In 2021, a survey was conducted among doctors and nurses at Landspítali Iceland University Hospital (LIUH) regarding their views on medical assistance in dying (MAID) and the underlying arguments, the inclusion criteria and modality of implementation. Surveys on identically defined study groups in 1995 and 2010 were used for comparison. The survey was sent to 357 doctors and 516 nurses working at LIUH. It included seven questions and several subquestions. Participants’ answers were compared by profession, age group, and specialisation status. (...) Descriptive and inferential statistics were used. A total of 135 doctors (38% response rate) and 103 nurses (20% response rate) answered the survey, representing 27% of the study group. A total of 145 (61%) participants were positive about MAID, with the most common argument being patient autonomy. The 95% margin of error for this view was ± 6.2%. Compared to 19% in 2010, support for MAID had tripled in 2021 (p < 0.05). Approximately 18% of participants did not support MAID of any kind, mostly due to arguments regarding preserving life or inconsistencies with the role of health care professionals. Finally, 19% of participants were uncertain of their views towards MAID, mostly due to the high level of complexity of the matter. Compared to previous surveys, a large increase in positive attitudes towards MAID was observed among this study population. The results revealed the reasons for participants’ attitudes; weighing patients’ dignity/autonomy against professionals’ duty to “not to kill”/palliate and showing some differences between professions. (shrink)

In search of human uniqueness Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9472-6 Authors Elsa Addessi, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Via Ulisse Aldrovandi, 16/b, 00197 Rome, Italy Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Este trabajo estudia los aportes y limitaciones del concepto de «régimen farmacopornográfico» propuesto por Paul B. Preciado junto con los pilares que lo constituyen: el farmacopoder y el pornopoder. El análisis será complementado con las aportaciones de otros autores, destacando las de Judith Butler, filósofe de referencia para el autor, cuyas teorías sobre el género y el cuerpo han influido de forma indiscutible en las posteriores investigaciones sobre la identidad. A través del estudio del pensamiento de ambos será posible llegar (...) a una mejor comprensión de lo que Paul B. Preciado denomina «farmacopornocapitalismo» y también dirimir las aportaciones y límites de la teoría del autor. Su trabajo ha sido indiscutiblemente revolucionario en materia de género e identidad, poniendo en tela de juicio categorías naturalizadas y exhibiendo las dinámicas biopolíticas de opresión y discriminación que encarnan nuestra existencia. Reconociendo esto, también debemos poner sobre la mesa los límites en su planteamiento, donde algunas veces la provocación le lleva a afirmaciones que difieren del objetivo final de su teoría: mostrar cómo actúa el control en los cuerpos y encontrar una salida a este. (shrink)

To develop effective public health management strategies, it is necessary to account for the viewpoints of all stakeholders. Thus, anthropological approaches can potentially inform strategies for preventing and managing zoonotic diseases. Here, we use Q fever as a starting point for exploring how small ruminant farmers perceive the reality of microbes by disentangling the farmers’ often subtle relationships with their livestock, disease, and the world in general. We found that livestock farmers feel like they exist in the borderlands between two (...) worlds: the non-naturalistic World A, characterised by long timespans and complex relationships with non-humans, and the naturalistic World B, characterised by short timespans and the control of non-humans. The occurrence of diseases leads to tension and shifts between the worlds, depending on how much farmers entrust World B with health risk management and relations with non-humans. Significant or complete delegation of these responsibilities may result in a sense of unease and dispossession, particularly when World B fails to provide productive solutions. Whether farmers view Q fever as mysterious and threatening is also highly dependent on the degree of health risk delegation. Overall, the agent that causes Q fever is perceived in one of two ways: as a fearsome pathogen or a normal denizen in the farm’s ecosystem. These results have implications beyond Q fever and clearly illustrate the concept of the “microbial turn”, which emphasizes the plurality and ambivalence of the relationships between humans and microbes. (shrink)

The diversity of nanotechnologies and of the governance challenges that their applications raise calls for exploration and learning across different cases. We present an Upstream Oversight Assessment (UOA) of expected benefits and potential harms of nanoparticles made of a synthetic polymer (PLGA) to improve vaccines for farmed salmon. Suggested by Jennifer Kuzma and colleagues, an UOA may help identify and prioritise research needs, and it may support evaluations of the adequacy of relevant existing regulatory frameworks. In this work, the UOA (...) approach is modified and supported with elements from the uncertainty analysis framework developed by Warren Walker and colleagues. Empirically, we draw on relevant available published literature and insights generated in an ongoing nanoparticle salmon vaccine project, in which one of the authors participates. Nanotechnologies have not previously been encountered in the regulatory context of fish vaccines, which in part raises unique challenges due to prospective large scale vaccine use in semi-open aquatic systems. Strengthened through cooperation between ELSA and technology researchers we found the UOA useful for an early mapping of benefits and concerns, and for identifying areas in need of further research prior to a nanoparticle based salmon vaccine is developed and taken into use. We consider our approach to represent one among several complementing initiatives that seek to contribute to early stage evaluations of possible negative side effects, broadly conceived, in order to facilitate a more robust nanotechnology development. (shrink)

Nanotechnology is an important platform technology which will add new features like improved biocompatibility, smaller size, and more sophisticated electronics to neuro-implants improving their therapeutic potential. Especially in view of possible advantages for patients, research and development of nanotechnologically improved neuro implants is a moral obligation. However, the development of brain implants by itself touches many ethical, social and legal issues, which also apply in a specific way to devices enabled or improved by nanotechnology. For researchers developing nanotechnology such issues (...) are rather distant from their daily work in the lab, but as soon as they use their materials or devices in medical applications such as therapy of brain diseases they have to be aware of and deal with them. This paper is intended to raise sensitivity for the ethical, legal and social aspects (ELSA) involved in applying nanotechnology in brain implants or other devices by highlighting the short term problems of testing and clinical trials within the existing regulatory frameworks (A), the short and medium-term questions of risks in the application of the devices (B) and the long-term perspectives related to problems of enhancement (C). To identify and address such issues properly nanotechnologists should involve ethical, legal and social experts and regulatory bodies in their research as early as possible. This will help to remove pressure from regulatory bodies, to settle public concern and to prevent non-acceptable developments for the benefit of the patients. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June Jordan, (...) Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized, in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself... (shrink)

Modern science developed in the interflow of culture between west and east. Combing of pratice technology with philosophic thoughts formed experimental method. Holistic views contacting atomism produced system theory. System thoughts are applicated in the science and engineering of biosystems, and the cencepts of system biomedicine (Kamada T.1992), systems biology (Zieglgansberger W, Tolle TR.1993), system bioengineering and system genetics (Zeng BJ. 1994) were established. From positive to synthetic thoughts, philosophy have been developed ontology, cosmology, organism theories. Structurity is structure logic (...) system founded on entity, develop, exist axioms, tolerance, adaptation, fluctuate, interweave, transform theorems and integrate, adaptation, construct laws. Structurity be discussed on the cosmos, life, culture system, creation, hologram theories of structure ontology, construct mutation, simi-structure organism and entity emergence, symbol implication. From the relation of structure, function and development, the structurity put forward the cycle, spiral, triangle structure stability patterns of self-organization in structure complement each other and stratification, functional couple and interflow bounds growth, coordinativetransformation and holographic symmetry. (shrink)

For German townsmen, life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was characterized by a culture of arms, with urban citizenry representing the armed power of the state. This book investigates how men were socialized to the martial ethic from all sides, and how masculine identity was confirmed with blades and guns.

In 2014, the editorial board of BMC Medical Ethics came together to devise sections for the journal that would give structure to the journal help ensure that authors’ research is matched to the most appropriate editors and help readers to find the research most relevant to them. The editorial board decided to take a practical approach to devising sections that dealt with the challenges of content management. After that, we started thinking more theoretically about how one could go about classifying (...) the field of medical ethics. This editorial elaborates and reflects on the practical approach that we took at the journal, then considers an alternative theoretically derived approach, and reflects on the possibilities, challenges and value of classifying the field more broadly. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Sensorimotor Direct Realism: How We Enact Our World” by Michael Beaton. Upshot: This commentary is broadly sympathetic to the claims made in the target article. I start by questioning whether we can have direct access to an external reality in such a way that our experience is not intrinsically private. I then suggest that the argument for direct realism presented here is inconclusive with regard to whether external objects play a causal or a constitutive (...) role. (shrink)