it’s in the nature of science for certain putative discoveries later to be debunked. But the years passed, and as I paid a bit more attention, […]
Terry Pratchett Shakes Hands with Death
This is probably a bit de trop, because I suspect that many watched it as broadcast – but those who haven’t seen Terry Pratchett‘s Dimbleby Lecture can watch it here; I believe that most things on the iplayer get taken down after a while, but I can’t see any indication of there being a limited […]
The ethics of Elderly Mums in the News
By David Hunter Daniel Sokol has written this thoughtful piece about the yuck factor and Elderly Mums conceiving children late in life via IVF. […]
A Fish on a Petri Dish
Not so long ago, I heard a research scientist talking about the work he was doing and its context in the discipline. He was looking at a particular set of genes that were implicated in cancer, and was interested in manipulating those genes as a means of controlling tumor formation. He wanted to work on […]