Philosophy & Ethics
Remarkable improvements in the quality of life, prevention and treatment of disease have been made possible through advancements in biomedical research, including clinical trials involving human subjects.
Using human subjects in trials means making sure of 'informed consent.'
That wasn't always the case. The stories of questionable practices by scientists are legendary. The Frankenstein monster was a hit among the public because it was plausible. Tesla electrocuted dogs and even as recently as the 1960s researchers were conducting experiments on unaware humans.
Less educated people are less…
When I go to the gym I get easily bored, so I listen to either music or, more likely, audiobooks. Recently, I’ve spent exercise time with a couple of scifi entries by author Robert Sawyer. I started out with Flashforward, then moved to Calculating God.
Both books are based on clever premises, unfold nicely, but are — in my opinion — ruined by the author’s penchant for invoking deus-ex-machina scenarios near the end. And they both preach a bit too much science, to the point of feeling like a lecture to the reader, especially Calculating God. Nonetheless, they do make the time at the gym pass…
29% of large clinical trials remain unpublished five years after completion and, of those, 78% have no results publicly available, according to a paper published yesterday.
This means that an estimated 250,000 people have been exposed to the risks of trial participation without the societal benefits that accompany the dissemination of their results, worry the authors. Of course, the participants all volunteered for the trials and had informed consent and many were even paid so claiming they were 'exposed to the risks' is emotional verbage designed to guide the public into one conclusion: all…
I recently attended a talk by Daniel Garber (Princeton University) on the topic of “God, Laws and the Order of Nature in the Scientific Revolution.” While Garber’s talk was mostly historical in nature, it raised some interesting points about why and how we talk about laws of nature at all.
And the connection was reinforced just a couple of days ago when I went to the New York Film Festival and saw a screening of “Particle Fever,” a documentary about the Higgs boson during which the concept of the fundamental (lawful, according to supporters of supersymmetry; random, according to people…
vongehr |
A young woman, a student it seems from the looks of it, shuffles in bursts behind me, in small steps one foot just in front of the other, staring down, then she wiggles her head at the sky, then she shuffles on, stops, wiggles her head. The light turns green and I walk, just walk away as if I must, feeling guilty, fleeing the scene. I steal one more look, also because she is attractive. An easy mark for the fulfillment of desires – who would ever know if I took her in the dusk? I feel for her, feel pain, but then I envy her, too. She has an aim, perhaps. She has her way of dealing with her…
When organ donations after death are a topic, the altruism argument is easily made. But during life, it is more complex.
Kidney transplantation is the best treatment for patients with kidney failure. Unfortunately, there's a shortage of kidneys available to those in need of a transplant, and donation rates from both living and deceased donors have remained relatively unchanged over the last decade. Some people aren't going to have willing donors or even matching ones but when the notion of paying for donations is introduced, the implication is this will be a new front in the class war…
I am not a metaphysician (or a metaphysicist, as some call themselves), but I've been fascinated for a while by what I've come to think of as the metaphysics wars. Let me explain. Metaphysics is, of course, one of the classic branches of philosophy, tracing back at least to the pre-Socratic Thales of Miletus (the guy who thought that all is made of water), and of course getting its name from Aristotle's treatise (though that wasn't the original title, it was named so afterwards, because it came after Aristotle's Physics).
Metaphysics was very important to the ancient Greeks, and absolutely…
You can tell I've had philosophy of mind on my mind lately. I've written about the Computational Theory of Mind (albeit within the broadest context of a post on the difference between scientific theories and philosophical accounts), about computation and the Church-Turing thesis, and of course about why David Chalmers is wrong about the Singularity and mind uploading (in press in a new volume edited by Russell Blackford and Damien Broderick).
Moreover, and without my prompting, my friend Steve Neumann has just written an essay for RS about what is it like to be a Nagel. Oh, and I recently…
I have recently been to the European Philosophy of Science Association meeting, where my colleague Maarten Boudry and I have hosted a symposium on our recently published book on the Philosophy of Pseudoscience.
I have, of course attended several other sessions and talks, as is customary on these occasions (it is also customary to enjoy the local sights, food and drinks, which I dutifully subjected myself to...).
One of these talks was entitled "Explanatory fictions and fictional explanations," by Sorin Bangu, of the University of Bergen (Norway). I want to use it as a stimulating example of…
Doctors who abuse prescription drugs often "self-medicate" for physical or emotional pain or stress relief, according to a new paper.
Based on focus groups with physicians in treatment for substance abuse, the findings lend insight into the reasons why doctors abuse prescription medications—as well as important implications for prevention and recognition. The lead author was Lisa J. Merlo, PhD, MPE, of the University of Florida, Gainesville.
In anonymous discussions, the researchers talked about reasons for prescription drug abuse with 55 physicians in recovery. The doctors were being…