The comments moderation system here has changed over the last few days and I don’t know how to work it yet. If a comment you’ve tried to make since about Friday has disappeared, could you let me know via the email address in my profile? I worry about this because we usually get 5 or […]
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Pharmaceutical Prohibition: as Successful as Ever
An item on Sky news the other day caught my attention. It concerned a new wave of legal highs being manufactured in China. The thrust of the report is that, in the wake of mephedrone having been banned a few weeks ago, enterprising Chinese chemists are working on a new set of chemicals designed to […]
Latest Statistics on Abortion in England and Wales…
… available here. […]
On the Lack of Socialised Healthcare
It’s very easy for a European to feel very smug about socialised medicine. Maybe the American system isn’t as bad as all that. Maybe we should be a bit more open about its merits. And maybe we should, in the process, ignore cases like that of JoAnn Knutson. Knutson was 72, and had a fall […]
It is official – Ethicists will still be here in 20 years time
The UK government sponsored science web-site for young people Science: [So what? So everything] has paid some futurologists to come up with 20 new jobs that will exist in 20 years time. Among the nano-medics and avatar managers you can also find the ‘New science’ ethicist’ described in the following way: “‘New science’ ethicist As […]
This may be the last post I ever make on this blog…
Saturday morning, 30th January 2010, I – along with many other people – will be taking a massive overdose. As it happens, I’ll be doing so in a seminar room at the Wellcome Trust, so there will probably be lots of medical sorts nearby. I’ll tell them not to intervene. I may even encourage them to […]
Obituary – Dr Jennifer Gunning
It is with great sorrow that I bring you news of the death of Dr Jennifer Gunning last week. Jenny was my colleague for more than 5 years at Cardiff University and was instrumental in setting up the Cardiff Centre for Ethics, Law and Society (CCELS). Jenny was educated as a structural biologist and later went […]
A Fish on a Petri Dish
Not so long ago, I heard a research scientist talking about the work he was doing and its context in the discipline. He was looking at a particular set of genes that were implicated in cancer, and was interested in manipulating those genes as a means of controlling tumor formation. He wanted to work on […]
Protecting Innocent Lives?
Last spring, George Tiller was killed. (I was going to say murdered, or assassinated, but both of those are morally and legally weighted…) Tiller was one of a very small community of doctors in the US willing to give late-term abortions, and it was for this that he was shot. Scott Roeder is currently on […]
Sic transit gloria DECODE
You may remember an Icelandic company called DECODE that, way back in the last decade wanted to collect DNA samples from the complete Icelandic population, link them with health data and perform amazing gene-epidemiological studies that would revolutionise medicine. Many investors will certainly remember DECODE which, at its peak had a market value in the […]