Book reviewed in this article: The New Health Care For Profit: Doctors and Hospitals in a Competitive Environment. Edited by Bradford H. Gray The Healing Mission and the Business Ethic. By Robert M. Cunningham The Medical Industrial Complex. By Stanley Wohl.

The contributors to The Moral of the Story, all preeminent political theorists, are unified by their concern with the instructive power of great literature. This thought-provoking combination of essays explores the polyvalent moral and political impact of classic world literatures on public ethics through the study of some of its major figures-including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Penn Warren, and Dostoevsky. Positing the uniqueness of literature's ability to promote dialogue on salient moral and intellectual (...) virtues, editor Henry T. Edmonson III has culled together a wide-ranging exploration of such fundamental concerns as the abuse of authority, the nature of good leadership, the significance of "middle class virtues" and the needs of adolescents. This collection reinvigorates the study of classic literature as an endeavor that is not only personally intellectually satisfying, but also an inimitable and unique way to enrich public discourse. (shrink)

Background: Informed consent is essential for the ethical conduct of clinical research and is a culturally sensitive issue. But, a measurable Chinese version of the scale to evaluate the informed consent process has not yet been explored in the existing literature. Research objectives: This study aimed to develop and psychometrically test the Chinese version of the Informed Consent Process Scale. Research design: Back-translation was conducted to develop the Chinese version of the questionnaire. A cross-sectional survey was administered, after which an (...) exploratory factor analysis was conducted. Participants: We recruited a total of 375 participants who had experience in signing an informed consent form within the previous 3 years in Taiwan. Ethical considerations: This study was approved by two Institutional Review Boards and the autonomy of the participants was respected. Findings: The Chinese version of the Informed Consent Process Scale is composed of three factors with 23 items showing evidence of acceptable reliability and validity. Three major factors were extracted and labeled: Factor 1 – ‘Understanding of the research’, Factor 2 – ‘Trust and confidence’ and Factor 3 – ‘Doubt and uncertainty’. The three factors accounted for is 52.954 of the total variance with Cronbach’s α of.917. Discussion and conclusion: The finding corroborates previous studies showing that participants had too little understanding on the informed consent forms they signed and implied the need to clarify the critical points in clinical research. The psychometric results indicated good internal consistency and validity for this newly constructed instrument, and it was found worthy of conducting further testing and application. (shrink)

Geron recently announced that it had begun enrolling patients in the world's first-in-human clinical trial involving cells derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). This trial raises important questions regarding the future of hESC-based therapies, especially in spinal cord injury (SCI) patients. We address some safety and efficacy concerns with this research, as well as the ethics of fair subject selection. We consider other populations that might be better for this research: chronic complete SCI patients for a safety trial, subacute (...) incomplete SCI patients for an efficacy trial, and perhaps primary progressive multiple sclerosis (MS) patients for a combined safety and efficacy trial. (shrink)

We are living in an unprecedented era of biomedical revolution. Medicine is remaking humans, and controversy surrounds such topics as abortion, artificial organs, brain circuitry, eugenics, euthanasia, and gene therapy. At the same time, medical advances are posing complex ethical problems for both patients and professionals. The most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of its kind, Case Studies in Biomedical Ethics: Decision-Making, Principles, and Cases explores fundamental ethical questions arising from real situations faced by health professionals, patients, and others. Featuring a (...) wide range of more than 100 case studies drawn from current events, court cases, and physicians' experiences, the book is divided into three parts. Part I presents a basic framework for ethical decision-making in healthcare, covering such issues as separating evaluative questions from questions of fact; distinguishing between ethical and nonethical evaluations; and identifying the source of ethical judgments. Expanding upon this framework, Part II explains the ethical principles: beneficence and nonmaleficence, justice, respect for autonomy, veracity, fidelity, and avoidance of killing. Parts I and II provide students with the background to analyze the ethical dilemmas presented in Part III, which features cases on a broad spectrum of issues including abortion, genetics, mental health, confidentiality, health insurance, experimentation on humans, the right to refuse treatment, and death and dying. Each case is accompanied by the authors' commentary, which guides students in considering the issues. Ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in biomedical ethics, bioethics, and medical ethics, Case Studies in Biomedical Ethics incorporates opening text boxes in each chapter that cross-reference relevant cases in other chapters. It also includes an appendix of important ethical codes and a glossary of key terms. (shrink)

(1979). Some Observations on the Problems of Grading Examinations with Several Components: a reply to P. J. Squire. Educational Studies: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 225-230.

The article of Finlay et al. is an excellent example of identifying constraints in the development of the brain, and their implications on brain architecture in evolution. Here we further illustrate the importance of constraints by presenting a few examples of how a small number of biophysical mechanisms or even a single life history parameter can have an enormous impact on brain evolution.

In celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Beauchamp and Childress’s Principles of Biomedical Ethics, a review is undertaken to compare the lists of principles in various bioethical theories to determine the extent to which the various lists can be reconciled. Included are the single principle theories of utilitarianism, libertarianism, Hippocratism, and the theories of Pellegrino, Engelhardt, The Belmont Report, Beauchamp and Childress, Ross, Veatch, and Gert. We find theories all offering lists of principles numbering from one to (...) ten. Many of the differences can be reconciled, but some critical differences remain. (shrink)

The emergence of the “4th Industrial Revolution,” i.e. the convergence of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, advanced materials, and bioengineering technologies, could accelerate socioeconomic insecurities and anxieties or provide beneficial alternatives to the status quo. In the post-Covid-19 era, the entities that are best positioned to capitalize on these innovations are large firms, which use digital platforms and big data to orchestrate vast ecosystems of users and extract market share across industry sectors. Nonetheless, these technologies also have the potential (...) to democratize ownership, broaden political-economic participation, and reduce environmental harms. We articulate the potential sociotechnical pathways in this high-stakes crossroads by analyzing cellular agriculture, an exemplary 4th Industrial Revolution technology that synergizes computer science, biopharma, tissue engineering, and food science to grow cultured meat, dairy, and egg products from cultured cells and/or genetically modified yeast. Our exploration of this space involved multi-sited ethnographic research in both the cellular agriculture community and alternative economic organizations devoted to open source licensing, member-owned cooperatives, social financing, and platform business models. Upon discussing how these latter approaches could potentially facilitate alternative sociotechnical pathways in cellular agriculture, we reflect upon the broader implications of this work with respect to the 4th Industrial Revolution and the enduring need for public policy reform. (shrink)

An ascent routine (AR) allows a speaker to self-ascribe a given propositional attitude (PA) by redeploying the process that generates a corresponding lower level utterance. Thus, we may report on our beliefs about the weather by reporting (under certain constraints) on the weather. The chief criticism of my AR account of self-ascription, by Alvin Goldman and others, is that it covers few if any PA’s other than belief and offers no account of how we can attain reliability in identifying our (...) attitude as belief, desire, hope, etc., without presupposing some sort of recognition process. The criticism can be answered, but only by giving up a tacit—and wholly unnecessary—assumption that has influenced discussions of ascent routines. Abandoning the assumption allows a different account of ARs that avoids the criticism and even provides an algorithm for finding a corresponding lower level utterance for any PA. The account I give is supported by research on children’s first uses of a propositional attitude vocabulary. (shrink)

Medical ethics changed dramatically in the past 30 years because physicians and humanists actively engaged each other in discussions that sometimes led to confrontation and controversy, but usually have improved the quality of medical decision-making. Before then medical ethics had been isolated for almost two centuries from the larger philosophical, social, and religious controversies of the time. There was, however, an earlier period where leaders in medicine and in the humanities worked closely together and both fields were richer for it. (...) This volume begins with the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment when professors of medicine such as John Gregory, Edward Percival, and the American, Benjamin Rush, were close friends of philosophers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid. They continually exchanged views on matters of ethics with each other in print, at meetings of elite intellectual groups, and at the dinner table. Then something happened, physicians and humanists quit talking with each other. In searching for the causes of the collapse, this book identifies shifts in the social class of physicians, developments in medical science, and changes in the patterns of medical education. Only in the past three decades has the dialogue resumed as physicians turned to humanists for help just when humanists wanted their work to be relevant to real-life social problems. Again, the book asks why, finding answers in the shift from acute to chronic disease as the dominant pattern of illness, the social rights revolution of the 1960's, and the increasing dissonance between physician ethics and ethics outside medicine. The book tells the critical story of how the breakdown in communication between physicians and humanists occurred and how it was repaired when new developments in medicine together with a social revolution forced the leaders of these two fields to resume their dialogue. (shrink)

_Minds, Brains, Computers_ serves as both an historical and interdisciplinary introduction to the foundations of cognitive science.