With any luck, the marking tsunami will have receded by the end of the week, and so I should be able to get back to blogging a bit more frequently soon. In the meantime, I’ll fill some space by ripping off something from the “Feedback” page of the latest New Scientist: The TV industry has […] […]
Category: Research Ethics
Animal Liberation: Sacrificing the Good on the Altar of the Perfect?
For my money, one of the best papers at the nonhuman animal ethics conference at Birmingham a couple of weeks ago was Steve Cooke’s.* He was looking at the justifications for direct action in the name of disrupting research on animals, and presented the case – reasonably convincingly – that the main arguments against the permissibility of […]
Animals in US Laboratories: Who Counts, Who Matters?
Guest post by Alka Chandna How many animals are experimented on in laboratories? It’s a simple question, the answer to which provides a basic parameter to help us wrap our heads around the increasingly controversial and ethically harrowing practice of locking animals in cages and conducting harmful procedures on them that are often scary, painful, and […]
Saatchi Bill – Update
Damn. Damn, damn, damn. It turns out that the version of the Medical Innovation Bill about which I wrote this morning isn’t the most recent: the most recent version is available here. Naïvely, I’d assumed that the government would make sure the latest version was the easiest to find. Silly me. Here’s the updated version […]
An Innovation Too Far?
NB – Update/ erratum here. Ooops. One of the things I’ve been doing since I last posted here has involved me looking at the Medical Innovation Bill – the so-called “Saatchi Bill”, after its titular sponsor. Partly, I got interested out of necessity – Radio 4 invited me to go on to the Sunday programme to talk […]
Adrenaline, Information Provision and the Benefits of a Non-Randomised Methodology
Guest Post by Ruth Stirton and Lindsay Stirton, University of Sheffield One of us – Ruth – was on Newsnight on Wednesday the 13th August talking about the PARAMEDIC2 trial. The trial is a double blind, individually randomised, placebo controlled trial of adrenaline v. normal saline injections in cardiac arrest patients treated outside hospital. In simpler terms, if […]
Consigned to the Index
There’re probably times when all of us have had a solution, and just had to find a problem for it. It’s an easy trap; and it’s one into which I suspect Gretchen Goldman may have fallen in an article in Index on Censorship about scientific freedom and how it’s under threat from disputes about Federal funding in the […]
Resurrectionism at Easter
There’s a provocative piece in a recent New Scientist about what happens to unclaimed bodies after death – about, specifically, the practice of coopting them for research purposes. Gareth Jones, who wrote it, points out that the practice has been going on for centuries – but that a consequence of the way it’s done is that it tends […]
This will hurt a bit
By David Hunter In a piece titled in a fashion to simultaneously win the internet and cause every male reader to wince, Michelle Meyer asks “Whose Business Is It If You Want a Bee To Sting Your Penis? Should IRBs Be Policing Self-Experimentation?” In this piece she describes the case of a Cornell graduate student […]
An Attack of the What-Ifs
Among the comments to the last post, there’s this from Parmenion59: So…if a cure for lung cancer is found, and the study has been funded through money from a tobacco company…the BMJ won’t publish said study? Way to go BMJ. Hmmm. At least on the face of it, this looks like an important point – […]