You may have seen in the news recently the story of Jamie and Gladys Scott, two sisters in Mississippi serving a life prison sentence for armed robbery. Jamie requires dialysis, and has been offered parole on medical grounds; Gladys has been granted parole on condition that she agree to donate a kidney to her sister. (The […]
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Book Review: Norman Cantor, “After We Die”
Washington DC: Georgetown UP, 2010; 372+x pp “Here’s the story; it starts at the end,” says the dead narrator at the beginning of Ali Smith’s novel Hotel World. It’s a bit of a cliche to say that the dead have stories to tell, but they do have stories to be told about them. Among them […]
Hate the Sin, Operate on the Sinner
There’s a story in the BMJ about a German surgeon who refused to operate on an anaesthetised patient because he – the patient – had a swastika tattoo. The surgeon, it’s reported, was a Jew who couldn’t find it in his conscience to operate on anyone with Nazi sympathies. The head of the German Medical […]
Two Fathers… and an Inflated Role for Genes?
This is interesting: researchers in Texas are reporting that they’ve generated viable mice with two genetic fathers. The science makes my head hurt, but PZ Myers gives a decent précis (although it’s still a bit long to reproduce here, and I’m not going to attempt even to give a précis of the précis). The technology […]
Conference Report: Consent and Organ Donation Seminar, Keele
Guest post by Sorcha Uí Chonnachtaigh On Thursday, 9 December, the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele hosted a Wellcome funded seminar entitled “Consent and Organ Donation” to coincide with the final lecture in a series on organ donation by visiting Leverhulme Professor Martin Wilkinson. Martin’s lecture on Wednesday evening (8 December), “Reforms for the […]
Is it OK to Laugh?
Guy Francis has a website and a YouTube channel. Some of the stuff on his YouTube channel is him singing along to pop songs. What’s noteworthy is that Francis also has quite severe Tourette’s syndrome. This makes his karaoke somewhat unique. (For a sample, take a look at this. It’s almost certainly Not Safe for […]
My Homunculus Made Me Do It!
Many readers will be familiar with the “Sokal Hoax”, in which a nonsensical paper was submitted to, and accepted by, the journal Social Text, thereby demonstrating the vacuity of at least some PoMo theorising. Well, John MacLachlan has repeated the feat, having had a patently absurd abstract accepted for presentation at a conference on integrative […]
Assisted Dying Killed off in Scotland
Members of the Scottish Parliament have overwhelmingly rejected Margo MacDonald’s Assistance in Dying Bill, by 85 votes to 16 – which is about as crushing as I think you can get. The Scotsman reports Nicola Sturgeon as saying that I find myself particularly concerned and fundamentally concerned about the difficulty I think would always and […]
MSF writes to the EU
One of the things we’re interested in here in Manchester is the problem of how to reconcile the need to incentivise and reward research in the medical sector with the palpable need in the developing world for affordable medicines. This quandry is at the heart of the Manchester Manifesto. A lot of emphasis has been […]
Blogging hiatus
Apologies for the drop-off in blogging rates recently: I’ve been snowed under with real work and stuff. I – or Søren or David – wi’ll be back on track in the near future. 🙂 […]