Bioethics Briefing Book

The Hastings Center has produced Birth to Death and Bench to Clinic: The Hastings Center Bioethics Briefing Book for Journalists, Policymakers, and Campaigns It contains 36 overviews of issues in bioethics of high public interest, such as abortion, health care reform, human and sports enhancement, organ transplantation, personalized medicine, medical error, and stem cells. The […]

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It’s oh-so Quiet…

As some of you may have heard, Wired magazine is suggesting that the age of the blog may already be over.  And the level of activity here over the past couple of weeks may have lent credence to that supposition. Full service will be resumed soon – it just seems like Søren, David and I are […]

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A fishy affair

By David Hunter Writing in his usual uncompromising style Ben Goldacre describes the latest carry-ons in the “trial” carried out in Durham by the Council on whether fish oils improve GCSE performance: You’ll remember the Durham fish oil “trial” story, possibly the greatest example of scientific incompetence ever documented from a local authority. Initially they […]

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The ethics of abortion – De ja vue or necessary debate?

This summer I realised with some horror that it was 20 years ago I first presented a paper at an international medical ethics conference while still being a medical student. That paper was on who should control the fate of aborted foetuses and the paper I gave the year after at the same conference was […]

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Hot on the newsstands…

The latest JME is out today… and I’d just like to draw everyone’s attention to the paper on facial allograft transplantation by Ben White and some random bloke who needs a haircut.  This isn’t because I had anything to do with it, but because (a) it’s very good, and (b) it’s based on Ben’s dissertation […]

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On Hospital Ethicists

At the beginning of August, Dan Sokol wrote a piece for the BBC news site in which he touched on the place of hospital-employed ethicists.  Apparently, this is a reasonably common position in the States.  I used to be of the opinion that hospital ethicists would be a good idea – when I was a student, […]

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