January 17, 2013
The thorny issue of assisted suicide doesn’t seem to be fertile, or even appropriate, ground for a television comedy. Not so, says Bob Kushell, a writer for The Simpsons and Anger Management. (BBC)
January 9, 2013
Doug Wolens’s recent documentary takes on the complex, abstract concept of the singularity, which predicts a moment when technology will give rise to intelligence beyond the scope of human imagination. It sounds like sci-fi but, Wolens and others argue, there’s … Read More
December 31, 2012
Celebrities rarely shy away from public peddling of dubious ideas about health and science, and 2012 was no exception. (Reuters)
December 24, 2012
New research examining the role of race and ethnicity in an individual’s decision to become a donor for hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) identifies several factors associated with varied participation rates in national donor registries across racial/ethnic groups. (News-Medical.net)
December 19, 2012
The mass murder of 20 children and six adults Friday in Newtown, Conn., has provoked yet another round of recrimination, finger pointing and breast-beating. Was the shooter mentally deranged? If there was more gun control, would this have happened? Did … Read More
December 17, 2012
Director Jeremy Sims describes his latest project as a feel-good film about euthanasia. “It’s a coming-of-age story for a 70-year-old man,” said the filmmaker. (Herald Sun)
December 7, 2012
It’s no longer news that babies have become a status symbol. We’ve gotten used to judging celebs’ bumps and observed the rise of the baby-centric fashion statement. The excitement this week over Kate Middleton’s royal fetus — and the medical … Read More
November 20, 2012
Tesla was hardly alone in believing this. Support for eugenics was one of the few things that people across political lines in the early 20th Century would agree on, from socialists like H.G. Wells to the Supreme Court of the … Read More
September 27, 2012
Celebrities often endorse health causes — think Michael J. Fox and Parkinson’s disease, Montel Williams and multiple sclerosis, Rosie O’Donnell and desmoid tumors. Then think Jenny McCarthy and autism — and her conviction that it is caused by childhood vaccines. … Read More
September 26, 2012
“Good Morning America†cameras were there last week when co-host Robin Roberts underwent a bone marrow transplant. So were her colleagues Diane Sawyer and Sam Champion, wearing surgical masks and singing songs of encouragement. All of it was on the … Read More
September 24, 2012
It’s not every day that a new academic discipline is born. But that’s exactly what happened in 2012, when the Project on Bioethics, Sexuality and Gender Identity – or “Queer Bioethics,” for short – came to life at the University … Read More
August 23, 2012
Technology and Human Flourishing 2012 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture October 25-27, 2012 Baylor University Institute for Faith and Learning http://www.baylor.edu/ifl/index.php?id=88447
June 26, 2012
The 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine went, at least in part, to the victors in a battle of aesthetics. Roughly 10 years prior, during the race to uncover the structure of DNA — the molecule of life — researchers bickered … Read More
October 10, 2011
Few media stories on cancer venture into issues of death, dying and end-of-life care — and outlets directed at African Americans are particularly unlikely to do so, a new study suggests. (Reuters)
September 7, 2011
By enhancing ourselves with technology, do we throw away a part of our humanity? That’s the question at the heart of a new video game, Deus Ex: Human revolution. (Wired)
September 6, 2011
Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They’re studying Shakespeare’s “As You Like It†— but not in any traditional way. (New York Times)
July 29, 2011
In 1995, an anesthesiologist named Charles Vacanti from the University of Massachusetts and his MIT colleague, chemical engineer Linda Griffith-Cima, implanted a lab-grown cartilage structure in the shape of a human ear under the skin of a hairless mouse. (Wired)
May 25, 2011
It may appear morose, but the director of a heart-wrenching documentary about doctor-assisted dying in Oregon hopes his film offers an uplifting lesson on how to live life. (Reuters)
May 4, 2011
In 2009, a Buenos Aires civic association awarded a prize named after American civil rights activist Rosa Parks to Argentinian Senator Liliana Negre de Alonso. The prize was given “por la DefensorÃa de la Vida Humana,†but the recipient’s resumé hardly … Read More
May 2, 2011
*They’ve been busy as video curators over at Vienna’s “Synthetic Biology Science, Art and Film Festival.â€Â *There are literally dozens of these remarkable efforts — and they invite you to spend all day rating them. http://bio-fiction.com/videos/ Biotech-labs around the world are busy … Read More
April 11, 2011
I am very excited to learn that starting in July, Netflix will have every Star Trek episode from every series available for instant streaming. And since I’ve been alluding to Star Trek quite a bit when touching on issues of … Read More
March 29, 2011
The media is awash with stories of so-called ‘‘fashion babies’’. Whether we’re talking about Elton and David’s son Zachary, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s ‘‘gestational carrier’’ or Brisbane couple Melissa Keevers and Rosemary Nolan’s new quintuplets, everyone is apparently entitled … Read More
March 29, 2011
The challenge of reining in the rising costs of the Medicare Program is particularly thorny because it confronts a recalcitrant societal tension between the necessity for cost control and the value of open-ended technology use for life extension in the … Read More
March 29, 2011
Hispanics, especially first- and second-generation Mexican-Americans, are less likely to donate organs than Americans as a whole, according to organ donation experts. (Reuters)
March 18, 2011
Israel has enthusiastically embraced advanced reproductive technologies. Now a court is considering whether parents have the right to use their dead son’s frozen sperm to create posthumous grandchildren. (Tablet Magazine)
