Post authors: Dean Fergusson, Monica Taljaard and Charles Weijer [authors listed alphabetically] Paper: Thinking clearly about the FIRST trial: addressing ethical challenges in cluster randomised trials of policy interventions involving health providers Recently, members of our research team published an ethical analysis of the Flexibility in Duty Hour Requirements for Surgical Trainees (FIRST) trial in the Journal […]
Latest articles
Impact Factors and Ethics
The news that the Journal of Medical Ethics now has an impact factor of 1.889 is a commendation for those who have contributed to the journal’s success over recent years. It reflects the efforts of the editorial team led by Julian Savulescu, Tom Douglas and Dominic Wilkinson to maintain consistently high editorial standards and ensure the journal covered […]
Conflicts of duty: What do they mean?
Guest Post Author: Andreas Eriksen, ARENA, Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway; SPS, Centre for the Study of Professions, Oslo and Akershus University College, Oslo, Norway Paper: Conflicting duties and restitution of the trusting relationship Medical professionals constantly face hard cases in their interaction with patients, colleagues, and the public. They are torn between different considerations and exposed to seemingly […]
What Makes an Emergency?
By Iain Brassington Stanley Cavell died a few days ago. He is, I suspect, not widely known among medical ethicists, and is cited less. Fair enough: medical ethics wasn’t his thing. It’s a shame, though, because his work did strike me as being worth getting to know. This is not to say that I was familiar […]
The Williams Review: Unlikely to reassure doctors concerned about gross negligence manslaughter law
Guest Author: Nathan Hodson, Foundation Doctor, University Hospitals of Leicester. A rapid policy review of medical gross negligence manslaughter was announced by Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Jeremy Hunt, in February 2018. Last week, barely four months later, Professor Sir Norman Williams delivered the report. Its remit was limited to investigating the […]
Guest Post: The eternal life of the biobank participant
Authors: Maria Stuifbergen, Lars Ursin Paper: The Ethics of dead participants: policy recommendations for biobank research Have you ever been operated at a hospital, donated blood, or participated in a health survey? Then you might have agreed to let health information and tissue samples from you be stored in a research biobank. You gave your […]
Guest Post: pathology incidental findings in the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project
Authors: Nicole C. Lockhart, Carol J. Weil, Latarsha J. Carithers, Susan E. Koester, A. Roger Little, Simona Volpi, Helen M. Moore, Benjamin E. Berkman Paper: Development of a consensus approach for return of pathology incidental findings in the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project In 2010, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched a research program […]
Guest Post: Biological children: an innocent wish?
Article: I love my children: am I racist? On the wish to be biologically related to one’s children Author: Ezio Di Nucci, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Is it morally legitimate to want biological children? There is a general argument about the legitimacy of bringing new people into this world; but there is also a more specific […]
Guest Post: Ethical arguments for access to abortion services in the Republic of Ireland: recent developments in the public discourse.
Authors: Joan McCarthy, Katherine O’Donnell, Louise Campbell, Dolores Dooley Paper: Ethical arguments for access to abortion services in the Republic of Ireland: recent developments in the public discourse Some people argue that abortion is immoral, yet others don’t think so. Some think that abortion is immoral in general, and in the abstract, and yet judge that […]
Guest Post: Transgressing nature? Ethics and artificial gametes
Authors: Anna Smajdor, Daniela Cutas and Tuija Takala Article: Artificial gametes, the unnatural and the artefactual Increasingly, science offers new ways for human beings to design, create and control living organisms. Among other avenues of research, work towards the creation of ‘artificial’ (or, as they used to be called, ‘synthetic’) gametes has attracted considerable media attention […]