By David Hunter Those outside of Australia are probably at best peripherally aware of the furore that the current budget announced by the new government last week is causing – it is in many ways an unsurprising budget for a broadly rightwing socially conservative government and quite reminiscent of the policies the Con-Dems have brought […]
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While We’re Talking about Ambiguous Sex
So: what is one to make of Conchita Wurst? I’ve not heard the song that won Eurovision this year, but I’m willing to bet that the world would be a better place if every entrant had been thrown into the Køge Bay before a single note was struck. But that might just be me. Writing in the Telegraph, Brendan […]
Athletic Sex
There was an interesting article published in the BMJ a few days ago on the subject of athletes and their sex. Here’s the opening gambit: The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and international sports federations have recently introduced policies requiring medical investigation of women athletes known or suspected to have hyperandrogenism. Women who are found to have […]
Rescuing the Duty to Rescue
Guest post by Tina Rulli and Joseph Millum It is commonly thought that individuals have a moral duty to rescue others in peril. Bioethicists have leveraged this duty to rescue for a variety of purposes—including to criticize the use of placebo controls in trials in developing countries; to defend duties of researchers to return urgent […]
Resurrectionism at Easter
There’s a provocative piece in a recent New Scientist about what happens to unclaimed bodies after death – about, specifically, the practice of coopting them for research purposes. Gareth Jones, who wrote it, points out that the practice has been going on for centuries – but that a consequence of the way it’s done is that it tends […]
This will hurt a bit
By David Hunter In a piece titled in a fashion to simultaneously win the internet and cause every male reader to wince, Michelle Meyer asks “Whose Business Is It If You Want a Bee To Sting Your Penis? Should IRBs Be Policing Self-Experimentation?” In this piece she describes the case of a Cornell graduate student […]
Twitter Speaks Truth
I know I should be concentrating on my marking at the moment, but I’ve just seen this at the top of my twitter feed, and… I feel that it vindicates my little break. […]
Oh, and while we’re talking about media hype…
… there’s this, from last week’s Independent: Thousands of unborn foetuses incinerated to heat UK hospitals The bodies of more than 15,000 unborn foetuses have been incinerated in the UK, an investigation has found, with some treated as “clinical waste” and others burned to heat hospitals. The practice was carried out by 27 NHS trusts, […]
Who’s the SilLIer?
It’s funny how things come together sometimes. A few months ago, I mentioned a slightly strange JAMA paper that suggested that non-compliance with treatment regimes should be treated as a treatable condition in its own right. The subtext there was fairly clear: that there’s potential scope for what we might term “psychiatric mission-creep”, whereby behaviour gets […]
Multiplex Parenting: in vitro Gametogenesis and the Generations to Come
Guest Post by César Palacios-González, John Harris and Giuseppe Testa; for the full paper, click here. Recent biotechnology breakthroughs suggest that functional human gametes could soon be created in vitro. While the ethical debate on the uses of in vitro generated gametes (IVG) was originally constrained by the fact that they could be derived only from embryonic […]