Tag Archive | Bioethics
Finding the Muslim View on Medicine
Muslims are the fastest-growing religious minority in the United States, with over 7 million Americans declaring themselves as followers of Islam and more than 2,000 mosques nationwide. But in spite of the numbers, little data has been collected about American Muslims’ beliefs about health and disease, or their experience in the U.S. health care system. […]
Mapping Out the Starting Point
When health disparities in urban populations are discussed at the University of Chicago Medical Center, it’s not an abstract, far-away concept. Only a few blocks west and south of the hospital campus are some of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, where nearly every health statistic one finds is shocking. Pick any measure – diabetes, heart […]
Putting a Long Leash on Synthetic Life
When scientist/entrepreneur J. Craig Venter announced that his company had created “synthetic life” in March, a predictable tsunami of media hype followed. Though the discovery was more accurately an important step in synthetic biology, rather than the creation of life from scratch in a laboratory, the story provoked rampant speculation about what this new field […]
MacLean Conference Day 2: Ancient Ethics, Modern Medicine
“In this sense, we may indeed say that medicine has saved the life of ethics, in that it has given back to ethics a seriousness and relevance which it seemed to have lost for good.” -Stephen Toulmin, 1982 “The emergence of medical ethics in the latter half of the 20th century helped revive medicine, saved […]
Rebuilding Trust, Moving Beyond Race
When long-hidden information about U.S. syphilis experiments on Guatemalan prisoners in the 1940′s surfaced last week, the shocking case contained echoes of the infamous Tuskegee study. Conducted from 1932 to 1972, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment followed African-American sharecroppers with the disease, and gained notoriety for withholding antibiotic treatment from the men in order to study […]
Linkage 9/24: Choking, Mad Scientists, & Relativity at Home
In 1994, Italy’s Roberto Baggio was widely considered to be the best soccer player in the world. Having led his country to the final of the World Cup, played before over 100,000 people in the Rose Bowl, Baggio was the obvious choice to take his team’s critical fifth penalty shot in the shootout that would […]
To Test or Not to Test
The idealized view of genetic medicine is a world where every person’s DNA can be tested for the genes that predispose them to disease. Armed with this information, physician and patient can take early preventive steps to help decrease an elevated risk for developing cancer, heart disease, or other maladies before they start. The Human […]
When to Say When on Assisted Reproduction
There aren’t too many tabloid stories that have implications for science and medical ethics. But in January 2009, the sensational saga of Nadya Suleman, the mother of octuplets crudely dubbed Octomom, simultaneously lit up the TMZs and National Enquirers of the world and posed tough questions to the field of assisted reproduction. Methods such as […]
Should Kidneys Be for Sale?
Please welcome Ankur Thakkar, who works in our Publications Department, with this fine post on the controversy over paid compensation for organ donation. The economic crisis over the last three years caused many Americans to change their lifestyles to make ends meet. They turned to second jobs, second mortgages and tighter budgets. They sold the […]
