The Ethics of an Unlicensed Medical Practitioner

For option A of this assignment, the prompt is that Harry, a manufacturer of medical equipment and an avid reader of medical textbooks, has developed a program that will allow its users to self-diagnose and self-treat their ailments, without a doctor’s help. Harry wants to sell his program to “ordinary folk” as a replacement for consulting licensed medical practitioners. An important point here is that Harry is not licensed to practice medicine and has only read books on the subject. The posed question is whether or not his program should be published (from an ethical standpoint—not necessarily a profit-driven one). In this paper, I will propose a solution to this ethical question and offer a set of value-based reasons why that solution should be taken. After that, I will give a counterargument and explain why the counterargument would not be ethical compared to my first solution. From there, I will support my solution using three different ethical frameworks: an ethics of purpose, an ethics of principle, and an ethics of consequence

Polygenic risk for schizophrenia and season of birth within the UK Biobank cohort

Background: There is strong evidence that people born in winter and in spring have a small increased risk of schizophrenia. As this ‘season of birth’ effect underpins some of the most influential hypotheses concerning potentially modifiable risk exposures, it is important to exclude other possible explanations for the phenomenon. Methods: Here we sought to determine whether the season of birth effect reflects gene-environment confounding rather than a pathogenic process indexing environmental exposure. We directly measured, in 136 538 participants from the UK Biobank (UKBB), the burdens of common schizophrenia risk alleles and of copy number variants known to increase the risk for the disorder, and tested whether these were correlated with a season of birth. Results: Neither genetic measure was associated with season or month of birth within the UKBB sample. Conclusions: As our study was highly powered to detect small effects, we conclude that the season of birth effect in schizophrenia reflects a true pathogenic effect of environmental exposure

Resonant tunnelling features in the transport spectroscopy of quantum dots

We present a review of features due to resonant tunnelling in transport spectroscopy experiments on quantum dots and single donors. The review covers features attributable to intrinsic properties of the dot as well as extrinsic effects, with a focus on the most common operating conditions. We describe several phenomena that can lead to apparently identical signatures in a bias spectroscopy measurement, with the aim of providing experimental methods to distinguish between their different physical origins. The correct classification of the resonant tunnelling features is an essential requirement to understand the details of the confining potential or predict the performance of the dot for quantum information processing.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures. Short review article submitted to Nanotechnology, special issue on 'Quantum Science and Technology at the Nanoscale

Architecture for high-sensitivity single-shot readout and control of the electron spin of individual donors in silicon

We describe a method to control and detect in single-shot the electron spin state of an individual donor in silicon with greatly enhanced sensitivity. A silicon-based Single-Electron Transistor (SET) allows for spin-dependent tunneling of the donor electron directly into the SET island during the read-out phase. Simulations show that the charge transfer signals are typically \Delta q > 0.2 e - over an order of magnitude larger than achievable with metallic SETs on the SiO2 surface. A complete spin-based qubit structure is obtained by adding a local Electron Spin Resonance line for coherent spin control. This architecture is ideally suited to demonstrate and study the coherent properties of donor electron spins, but can be expanded and integrated with classical control electronics in the context of scale-up.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure