How should we talk to children about research? And how should we go about recruiting them to studies? For children to become research participants, their parents must consent. Regulation states children should also give assent themselves, to as great extent as possible. Our ethics committees require us to provide them with age-appropriate information. Health care […]
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Some genetic diseases do not develop in the child unless both parents happen to have the same gene. Parents can be healthy and unaware that they have the same non-dominant disease gene. In these cases, the risk that their child develops the disease is 25 percent. Preconception expanded carrier screening could be offered to entire […]
Continue readingSuppose that you want to learn to speak a language, but the course is overloaded by grammatical terminology. During the lessons, you hardly hear any of the words that belong to the language you want to learn. They drown in technical, grammatical terms. It is as if you had come to a course on general […]
Continue readingShould researchers inform research participants if they happen to discover individual genetic risks of disease? Yes, many would say, if the information is helpful to the participants. However, the value of complex genetic risk information for individuals is uncertain. Jennifer Viberg Johansson suggests that this uncertainty needs to be acknowledged by both geneticists and ethicists. […]
Continue readingHow should we interpret the sequence of author names in academic publications? Does it inform us about how much each author contributed to the publication? After reading an article on the topic by Gert Helgesson and Stefan Eriksson, I realize that authorship order is a very disorderly matter. The first and last positions are often […]
Continue readingA new article highlights ethical challenges that nurses face in their profession when more and more clinical trials are conducted on cancer patients. Nursing alone is stressful. Studies have shown how heavy workload and being pressed for time can cause moral blindness and emotional immunization among nurses. In clinical trials, the situation is even more […]
Continue readingMichele Farisco at CRB has written an interesting post for the BMC blog on medicine. He says that “whereas ethical analyses of disorders of consciousness traditionally focus on residual awareness, there may be a case to be made for the ethical relevance of the retained unawareness.” Interested to read more? Here is a link to […]
Continue readingSometimes, physicians have to decide that a cancer patient has such a poor prognosis that he or she should not be resuscitated through cardiopulmonary rescue, if discovered with cardiac arrest. The procedure is violent and would in these cases cause unnecessary suffering. The situation is stressful for the healthcare team no matter which decision is […]
Continue readingThe honorable discipline philosophy is hardly anything we associate with groundbreaking research and innovation. Perhaps it is time we began to see a connection. To begin with, we can let go of the image of philosophy as an honorable discipline. Instead, let us talk about the spirit of philosophy. People who think for themselves, as […]
Continue readingWe dismiss the magician’s claim to be in touch with the spirit world. We dismiss the priest’s claim to be in touch with the divine. We do not believe in supernatural contact with a purer world beyond this one! Nevertheless, similar claims permeate our enlightened rationalist tradition. Even philosophers promised contact with a purer sphere. […]
Continue readingTHE ETHICS BLOG
A research blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)
We write for researchers, healthcare staff, officials, politicians, patient organisations and anyone interested in ethics.
We comment on the research ethics and bioethics debate and discuss our own research. We address issues from current debates in the research community and in the press.
MEET THE EDITOR
Pär Segerdahl is editor of the Ethics Blog and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics.