By Anna-Karin Margareta Andersson The article highlights an important but surprisingly neglected medical ethical topic: new research suggests that children born without a cerebral cortex are conscious. What types of care should they be provided in order to respect their human rights? This topic caught my attention thanks to Professor Alan Shewmon and colleagues’ pivotal […]
Category: Neuroethics
Revisiting the lessons of Frankenstein
By Julian Koplin & John Massie The story of Frankenstein came to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in a nightmare. It was a miserable, wet summer in 1816, and Mary Shelley was visiting the poet Lord Byron with her sister, Claire Clairmont, and her soon-to-be husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. They spend much of the summer […]
The errant ways we talk about brain death
By Jordan Potter and Jason Lesandrini On November 4, 2019, newspapers across the USA reported on the tragic and untimely death of Mr. Nebane Abienwi – a 37-year-old asylum-seeking migrant from Cameroon who died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after suffering a brain hemorrhage. Per an ICE report, physicians at Sharp […]
Are the Irreversibly Comatose Still Here?
By Lukas J. Meier Patients who do not emerge from coma are not dead – at least not in a biological sense. Their hearts are beating, their skin is warm, and many of them even breathe without external assistance. But are these patients also alive mentally, that is, is there anything going on in their […]
Reversibility, Colds, and Neurosurgery
By Jonathan Pugh. Happy new year to readers of the blog! I always approach the new year with some trepidation. This is not just due to the terrible weather, or even my resolution to take more exercise (unfortunately in the aforementioned terrible weather). Instead, I approach January with a sense of dread because it is […]
Guest Post: Sentient Brains in a Dish? Potential Glimpses of Sentience Will Be Detectable in Future Cerebral Organoids
Authors, Andrea Lavazza *, Marcello Massimini ** (*Centro Universitario Internazionale, Arezzo, Italy; **Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences “Luigi Sacco”, University of Milan, Italy; Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi, Milan, Italy). Paper: Cerebral organoids: ethical issues and consciousness assessment (http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2017-104555) Can we grow a sentient human organism in a dish? The answer may depend on how we evaluate […]
Putting a Price on Empathy
Guest Post by Sarah Carter My paper is another to add to the ever-increasing number of articles about moral (bio)enhancement – but why is this issue so important? To take a cynical view: if we had a pill or injection that could make people more moral, less prone to harming others, and so on, it […]