By David Hunter Hattip to Nathan Emmerich for speculating about this on Facebook and then blogging about it here: Organ Donation: Why isn’t there an App for that? There are a number of ways you can volunteer to donate your organs when you die in the UK, you can sign up when you get a […]
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A Very Small Amount of Relevance
Some very strange papers have just appeared in Bioethics regarding homeopathy. Not so long ago, the journal published a paper by Kevin Smith that advanced the claim that homeopathy is not only ineffective, but ethically problematic. The position taken was that homeopathy “ought to be actively rejected by healthcare professionals”, and that it is in fact ethically […]
CFP: Wellbeing and Public Policy
This may be of interest to readers… MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory – Ninth Annual Conference Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT), University of Manchester 5th – 7th September 2012 Workshop on Well-being and Public Policy: Call for Abstracts David Cameron, in a recent speech on introducing national measures of well-being to inform public policy, […]
Bioethics – a discipline without a natural home?
By David Hunter This post is inspired by this excellent and challenging article by Carl Elliot where he asks why should students study bioethics at scandal plagued institutions such as his own University of Minnesota (I said it was challenging). One of the problem he notes is that bioethicists in scandal plagued departments such as […]
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. […]
Drugs and Sex – or Drugs and Less Sex
Two slightly curious stories about drugs and sex. Or, rather, two stories about drugs and sex curiously juxtaposed. First, this story from Sunday’s Independent was inspired by this paper in The Journal of Sexual Medicine. Quite how much weight we should put on the JSM‘s paper is a moot point – it’s a case study involving one […]
Vaccination, and Policies for Enforcement
Rob Crilly reported in the Telegraph a couple of days ago that Pakistan is to pursue a policy of fining people who do not have their children vaccinated against polio. Now, at the time I write this, I can’t find this story or anything like it replicated elsewhere – Dawn, which is Pakistan’s biggest English-language […]
A Small Solution for a Big Problem?
BioNews asked me to write something about Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg and Rebacca Roache’s paper on engineering humanity to minimise global warming. I’d been meaning to for a while, so this was the prod I needed. Anyway: my take on their paper is here; but I thought I’d also reproduce it on this blog. What […]
Cancer drugs and magic money fountains of youth
By David Hunter The McMillian Cancer trust has published a report described on the radio as I drove to Manchester this morning as a damming and shameful report about the NHS and discrimination. The report alleges that more than 14 thousand elderly cancer sufferers are allowed to die in the UK because of age based […]
Raised Glasses to Raised Prices?
The proposal that there should be a minimum 40p/ unit price for alcohol, announced last week, has been broadly welcomed. Not universally, but broadly. There has been some dissent – but, by and large, it doesn’t seem to have been particularly vocal. From a ethicist’s perspective, the objection that we might expect to hear articulated […]