Values in times of crisis : strategic crisis management in the EU

In a crisis, the fundamental values or, in other words, the functioning of a society is under threat (SAPEA, 2022, p. 38). A difficulty in strategic crisis management is that responses to the situation need to be developed quickly, yet under circumstances of uncertainty. Time pressure and social pressure in decision-making often go hand in hand with a lack of a solid evidence base and experience that can be drawn on. Another key difficulty is that crisis management measures need to be implemented at the same time as current affairs continue to be managed. In this statement, the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) addresses how ethical values can contribute to strategic crisis management. Values play an important role in how we understand and make sense of crises. They influence how we frame the problems that strategic crisis management is supposed to address and how we choose the instruments to do so. Very often, however, values remain implicit and invisible. Foregrounding the values that are inherent in, and should guide, strategic crisis management is an important task to which this statement seeks to contribute. [excerpt from the Introduction]peer-reviewe

Cord blood banking – bio-objects on the borderlands between community and immunity

Umbilical cord blood (UCB) has become the focus of intense efforts to collect, screen and bank haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in hundreds of repositories around the world. UCB banking has developed through a broad spectrum of overlapping banking practices, sectors and institutional forms. Superficially at least, these sectors have been widely distinguished in bioethical and policy literature between notions of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’, the commons and the market respectively. Our purpose in this paper is to reflect more critically on these distinctions and to articulate the complex practical and hybrid nature of cord blood as a ‘bio-object’ that straddles binary conceptions of the blood economies. The paper draws upon Roberto Esposito’s reflections on biopolitics and his attempt to transcend the dualistic polarisations of immunity and community, or the private and the public. We suggest that his thoughts on immunitary hospitality resonate with many of the actual features and realpolitik of a necessarily internationalised and globally distributed UCB ‘immunitary regime’

Study on the patenting of inventions related to human stem cell research. [Introduction]

2 pages (out of 225 pages)Discusses the ethical issues of patenting stem cell technology

Study on the patenting of inventions related to human stem cell research. [Table of Contents]

7 pages (out of 225 pages)Discusses the ethical issues of patenting stem cell technology

Study on the patenting of inventions related to human stem cell research. [Part III]

42 pages (out of 225 pages)Discusses the ethical issues of patenting stem cell technology

Ethical issues in autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT) in advanced breast cancer: A systematic literature review

BACKGROUND: An effectiveness assessment on ASCT in locally advanced and metastatic breast cancer identified serious ethical issues associated with this intervention. Our objective was to systematically review these aspects by means of a literature analysis. METHODS: We chose the reflexive Socratic approach as the review method using Hofmann's question list, conducted a comprehensive literature search in biomedical, psychological and ethics bibliographic databases and screened the resulting hits in a 2-step selection process. Relevant arguments were assembled from the included articles, and were assessed and assigned to the question list. Hofmann's questions were addressed by synthesizing these arguments. RESULTS: Of the identified 879 documents 102 included arguments related to one or more questions from Hofmann's question list. The most important ethical issues were the implementation of ASCT in clinical practice on the basis of phase-II trials in the 1990s and the publication of falsified data in the first randomized controlled trials (Bezwoda fraud), which caused significant negative effects on recruiting patients for further clinical trials and the doctor-patient relationship. Recent meta-analyses report a marginal effect in prolonging disease-free survival, accompanied by severe harms, including death. ASCT in breast cancer remains a stigmatized technology. Reported health-related-quality-of-life data are often at high risk of bias in favor of the survivors. Furthermore little attention has been paid to those patients who were dying. CONCLUSIONS: The questions were addressed in different degrees of completeness. All arguments were assignable to the questions. The central ethical dimensions of ASCT could be discussed by reviewing the published literature

Genetic Testing in the Workplace: The employees point of view

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Cultivating Humanity in Bio- and Artificial Sciences

The question asked in this book, Will Science Remain Human?, focuses on the fact that contemporary science is primarily performed through technological means. This unprecedented technological apparatus is not only reducing some human roles, but seems to have the potential for altering some fundamental structures of science itself. The supply of data from all knowledge domains as well as the availability of artificial forms of reasoning, judging, and deciding is radically transforming how science has been working lately, and even more how it will operate in the future. From this perspective “a renewed understanding of the human character of science” seems necessary as rationality tends to be constructed more and more as a sequence of machine readable codes and a series of ultrafast processes for elaborating information. Moreover, the risk exists for scientific knowledge to be “represented in a simplified way, hiding human responsibility, freedom, creativity and choice