January 21, 2013
Premiering today at the Sundance Film Festival as part of the U.S. documentary competition, “After Tiller†is an intimate and heartfelt look at the four doctors performing third-trimester abortions in the United States, doing so even after the 2009 assassination … Read More
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
January 3, 2013
In the face of such uncertainty, what we need most is to understand better—issue by issue—what is happening on the ground in the country; and a terrific new book Governing Health in Contemporary China by my CFR colleague and renowned … Read More
December 3, 2012
Dr. Ricki Lewis knows a thing or two about genetics after decades in genetic counseling and multiple books and academic papers. Her latest book, a narrative nonfiction title The Forever Fix has been in her head since gene therapy began … Read More
November 16, 2012
Time magazine recently featured Kurzweil on it cover, and Fortune described him as “a legendary inventor with a history of mind-blowing ideas.” And now he has a new book, with a subtitle that suggests he has found another such idea: … Read More
October 31, 2012
Nanotechnology is helping to revolutionise many technology and industry sectors, such as environmental science, energy, medicine, food safety and transportation. For teaching and research I often have to recommend a text that introduces risk assessment to graduate students who are … Read More
October 29, 2012
A dystopian society supported by genetically modified clone workers stands out among the six stories that make up the sprawling film “Cloud Atlas.” The idea may seem far-fetched because of political opposition to human cloning and genetic modification in today’s … Read More
October 17, 2012
Those issues are at the heart of Cohen’s new book, “Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics.†The focus of his year as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the book examines three categories of medical … Read More
October 12, 2012
In “Regenesis,” a book exploring the science of synthetic biology, George Church and Ed Regis imagine a world where micro-organisms are capable of producing clean petroleum or detecting arsenic in drinking water, where people sport genetic modifications that render their … Read More
October 4, 2012
In the future, genetically modified organisms could be making our medicines, our fuel, our housewares, our houses — and they could even help us remake ourselves. All that may sound like science-fiction, but the future is already arriving, in the … Read More
September 20, 2012
Artificial wombs, lifelong fertility – it seems the stuff of dystopian sci-fi, but an author says it will happen. (Salon)
September 20, 2012
Who’s watching the health care professionals? A Johns Hopkins surgeon calls for a major paradigm shift. (The Atlantic)
September 6, 2012
A 2009 right-to-die case that deeply split public opinion in Catholic Italy is at the center of a new film exploring the themes of euthanasia, suicide and religious faith that is vying for top prize at the Venice festival. (Reuters)
March 25, 2011
Silver Sling, an 11-minute film by director Tze Chun, is another cinematic gem from the Future States series that Biopolitical Times blogged on last week. The film presents a future scenario in which affluent couples hire young women, some of … Read More
March 18, 2011
More recently, drugs like Adderall have enjoyed a half-shadowy vogue among writers. The dream of a pharmaceutical solution to literary paralysis provides a wisp of a real-world premise for “Limitless,†an energetic, enjoyably preposterous compound — it’s a paranoid thriller … Read More
March 11, 2011
David Goodstein has a unique perspective on scientific fraud, having pursued a successful career in research physics before becoming the provost of Caltech, one of the world’s premier research institutions. As an administrator, he helped formulate Caltech’s first policy for … Read More
March 11, 2011
Nicholas Agar’s new book explores the ethical implications of the use of present and future technologies to enhance human minds, bodies, and experiences. Agar raises enormous and never-finally-answerable questions about the end—or perhaps, better, ends—of human beings. (Science Progress)
March 9, 2011
Nancey Murphy of Fuller Theological Seminary has an interesting and challenging essay in a recent book called “Neuroethics.†She argues that the dominant conception of a soul, a spiritual essence separable from the body, is the result of a mistranslation. … Read More
March 8, 2011
Back in the 1940s, the early IT pioneer Claude Shannon fell in love with a computer called Betty, and no one raised an eyebrow. At the time, “computer” was simply the term for a person who performed routine calculations for … Read More
February 4, 2011
The present text, Progress in bioethics is part of the Basic bioethics series and is a compilation of papers relating to progressive bioethics in America. The collection of works, edited together by Jonathan Moreno and Sam Berger, are squarely rooted … Read More
January 29, 2011
Insightful and poignant, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks takes an unflinching look at the history of the first “immortal” human cell line, the scientists involved in its discovery, the woman whose cells were used, and the impact it has … Read More
January 21, 2011
The New England Journal of Medicine (Volume 363, Issue 25, December 16, 2010) is now available on-line and by subscription only. Articles include: “Health Care Reform — What Went Wrong on the Way to the Courthouse” Mark A. Hall, J.D., … Read More
January 4, 2011
In his recent book, NIH Director Francis Collins refers to DNA and the new science of genomics as “the language of life.†Thanks to the mapping of the human genome, says Collins, virtually all biomedical researchers agree “that their approach … Read More
December 9, 2010
The anthology, Feminist Bioethics, edited by Jackie Leach Scully, Laurel E. Baldwin-Ragaven, and Petya Fitzpatrick, examines how feminist bioethics theoretically and methodologically challenges dominant bioethics, and whether feminist ethical approaches are useful for exploring difference in other contexts. It offers … Read More
December 1, 2010
Humanity’s End is motivated by the conviction that the debate about human enhancement must move beyond the binary “yes, I love it; no, it’s evil†dialectic that has tended to dominate philosophical discussion up till now. When we focus on … Read More
