Post by Julian Savulescu Cross-posted from the Practical Ethics blog, and relating to this paper in the JME. Andrew Culliford, whose story is featured in the Daily Mail, is one of the estimated 7 in 100,000 people living with Motor Neuron disease, a progressive degenerative disease which attacks muscles, leaving those affected eventually unable even to […]
Category: Research Ethics
The Value of Role Reversal
Guest Post by Rebecca Dresser, Washington University in St. Louis Not so long ago, medical researchers had a habit of using themselves as guinea pigs. Many scientists saw self-experimentation as the most ethical way to try out their ideas. By going first, researchers could test their hypotheses and see how novel interventions affected human beings. Today […]
X-rays, aslyum seekers and research ethics/governance
By David Hunter There is an interesting story here: in the Guardian about a research trial being carried out by the UK border agency using dental x-rays to try and identify the age of young asylum seekers. […]
Of Tusks and Tuskegee: A Problem in Research Ethics
Xtaldave, by his own admission, has the horn. Well, if you’re being accurate about it, he has the tusk. But what’s important is that he has a whopping great piece of ivory to play with. Dave works in the labs here in Manchester, doing clever things with chemicals and science and crystalography and that sort […]
Is Bird Flu Research a Security Risk?
A story that has had a little airtime on the news over the last 24 hours or so concerns requests by US officials that details of research into a bird flu variant be held back from publication on the grounds that it might be of use to terrorists: The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity recommended […]
Fighting Fire with a Different Kind of Fire?
How much would I love to have been on the ethics committee that was faced with this? Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania were interested in a method of treatment for leukaemia that made use of modified versions of white blood cells. Cells were taken from leukaemia patients and genetically modified in two ways: first, they […]
Couldn’t find the language – the positive counterparts of risk and hazards
By David Hunter Continuing my recent theme of the impact of language on ethics and decision making I’m presently writing a paper on the use of claims based on justice to object to new technologies such as human enhancement or synthetic biology. In the process of writing this paper I’ve encountered a rather odd gap […]
Scientific Publicity and the Dilemmas of Publication (part II)
Following on from the post ↓down there↓ about the publication of potentially dangerous results, and as if by magic, into my inbox comes a cfp from the journal Medicine Studies for a special edition about responsibility in biomedical practices. Details are below the fold. […]
Scientific Publicity and the Dilemmas of Publication
There’s a short interview with David Nichols in last week’s New Scientist in which he talks about his place in the history of the production of “legal highs”. The backstory is that he was doing work on MDMA (ecstasy) with half an eye on using it in the treatment of psychiatric and neurological conditions. […]
Procedural Proportionality of Ethical Review
By David Hunter In an excellent paper published in the most recent edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics Gefenas et al make the point that types of research which impose similar burdens of risks and harms appear to be being regulated disproportionately at the moment in the Baltic States. […]