Is There a Duty to Serve as a Subject in Biomedical Research?

Most contemporary discussions of the ethics of human subjects research focus on the adequacies and inadequacies of informed consent in combination with peer review by institutional review boards (IRBs) for protecting subject welfare. Little has been written about the moral reasons that ought to lead someone to participate in research in the first place

No Method, Thus Madness?

If you ask most medical school deans if they have a course, program, or center doing bioethics, they will enthusiastically assure you that they do. And their enthusiasm for bioethics grows exponentially in proportion to their interest in showing that they are doing something about managing research ethics issues at their institutions. The same can be said about the entire biomedical research establishment - from private companies to independent research centers to professional organizations - bioethics is on the masthead, the organizational chart, and the agenda of the annual meeting. Not to worry - medicine\u27s got ethics

Professional Arrogance and Public Misunderstanding

Any assessment of the impact of required request legislation on organ and tissue procurement must begin by defining required request laws. Of the forty-one states that have passed such laws during the past three years, approximately, half have enacted strong required request policies. These states have mandated that hospital administrators be responsible for insuring that next-of-kin or legal guardians are asked about their willingness to donate organs and tissues of the deceased when a death has been pronounced in a hospital setting

Organ Transplants: The Cost of Success

Just thirty years after the first kidney transplant between identical twins was undertaken in 1954, organ transplantation has come of age. Today many transplant surgeons have attained success rates of over 80 percent survival for at least five years among those who have received kidneys from live related donors. The survival rate for those who receive cadaver kidneys five years after surgery is 60 percent. More than 95 percent of corneal transplant recipients have their sight restored

The Meaning of the Holocaust for Bioethics

Despite the central role played by the events leading to and during the Holocaust in bioethical discourse, bioethicists have paid surprisingly little attention to examining the nature of the crimes committed in the name of medicine and science, the moral rationales used to defend these crimes, or to the specifics of history that do and do not find parallels in current public policies and moral disputes. The Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota convened a conference on May 17-19, 1989, to examine some of these issues. The conference focused on five major themes: What role did mainstream medicine and science play in the creation of the Nazi state; What did German scientists and physicians think about and do in the name of eugenics and euthanasia; What moral rationales were used to justify the involvement of medicine - and science with genocide, euthanasia, and racism; Should scientists and physicians make any use of information obtained from barbarous experiments conducted on innocent persons in concentration camps; and What is the appropriate use of metaphors and analogies to the Nazi era in contemporary debates in bioethics

What’s So Special about the Human Genome?

Glenn McGee argues that the time is now for debating the morality of patenting human genes. In one sense he is surely right. While thousands of patents have been issued or are pending on many gene sequences, public policy with respect to ownership of the human genome is still far from settled. So a debate about the ethics of patenting genes is, if nothing else, timely. In another sense however, Professor McGee is wrong