By Marco Tang. What is mitochondrial replacement technique (MRT)? It involves obtaining a donor egg, removing the nDNA from the donor egg, transferring the legal mother’s nDNA into the donor egg and fertilizing it with the legal father’s sperm. This procedure enables women with mitochondrial disease to have children without it. What is unique is […]
Category: Medical ethics
The GMC must re-evaluate its treatment of climate protesters
By Rammina Yassaie. On 7 January this year, Bristol GP Patrick Hart, was jailed for 12 months for damaging petrol pump screens, which he describes as “an act of care” in protest against continued fossil fuel extraction; the environmental consequences of which are considered to be the greatest health threat of the 21st century. Hart’s […]
Who deserves a pig heart?
By Johannes Kögel and Georg Marckmann. Ethical criteria are essential for determining which patients should receive a pig heart transplant. These criteria—medical need, capacity to benefit, and patient choice—are designed to ensure a pathway to clinical trials that balances short-term outcomes with the long-term success of the therapy. Xenotransplantation, the transplantation of organs across species […]
How treatment framing can mislead
By Shang Long Yeo Suppose a doctor believes that some treatment best serves a patient’s interests, and knows that framing treatment outcomes in terms of survival rates (‘out of 100 who took the treatment, 90 survive’) rather than death rates (’10 die’) will make it more likely for the patient to consent. Is the doctor […]
Could XAI harm patients in time-sensitive environments?
By Andreas Wabro. Achieving transparency and interpretability of algorithmic predictions remains an important research goal for many AI experts around the world. In particular, the epistemic benefits of explainable AI (XAI) methods have been widely discussed, and especially in the context of healthcare, international institutions and academic experts often call for measures to improve physicians’ […]
Medical research with human samples and health data—why ‘dynamic’ consent is not the solution
By Andreas Bruns and Eva C Winkler. Informed consent is a central principle of medical research ethics. Traditionally, consent is required to respect the autonomy of human research subjects—their right to make their own, informed decision about whether or not to participate in medical research. However, this principle has come under significant pressure with the […]
If we expand the criteria for what makes a medical intervention invasive, we should include ingestion, not mental distress
Paul Affleck , Julia Cons, and Simon E. Kolstoe. De Marco et al have challenged the standard account of what makes a medical intervention invasive, stimulating a set of commentaries, including our own. Whilst we have enjoyed this correspondence, we still disagree on some fundamental points. De Marco et al state it is not clear […]
Voicing the realities of patient consent to unplanned obstetric interventions
By Frances Hand*, Morganne Wilbourne*, Sophie McAllister, Louise Print-Lyons, and Meena Bhatia. Approximately 46% of primiparous women using NHS facilities undergo an obstetric intervention during their labour. For women with a planned intervention (usually a caesarean birth) conversations regarding consent are mostly straightforward and occur during the pregnancy. Where an intervention is unplanned, current practice […]
Trumping rights?
By Ezio Di Nucci. Our team just finished another round of the ethics course at Copenhagen’s medical school, and we are now grading exams, which this semester included the following case study: A 32-year-old woman is in early labor. Tests indicate fetal hypoxia, i.e., that the fetus lacks sufficient oxygen. Various attempts are made to […]
Curb your enthusiasm: how to use large language models in medical ethics?
By Andrea Ferrario and Nikola Biller-Andorno. A technology enthusiast (TE) and a medical ethicist (ME) walk into a bar. Over a few rounds of drinks, their discussion shifts to the topic of large language models (LLMs) and their use in medical ethics. TE: Have you seen the latest? Technology using LLM, like OpenAI’s GPT-4, is […]