This is a follow-up on my earlier post, Questionable questionnaires. In the article that I blogged about, Kevin P. Weinfurt provided two cautions to empirical bioethicists who are using questionnaires. I summarize them: Egocentrism: the all-too-human self-centeredness of the bioethicist who spent years thinking about particular ethical issues in particular ways, and who designs questionnaires […]
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In my philosophical reading experience it is striking that some thinkers crack really good jokes. They are humorous and I laugh with them. Others are comical in their unyielding seriousness: difficult not to make jokes of. Humor is not exactly what you think of when you think of philosophy. Hardly anyone reads philosophy to get […]
Continue readingQuestionnaires are increasingly frequent in bioethics. They can provide information about how ethical issues are real for the parties concerned: for patients, for families, for nurses, for physicians, for research participants, for donors… Questionnaires can counteract professional isolationism where bioethicists believe they know exactly which issues should concern people, and on the basis of this “expertise” export […]
Continue readingWe tend to hold individual athletes responsible for doping behavior. This makes it tempting to assume that if we are to fight doping in sports, we need to more efficiently identify these individuals and impose sanctions on them. But what if doping is a phenomenon with many ramifications? What if doping isn’t invented by individual […]
Continue readingUnless you have an education in law, it is almost impossible to find your way through the regulatory landscape of European biobanking, or to understand the motives behind the proposed new general data protection regulation. However, a helpful overview and discussion can be found in this article by Evert-Ben van Veen: “Europe and tissue research: […]
Continue readingIf you allow researchers to do brain imaging on you for some research purpose, and they incidentally discover a tumor, or a blood vessel with thin walls, you probably want them to inform you about this finding. There are no doubts about the finding; the risks are well-known; it is actionable. Suppose instead that you […]
Continue readingBiobanks make contributing to medical research easy: easier than when the research is performed on living human bodies. I simply donate my sample and consent to storage for certain kinds of future research, under specified conditions like that the research is ethically reviewed and the sample is coded so that it cannot be traced to […]
Continue readingThe Helsinki Declaration is under revision. One suggested change concerns a paragraph about biobank and register-based research, which states: “For medical research using identifiable human material or data, physicians must normally seek consent for the collection, analysis, storage and/or reuse.” The paragraph currently continues with the following exceptions: “There may be situations where consent would be […]
Continue readingMy post last week tried to highlight a tension between human existence and biological life, using Henrietta Lacks as an example. She was a unique human being, existing in a human world; but the HeLa cells obtained from her cancer tumor function in laboratories all over the world as “bio-objects” representing biological life more generally. […]
Continue readingA new article reconsiders Henrietta Lacks and the immortal HeLa cells that were obtained from her rare cancer tumor in the 1950s; cells that still replicate and are used in biomedical laboratories all over the world: “Representing life as opposed to being: the bio-objectification process of the HeLa cells and its relation to personalized medicine” The […]
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.