“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon,” wrote the novelist Susan Ertz. But bioethics professor John Harris has no worries about filling his weekend tea times: “Only the terminally boring are in danger of being terminally bored,” he insists.
Harris is “someone who wants to live forever and [...]

Gene-Test Marketing Raises Public Health fears: A simple cheek swab can tell you about your ancestry. A bit of blood can tell you how likely you are to get cancer or heart disease. You can find out if you’re destined to be a high-performance athlete or a Sunday morning quarterback. Welcome to the wonderful world [...]

With the government set to allow food from cloned animals onto the market — and consumers not yet convinced it’s safe — meat and dairy producers are promoting an industry-led system to track cloned livestock.

Doctors at Grace General Hospital in Winnipeg, Canada, are waging a legal battle to detach a respirator and hasten the death (via morphine and halted feedings) of 84-year-old Orthodox Jew Samuel Golubchuk – against his family’s wishes.
The case, which has aroused anger and fear within the North American Jewish community that the case will set [...]

China’s Ministry of Health and Chinese Medicine Administration have jointly issued a regulation that aims to set up an evaluation system to tally the medical ethics of doctors in various hospitals and other health care providers in the country.
There are three components in the evaluation regime: self-assessment, departmental assessment and institutional assessment. A filing system [...]

Turning health workers into torturers: Last week, a judge reserved his decision and continued a temporary injunction to keep Samuel Golubchuk, an 84-year-old man with brain damage and multi-organ failure, hooked up to a ventilator and other life-support in a Winnipeg intensive-care unit. Mr. Golubchuk’s doctors want to stop the ventilator, believing it to be [...]

As most of you know, Bioethics International (BEI) empowers clinicians, scientists and policy makers to act responsibly by providing a bioethical framework to guide their decision-making.  The framework centers on the human person, the human person as both a patient and a member of humanity. Because BEI deals with the allocations, decisions and technologies that [...]

Monty Python could not have dreamt up a sharper caricature of Australian intellectuals. Writing in the Medical Journal of Australia, two academics made world headlines this week by endorsing a Chinese model of population control to reduce the human carbon footprint. Barry Walters, a professor of obstetrics at the University of Western Australia, has called [...]

[Article excerpts] We sit on the cusp of a new world in which the ability to genetically engineer our children, as well as reupholster our own organs, promises to become routine rather than exotic. Just as old definitions of life proved ethically problematic once medicine understood pregnancy better (would people fight over abortion if everyone [...]

The story of Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein sounds like something from a movie. The identical twins were separated at birth, adopted by different families. In their early 30s Schein started looking into information about their birth mother and in the process found out that she had a twin. The women were re-united, happily, via [...]