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: Research Ethics
Should the public health response to Nipah virus disease be like that of COVID-19?
By Tara Hurst, Tess Johnson, Euzebiusz Jamrozik, Phaikyeong Cheah and Michael Parker. Nipah virus made the international news recently for an outbreak in Kerala, India. This bat-borne virus has occurred seasonally in Bangladesh since the first outbreaks were identified in Malaysia and Singapore in 1998-1999 (Figure 1). The course of Nipah virus disease may be […]
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 […]
Reflections on a staff-student partnership: teachable moments in ethics
By Jennifer O’Neill. Context In early February 2022, my colleague and I embarked upon a programme of research examining our shared interest in patient healthcare involvement. As lecturers at the University of Glasgow School of Medicine, we identified a unique opportunity to establish a staff-student research partnership. The underlying rationale was that our student partners […]
Genetic research and the collective good: participants as leaders
By Ilaria Galasso and Susi Geiger. Medical ethics has long centered around the question of how to balance the public or common good with individual rights. Different approaches to ethics would prioritize different values in the context of medical research participation. Well-established moral principles provide solid arguments both for an obligation to participate in medical […]
Reflections on the misrepresentation of one’s work
By Richard B. Gibson. In 2020, I published an article called No Harm, No Foul? Body Integrity Identity Disorder and the Metaphysics of Grievous Bodily Harm. The piece highlights the lack of definitional clarity within English and Welsh criminal law regarding what harm is, arguing that the concept’s open to varying interpretations. It uses metaphysics […]
Diversity and inclusion initiatives for laboratory animals?
By Monika Piotrowska. Before the pandemic, an Italian colleague of mine from the biology department and his Polish wife would host elegant gatherings to celebrate the birthdays of their trilingual children. The adults would mingle around a large table that displayed an impressive array of gourmet delicacies while engaging in lively conversations. Occasionally we would […]
Why trusted research environments are not about trust
By Paige Fitzsimmons. In April 2022 the UK Department of Health and Social Care published ‘Better, broader, safer: using health data for research and analysis’. This report, which has come to be known as the ‘Goldacre Review’, recommends the use of Trusted Research Environments (TREs) to facilitate the building of public trust in health data […]
Developing a practical resource to improve the ethical standing of gene therapy trials
By Rosie Munday, Hugh Davies and Stephanie Jones with Oxford “A” Health Research Authority Research Ethics Committee Oxford “A” NHS REC is one of the four UK Research Ethics Committees flagged to review gene therapy proposals. Following the philosopher Mary Warnock’s sage advice “I do not believe you can make moral judgements unless, as far […]
The ethics of OrganEx
By Richard B. Gibson. Nature recently published a study by a team at Yale University in which the circulation and cellular activity of a pig’s vital organs – pancreas, liver, kidney, heart, lungs, and even brain – were restored over an hour after death. While exploratory, the study’s results are nonetheless remarkable, challenging the intuition […]