In this month’s newsletter we consider the ethics of new technologies and climate activism, in the form of two excellent articles by, respectively, Johanna Hovemann and colleagues and by our stalwart contributor Dr. Jean Martin.
TS Eliot’s poem East Coker is interpreted by many as an imprecation to reduce societal obsessions with the pursuit of scientific progress and to instead follow simpler, more diurnal lives of spirituality and contemplation.
Bioethics is often perceived as bridging the controversies dividing partisan positions, by clarifying objections and establishing common ground. Yet even the existence of an area of study called ‘bioethics’ can engender controversy.
The publication of the revised Declaration of Geneva on 20th November 2017 shows that ethics ostensibly remain central to the practice of medicine. Notable changes included the inclusion, for the first time, of a reference to respecting patient autonomy.
The recent legal case of a child whose parents sought innovative treatment for his serious genetic disorder, Charlie Gard, has meant that medical ethics led the news in the United Kingdom for a number of weeks.
Recent media coverage of biomedical engineers who have designed a synthetic yeast genome, resequencing the yeast DNA in the process to eliminate redundancy and reduce its size, has briefly brought to public attention a gamut of issues about the preparedness of scientific regulators for the pace of scientific advances.
I, Rouven, have now been the editor of our wonderful EACME newsletter for more than 8 years. 8 years! The time has come, to pass on this privilege to someone ‘new’. This is not easy for me. The EACME as a whole, and the newsletter in particular, are very important to me.