By Kyoko L. Yoda “It’s 10pm, do you know where your children are?” The Atlanta Child Murders (1979-1981) are not simply history to me. I was a child in suburban Atlanta then, and I remember the fear surrounding the disappearances and murders. I remember Atlanta news reporter, Monica Kaufman, saying the above haunting phrase every […]
Latest articles
Should we create “digital duplicates” of real people?
By Paul Jurcys, Clint Hurshman, Cristina Voinea, William D’Alessandro, Faisal Feroz, Soraj Hongladarom, Atay Kozlovski, Benjamin Lange, Pengbo Liu, Jerry Menikoff, Sven Nyholm, Anna Puzio, Paula Sweeney, Bhavya G. Sharma, Eric Schwitzgebel, Constantin Vica, Daniel Weissglass, Julian Savulescu, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Sebastian Porsdam Mann and Brian D. Earp Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, we […]
One Health and the Marburg outbreak in Rwanda
By Zohar Lederman As the global community frantically monitors the Ebola Virus Disease outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we are reminded yet again of our shared vulnerabilities, both as individuals and as a globalized community. Often in the face of microbes, individuals’ immunity is only one among several factors that determine the […]
The most effective intervention that nobody recommends
By Nicolas Marty and Kevin Vezirian In 2023, Science reported that as many as nine in ten laboratory animal personnel will experience compassion fatigue at some point in their careers. For a workplace problem of that magnitude, occupational health offers a standard instrument: the hierarchy of controls, which ranks responses to a hazard from most […]
The neglected ethical issues in clinical practice
By Daniel Sokol When I was a student, some time around the Jurassic period, a professor at All Souls College, Oxford told me that the key to publishing successful articles was finding a good idea. A good idea or topic, he said, could offset even mediocre writing skills. At first, finding these ideas was a […]
What does it mean to be born?
By Allison Milbrath, Ilona Cenolli, and Zaina Mahmoud What does it mean to be born? The answer to this question, and why it matters, might not be as straightforward as it first appears. Our new paper explores how the speculative development of ectogestation-enabling technologies (EETs), which aim to support human gestation outside the body by […]
Bioethics after MacIntyre
By Morten Magelssen and Søren Holm “Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched (…) Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and […]
AI companies have hijacked academic norms
By Brandon Yates Most people, upon becoming the subject of a Retraction Watch article, might wish to diminish that fact or move on quickly to try and course correct. I’m in the peculiar position of having a Retraction Watch article that largely exonerated my work from the scrutiny that it had faced. It came into […]
Will history repeat itself? The Stanford Prison Experiment
By Brianne Helfrich and Mariah Chobany Netflix just announced that they will be re-creating the Stanford Prison Experiment as a reality tv show (titled The New Stanford Prison Experiment) airing this October. The six 45-minute episode series involve 30 participants, and this news has sparked online viral debate and disbelief with many expressing strong concerns […]
When sentience becomes a moving target: The case of xenocortical mice
by Andrea Lavazza Kaganovsky and colleagues genetically modified mice so that much of the cerebral cortex and hippocampus would not develop. They then transplanted human neural organoids into the space left vacant. This is a remarkable scientific achievement, intended to provide a living model for studying brain development and disease and for developing therapies. It […]