INTRODUCTION Recent surveys estimate that almost 30% of American and Canadian medical students gain work experience abroad during their 4 years of medical school (1), and many experts expect that number to increase in the future (1,2). However, little research exists regarding the ethical consequences of such experiences, or on the necessary training needed to prepare students for global health...

The emergence of an information society, carried by information technologies such as the digital computer and the Internet, has lead to many questions in the West about the proper regulation of the production, use and transfer of information. In the West, a large part of this discussion has focused on individual rights: how to balance various rights of individuals against each other and against...

Ethics in biomedical research cannot be defined by etymology, and need a semantic definition based on national and contemporary values. In a Nordic cultural and historic context, key values are solidarity with one's fellow man, equality, truth, justice, responsibility, freedom, and professionalism. In contemporary medical research, such ethics are further subgrouped into research ethics, resear...

The global bioeconomy is generating new paradigm-shifting practices of knowledge co-production, such as collective innovation; large-scale, data-driven global consortia science (Big Science); and consortia ethics (Big Ethics). These bioeconomic and sociotechnical practices can be forces for progressive social change, but they can also raise predicaments at the interface of law, human rights, an...

Given the focus on health systems in the post-millennium development goal era and moving towards the sustainable development goals, there is a compelling need for a common framework for health policy and systems research ethics to guide researchers and facilitate review by research ethics committees. A consultation of global health policy and systems research and ethics experts was convened to ...

In this paper we contribute to "sociology in bioethics" and help clarify the range of ways sociological work can contribute to ethics scholarship. We do this using a case study of an innovative neurotechnology, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and its use to attempt to diagnose and communicate with severely brain-injured patients. We compare empirical data from interviews with relatives o...

(1)Research Fellow, Institute for Science, Ethics, and Innovation, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK (2)National Practice Group Leader, Medical Law, Slater & Gordon; Adjunct Fellow, School of Law, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia (3)School of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia (4)Centre for Health Governance Law and Ethics, Sydney Law School, The...

General moral (ethical) principles play a prominent role in certain methods of moral reasoning and ethical decision-making in bioethics and public health. Examples include the principles of respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Some accounts of ethics in public health have pointed to additional principles related to social and environmental concerns, such as the precau...