Engelhardt Lecture, Cambridge: Can Someone do me a Favour?

Tristram Engelhardt is giving a lecture entitled “Moral Pluralism and the Crisis of Secular Bioethics: Why Orthodox Christian Bioethics has the Solution” at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies at Wesley House in Cambridge on the 3rd June.  It’s a provoking title – and my guess is that I’d probably disagree with just about every word after “Good evening”.  Notwithstanding this – […]

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Musical Swine Flu!

This does exactly what it says on the tin.  Stephan Zielinski has set swine flu to music: The algorithm I used is a bit complicated, but just in case you’re curious: since the gene is expressed as a surface protein antibodies can sense, it’s considered as a string of amino acids.  Each beat corresponds to […]

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Obligatory Topical Swine Flu Post

The appearance of Swine Flu over the past couple of days is the sort of thing that provides ample food for thought among ethicists, particularly public health ethicists.  One perennial question, for example, concerns exactly what governments ought to do to protect their populations from infection – is spending on flu vaccines a good way […]

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In ur genez, clozin’ ur futurz

We all know the “open future” argument against genetic modification of humans: that it’s part of being a human that we are apparently in control of our own lives and that a parent who tried to impose a “model” on us would thereby wrong us.  I’ve never been sure, in all honesty, whether this tells […]

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