By Iain Brassington A couple of weeks ago, BioNews invited me to review Top of the Lake; but since it’s relevant to the kinds of things that appear in the JME, I thought I’d repost it here. There’s a moment in the final episode of this second series of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake where Nicole […]
Category: Shameless self-publicity
Does Female Genital Mutilation Have Health Benefits? The Problem with Medicalizing Morality
By Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp) * Please note: this piece was originally published in Quillette Magazine. Four members of the Dawoodi Bohra sect of Islam living in Detroit, Michigan have recently been indicted on charges of female genital mutilation (FGM). This is the first time the US government has prosecuted an “FGM” case since a federal law was passed in […]
Can We Trust Research in Science and Medicine?
By Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp) Readers of the JME Blog might be interested in this series of short videos in which I discuss some of the major ongoing problems with research ethics and publication integrity in science and medicine. How much of the published literature is trustworthy? Why is peer review such a poor quality control mechanism? How can we judge […]
Writers Whose Expertise is Deplorably Low
Something popped up on my twitter feed the other day: this document from Oxford’s philosophy department. (I’m not sure quite what it is. Brochure? In-house magazine? Dunno. It doesn’t really matter, though.) In it, there’s a striking passage from Jeff McMahan’s piece on practical ethics: Even though what is variously referred to as ‘practical ethics’ or […]
Autism, Mental Illness, Euthanasia and the WaPo
There was a piece in the Washington Post the other day with a striking headline: Where the Prescription for Autism can be Death. Normally, if we’re saying that the prescription for x is y, we mean to say that y is being suggested as a treatment for x. Painkillers are the prescription for a bad back, a steroid cream the prescription […]
My One Appearance in “Cosmo”…
… and they go and screw it up. A few weeks (months?) ago, I got a call from Cosmopolitan to ask if I’d talk about home-testing kits for genetics – stuff like what 23andMe offers. We talked, and I like to think that I said something useful… and promptly forgot all about it, until just now, […]
This could get Personal
And so 23andMe has launched in the UK. For those not familiar with it, 23andMe allows individuals to swab themselves and have their genome analysed, at a cost of £125. The company is offering to generate a report covering about a hundred traits, giving information on a range of potentially important to fun things: the list […]
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 […]
What should we Think about Belgium’s Child Euthanasia Law?
With any luck, the nuts real-world work schedule of the past few months* will begin to ease in a few days, so I should be able to start blogging more frequently soon; but I thought I’d take a moment out from writing jurisprudence lectures to do some thinking out loud about Belgium’s recent change to […]