ethics
grrlscientist | June 3, 2009tags: Humane Society of the United States, HSUS, H$U$, cloning food, terrorism, animals, pets, false advertising, streaming video
I have followed this video as it has been removed from YouTube and been suppressed several times due to legal bullying by the activist and terrorist organization, the Humane Society of the United States (H$U$). This investigative report, which appeared a couple weeks ago on WSB TV [channel 2 in Atlanta], reveals that H$U$ uses misinformation to trick the public into thinking they are donating funds to build local shelters for homeless pets, and to help rescue pets…
mikethemadbiologist | May 3, 2009One of the disturbing trends over the last decade, give or take, has been how ethical behavior has become synonymous with "a conviction overturned on appeal." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's ethical. With that, I give you Matthew Yglesias (boldface mine; italics original):
They're not actually saying that what they did was right. Rather, they're saying that it was selfish but also legal. ...one is within one's rights, under certain circumstances, to insist on one's ability to inflict suffering on vast numbers of people in order to make more money for your rich self and…
revere | April 24, 2009As an academic epidemiologist I routinely do NIH funded research involving human subjects. That means my university must adhere to very strict regulations and guidelines for the protection of research subjects. Approval and monitoring of the ethical conduct of research funded by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), of which NIH is a part, was made a legal requirement in the 1970s following widespread abuses, of which the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study and the experiments by Nazi doctors were the most notorious. But less flagrant ethical breeches were widespread in medical research. I…
razib | April 8, 2009David Brooks has a new column grandly titled The End of Philosophy. Heather Mac Donald at Secular Right chides him for his criticism of the New Atheists, while John Derbyshire offers guarded praise. It seems to me that the jab at the New Atheists was something of a throwaway line and I lean more toward John's position. I give Brooks credit for attempting to inject insights from the new cognitive sciences into contemporary political commentary. Politics is a phenomenon which manifests on a grand scale, but its ultimate roots are at least in part in individual human psychology. The empirical…
amillikan | April 7, 2009The more moral you believe yourself to be, the less moral you may be inclined to act, according to a new study in Psychological Science. Psychologists evaluated the moral self-image of subject participants and then presented them with a variety of scenarios in which they were asked to donate money to charity and to choose between business practices that were either environment-friendly or cost-effective. The subjects who described themselves as being more ethical both donated less to charity and opted for cheaper, more harmful business practices compared to subjects who described themselves…
purepedantry | March 31, 2009Nature Clinical Practice Neurology has a salient article on ethics and medicine. The article asks the question: is it ethical to confront an individual with whom you do not have an official doctor-patient relationship, if you think they have a medical problem? Should you or should you not tell them if you see a medical problem?
Neurology is unique among the medical specialties in that much of the clinical examination can be appreciated visually and taught by use of video recordings.3, 4 Since 2003, we have conducted a 'neurological localization course', during which participants are…
revere | March 31, 2009Tufts University is the latest institution to step in the Conflict of Interest mess and come out with shoes that smell. The University had organized a conference on conflict of interest in medicine and research, with Iowa's Republican Senator Charles Grassley as the keynoter. Grassley has been an indefatigable crusader against instances of fraud and abuse against the federal government, and is a principal author and defender of the Federal False Claims Act, which allows whistleblowers to share in the recovery of fraudulently obtained monies (for an excellent account, see Henry Scammell's…
revere | March 18, 2009The Conflict of Interest talk these days is all about doctors and medical school lecturers who are in bed with Big Pharma, but the bed is pretty crowded. Researchers are there, too. Not that this hasn't been a topic of conversation. And not that researchers aren't conscious of it and frantically trying to distance themselves from it. But it's nice and warm under the covers and its a friendship with benefits, as the younger generation likes to put it:
As accusations of undisclosed financial conflicts among university researchers swirl, drug makers and academics are entering a new stage of…
revere | March 4, 2009When I was in medical school it was common to get gifts from drug companies. Since many of us had very little money, the gifts were welcome. One company gave me a Littman stethoscope, at the time, the most advanced stethoscope around. The same model costs about $100 now. I was glad to get it, although I can't tell you the name of the company. I forgot the names as quickly as I pocketed their gifts. We all got lots of free samples, too, and they were often things like tranquilizers sent through the mail and left in the magazine bin in my apartment house common mailbox area. Yes, these folks…
mikethemadbiologist | February 16, 2009ScienceBlogling Dr. Isis has an interesting post about the ethical obligations of junior scientists regarding animal research. Dr. Isis asks two questions:
Does a graduate student/postdoc have a moral imperative to report non-compliant research, even in the face of potentially risking one's career? How does one determine the risk/benefit of such actions?
Is there a spectrum of what is worth reporting and what is not worth reporting? If so, what tools do you use to determine the morality of reporting/not reporting the behavior.
While I'm loath to contradict the Goddess, I think this is not…
amillikan | February 10, 2009The author of the 1998 paper that fueld the anti-vaccination movement by asserting a link between MMR vaccinations and autism was recently found to have falsified his original data. The Sunday Times reports that the study's author Andrew Wakefield "changed and misreported results in his research" which was originally published in The Lancet medical journal in 1998. "He is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain," wrote ScienceBlogger Orac from respectful Insolence in his coverage of this revelation.
Related ScienceBlogs Posts:
Scientific…
pharyngula | February 8, 2009Italy is experiencing its own version of the Terry Schiavo case. A woman, Eluana Englaro, was in a car crash 17 years ago that caused catastrophic brain damage — she's been in a vegetative state ever since, and the family has been engaged in a legal fight for many years to pull the plug and allow her to die with a little dignity. They finally won that battle recently, and are easing her off life support and a feeding tube.
Cue the right wing. Silvio Berlusconi, Bush-like Prime Minister of Italy, has rushed to impose an emergency decree blocking the suspension of life support, a decision made…
palmd | February 5, 2009Reproductive ethics is a field I'm not all that familiar with, but it's been a big deal lately, so I've been thinking about it a bit. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has a few broadsheets on ethics, which are actually rather helpful. Reproductive medicine is a great field for looking at ethical problems. Let's examine two of them to learn something about the ethics of the field (and of course, about ourselves as well):
Parental factors, that is, facts about the parents, may be important in reproductive medicine. When doctors become part of the reproductive process, someone…
mikethemadbiologist | January 30, 2009...such as a respect for the truth. So says Dennis Overbye:
Worse, not only does it [science] not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can't measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.
So the story goes.
But this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.
That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values.…
palmd | January 26, 2009Morning report is a daily conference for medical residents. It is done differently at different institutions, but normally a case is presented, often by the post-call team, and discussed by the senior residents and an attending physician. Today's case will be the first in an occasional series. --PalMD
Case:
Mrs. M is an 89 year old woman who resides in a nursing home who was admitted with confusion and lethargy. She has a past medical history significant for stroke, coronary artery disease, depression in the distant past, and no history of dementia. She has lost significant weight over…
mikethemadbiologist | January 25, 2009I'm becoming more enthusiatic about Eric Holder as Attorney General. It's nice to see some clarity about waterboarding--that is, partial drowning interrogation. From Steve Benen:
The exchange was helpful in learning about both the senator and the nominee. [Republican Senator] Cornyn wanted Holder to admit that he'd torture a terrorist in a "ticking-time-bomb scenario," in order to "save perhaps tens of thousands of lives." Holder responded sensibly, noting that we have interrogation methods that aren't torture, and that torture wouldn't produce reliable intelligence anyway.
Cornyn was…
palmd | January 25, 2009Sometimes I feel like I'm pounding my head against a wall. I've been wondering why the issue of so-called conscience clauses just won't die, why otherwise intelligent people can't just agree with me just don't get it.
Quick review: some health care professionals wish to be able to deny patients certain types of care, and want to be protected by law for imposing their own morals on others, in violation of basic medical ethics and human dignity (as you can see, I don't have a strong opinion about this one).
Ethical behavior is difficult. It requires empathy---but in a very particular sense…
palmd | January 20, 2009Make no little plans; they have no power to stir men's blood.
---Daniel Burnham
The last eight years have seen subtle and not-so subtle predations on the practice of medicine. Will the new administration be able to promote the kind of change we need? Let's review some of the challenges facing the Obama administration.
Ethical apocalypse
Bush's evisceration of the Constitution of the United States has affected health care professionals. For example, the military has likely always used psychologists to assist with interrogations, but the last eight years has seen a huge increase in the…
purepedantry | January 18, 2009The NYTimes has a fascinating article about MIT professors -- developmental psychologists mostly -- who use their own children's development as data in their research. Though in nearly all cases, they are studying normal child development and not doing any of potentially harmful intervention, this presents difficult ethical issues because of the dual roles as parent and as researcher:
Some research methods are clearly benign; others, while not obviously dangerous, might not have fully understood effects. Ethicists said they would consider participation in some projects acceptable, even…
amillikan | January 16, 2009Scientists across the globe have put out a call to help two AIDS researchers being held prisoner in Iran. Accused of forming a "velvet revolution" and charged with "communicating with an enemy government," the researchers were reportedly exchanging scientific information with colleagues—a crucial scientific practice—in order to successfully implement public health measures in Iran to slow the spread of AIDS. Several ScienceBloggers have posted information on how to support these doctors.