Several studies suggest that the $1.4 billion in government subsidies are encouraging the ethanol program without substantial benefits to the U.S. economy. Large ethanol industries and a few U.S. government agencies, such as the USDA, support the production of ethanol. Corn-farmers receive minimal profits. In the U.S. ethanol system, considerably more energy, including high-grade fossil fuel, i...

Excerpt: "We are accustomed to anabolic athletes, medicated musicians and souped-up students. Now it appears that we can add pill-popping professors to this list (Sahakian and Morein-Zamir 2007). " Cosmetic neurology " is the term I used to describe the practice of using neurologic interventions to improve movement, mood, and mentation in healthy individuals. The specific kinds of enhancements ...

Advances in neuroscience and pharmacology have led to improvements in the cognitive performance of people with neurological disease and other forms of cognitive decline. These same methods may also afford cognitive enhancement in people of otherwise normal cognitive abilities. "Cosmetic", or supranormal, cognitive enhancement offers opportunities to enrich our social or financial status, our in...

The widespread emergence of innumerable technologies within health care has complicated the choices facing caregivers and their patients. The escalation of knowledge and technical innovation has been accompanied by an erosion of moral and ethical consensus among health providers that is reflected in the abandonment of the Hippocratic Oath as the immutable bedrock of medical ethics. Ethical conf...

In April 2002 the Nuffield Council on Bioethics published the Report The Ethics of Research Related to Healthcare in Developing Countries. It provides an ethical framework for those designing or conducting healthcarerelated research in developing countries. This paper will draw on the conclusions made in the Report, and present some of the recommendations. It will cover the importance of genuin...

This article attempts to define terminology and to describe a process for writing adaptive, early phase study protocols which are transparent, self-intuitive and uniform. It provides a step by step guide, giving templates from projects which received regulatory authorisation and were successfully performed in the UK. During adaptive studies evolving data is used to modify the trial design and c...

Does research on gender-based violence (GBV) pose greater than minimal risk to researchers and participants? This question needs to be understood particularly in light of hesitancy by Institutional Review Boards to approve research on GBV. The safety and risks of doing GBV studies and the implications for the ethical review process have not been a focus of much research. This qualitative study ...

I argue against two popular claims. The first is a descriptive, empirical claim about the nature of ordinary human experience which I call the psychological Narrativity thesis (PNT). According to PNT, 'each of us constructs and lives a "narrative" … this narrative is us, our identities' (Sacks O. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Duckworth; 1985, 110). The second is a normative, e...

As evidenced by high-throughput sequencers, genomic technologies have recently undergone radical advances. These technologies enable comprehensive sequencing of personal genomes considerably more efficiently and less expensively than heretofore. These developments present a challenge to the conventional framework of biomedical ethics; under these changing circumstances, each research project ha...

BACKGROUND For ethical approval of a multicentre study in Canada, investigators must apply separately to individual Research Ethics Boards (REBs). In principle, the protection of human research subjects is of utmost importance. However, in practice, the process of multicentre ethics review can be time consuming and costly, requiring duplication of effort for researchers and REBs. We used our ex...