Unethical governance: capacity legislation and the exclusion of people diagnosed with dementias from research

This paper considers the potential for the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) of England and Wales to incentivise the exclusion of people with dementia from research. The MCA is intended to standardise and safeguard the inclusion of people with cognitive impairments in research. This entails various procedural requirements, which in pressurised research contexts can lead researchers to exclude people with dementia as a means of simplifying bureaucratic constraints. I consider the risks of an ‘unethical ethics’, wherein procedural ethics indirectly causes the exclusion of people with dementia from research, undermining historic successes toward increased inclusivity. I suggest several solutions, including enhanced sensitivity to impairments and shifting the burden of proof from justifying inclusion to justifying exclusion. The paper responds to the ‘ethics creep’ tradition in procedural ethics, and critical appraisals of capacity legislation in dementia research. This approach recognises that institutional research ethics is itself a major ethical concern and can unwittingly beget unethical practices. Dementia researchers must be alert to such unethical ethics

Letters from America

xlii, 180 p., [1] h. de lám

The Hunger Game

We introduce a deterministic analogue of Markov chains that we call the hunger game. Like rotor-routing, the hunger game gives a way to deterministically mimic the behavior of both recurrent Markov chains and absorbing Markov chains. In the case of recurrent Markov chains with finitely many states, hunger game simulation yields an approximation to the stationary distribution with error falling off like $N^{-1}$, where $N$ is the number of simulation steps; in the case of absorbing Markov chains with finitely many states, hunger game simulation yields approximations to hitting measures and hitting times with error falling off like $N^{-1}$. In both contexts, random simulation gives error that falls like $N^{-1/2}$.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figure

Sir John Cornforth AC CBE FRS: his biosynthetic work

Sir John Cornforth’s work on the stereochemistry of enzyme reactions involved in the biosynthesis of squalene and cholesterol and in the formation and metabolism of a chiral methyl group in acetyl co-enzyme A, is reviewed

Astralagus ertterae (Fabaceae), a New Species from the Southern Sierra Nevada

Astragalus ertterae, a new species from pinyon pine woodlands, southern Sierra Nevada, Kern County, California, is described and illustrated. This remarkable new species is morphologically closest to A. bicristatus in sect. Bicristati but differs in its dwarf stature, pilose indumentum, short peduncles, somewhat smaller flowers, and especially in a pod only half as long and proportionately twice as plump