The transhumanist project of reshaping human beings by promoting their improvement through technological innovations has a broad agenda. This study focuses on the enhancement of the human organism through genetic modification techniques. Transhumanism values and a discussion of their philosophical background provide a framework to understand its ideals. Genetics and ethics are employed to assess the claims of the transhumanist program of human enhancement. A succinct description of central concepts in genetics and an explanation of current techniques to edit the (...) human genome serve to assess the capabilities and limitations of editing techniques. Potential benefits and liabilities of human enhancement through genome editing are discussed to appraise its feasibility. Ethical considerations of genome editing inform a reflection on the implications of introducing heritable changes in the genome of individuals. It is concluded that the transhumanist program is underpinned by a large number of hypotheses rather than by sufficient evidence. (shrink)

This collection looks from a variety of angles at the human body as it resists the determinations of gender, sexuality, socialisation and history. Ranging from classical hermaphrodites, Bruegel's blind faces and Weimar transgender surgery, via Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, state-socialist sport and Proust, to Barbie, Lari Pittman, American Psycho, IVF and video dance, the sixteen essays question the relationship between politics, culture and desire. This richly illustrated book also features the original work of two young photographers and a theatre director.

The posthumanist project proposes directing the evolution of human beings by promoting their improvement through technological means to create a variety of entities that will have few or no common...

The legal requirements and justifications for collecting patient-identifiable data without patient consent were examined. The impetus for this arose from legal and ethical issues raised during the development of a population-based disease register. Numerous commentaries and case studies have been discussing the impact of the Data Protection Act 1998 and Caldicott principles of good practice on the uses of personal data. But uncertainty still remains about the legal requirements for processing patient-identifiable data without patient consent for research purposes. This is (...) largely owing to ignorance, or misunderstandings of the implications of the common law duty of confidentiality and section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2001. The common law duty of confidentiality states that patient-identifiable data should not be provided to third parties, regardless of compliance with the DPA1998. It is an obligation derived from case law, and is open to interpretation. Compliance with section 60 ensures that collection of patient-identifiable data without patient consent is lawful despite the duty of confidentiality. Fears regarding the duty of confidentiality have resulted in a common misconception that section 60 must be complied with. Although this is not the case, section 60 support does provide the most secure basis in law for collecting such data. Using our own experience in developing a disease register as a backdrop, this article will clarify the procedures, risks and potential costs of applying for section 60 support. (shrink)

A 2011 National Academies of Sciences report called for an “Information Commons” and a “Knowledge Network” to revolutionize biomedical research and clinical care. We interviewed 41 expert stakeholders to examine governance, access, data collection, and privacy in the context of a medical information commons. Stakeholders' attitudes about MICs align with the NAS vision of an Information Commons; however, differences of opinion regarding clinical use and access warrant further research to explore policy and technological solutions.

Gender discrimination continues to plague organizations. While the advent of the Internet and the digitization of commerce have provided both a mechanism by which goods and services can be exchanged, as well as an efficient way for consumers to voice their opinions about retailers (i.e., via online rating systems), recent work has begun to uncover significant biases that manifest during the review process. In particular, it has been suggested that the gig-economy’s elimination of previously anonymous arm’s-length transactions may re-introduce bias (...) into perceptions of quality. In this work, we build upon research that has identified biases based on ascriptive characteristics in rating systems of ridesharing platforms. In doing so, we conduct an online experiment using a series of factorial vignettes to consider not only willingness to transact but post-transaction perceptions of quality. Findings suggest that female drivers are not penalized ex ante for taking on gender incongruent roles, i.e., driving, and experience no penalty when a rider reports a high-quality experience. However, conditional upon a lower quality experience, there is a disproportionate penalty for female drivers. Strikingly, we also observe that historic high quality does not serve as a buffer against such penalties, as prior literature would suggest. These findings underscore the challenges platforms face in ensuring their participants are being evaluated in a fair and impartial way, and highlight the difficulties present when non-employees (customers) are rating non-employees (drivers) of the firm. (shrink)

Concussion and Mild Traumatic Brain Injury affect millions of people worldwide. mTBI has been called the “signature injury” of the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, affecting thousands of active duty service men and women, and veterans. Sport-related concussion represents a significant public health problem, with elite and professional athletes, and millions of youth and amateur athletes worldwide suffering concussions annually. These brain injuries have received scant attention from neuroethicists, and the focus of this special issue is on defining the (...) ethical considerations and developing and elucidating the neuroethical contributions to the discussion about concussion and mTBI. (shrink)

No longer holders of a discretionary right to intervene, all States are now burdened with the responsibility to take action under the doctrine of responsibility to protect …. [Potential intervener...

At various times in history, a single power finds itself, at least for its region and time, a 'sole remaining superpower'. This paper explores the parallels between Athens' superpower status at the end of the Persian War and the US's superpower status in the contemporary world. Athens mismanaged her situation in ways that precipitated her own demise in the Peloponnesian War. The question of what might be analogous to Athens' conduct in contemporary US policy is explored to serve as a (...) kind of 'cautionary tale' for modern US strategy. (shrink)

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons. We identify participant-centricity and trustworthiness as the most important features of an MIC and discuss the implications for those seeking to create a sustainable, useful, and widely available collection of linked resources for research and other purposes.

Making data broadly accessible is essential to creating a medical information commons. Transparency about data-sharing practices can cultivate trust among prospective and existing MIC participants. We present an analysis of 34 initiatives sharing DNA-derived data based on public information. We describe data-sharing practices captured, including practices related to consent, privacy and security, data access, oversight, and participant engagement. Our results reveal that data-sharing initiatives have some distance to go in achieving transparency.

The integration of biomedical terminologies is indispensable to the process of information integration. When terminologies are linked merely through the alignment of their leaf terms, however, differences in context and ontological structure are ignored. Making use of the SNAP and SPAN ontologies, we show how three reference domain ontologies can be integrated at a higher level, through what we shall call the OBR framework (for: Ontology of Biomedical Reality). OBR is designed to facilitate inference across the boundaries of domain ontologies (...) in anatomy, physiology and pathology. (shrink)

Advances in technologies and biomedical informatics have expanded capacity to generate and share biomedical data. With a lens on genomic data, we present a typology characterizing the data-sharing landscape in biomedical research to advance understanding of the key stakeholders and existing data-sharing practices. The typology highlights the diversity of data-sharing efforts and facilitators and reveals how novel data-sharing efforts are challenging existing norms regarding the role of individuals whom the data describe.

At this writing, late in 2023 and on the eve of 2024, we are approaching the seventy-fifth anniversary of George Orwell’s 1984 and its many quotable passages such as “WAR IS PEACE.” Like 1949, the...

Cognition in work teams has been predominantly understood and explained in terms of shared cognition with a focus on the similarity of static knowledge structures across individual team members. Inspired by the current zeitgeist in cognitive science, as well as by empirical data and pragmatic concerns, we offer an alternative theory of team cognition. Interactive Team Cognition (ITC) theory posits that (1) team cognition is an activity, not a property or a product; (2) team cognition should be measured and studied (...) at the team level; and (3) team cognition is inextricably tied to context. There are implications of ITC for theory building, modeling, measurement, and applications that make teams more effective performers. (shrink)

Explores the moral dimensions of the current global role of the U.S. military.

Background: The use of race as a category in medical research is the focus of an intense debate, complicated by the inconsistency of presumed independent variables, race and ethnicity, on which analysis depends. Interpretation is made difficult by inconsistent methods for determining the race or ethnicity of a participant. The failure to specify how race or ethnicity was determined is common in the published literature.Hypothesis: Criteria by which they assign a research participant to racial or ethnic categories are not reported (...) by published articles.Methods: Methods were reviewed for assigning race and ethnicity of research participants in 268 published reports reporting associations among race , health outcome and genotype.Results: Of the 268 published reports reviewed, it was found that 192 did not explain their methods for assigning race or ethnicity as an independent variable. This was despite the fact that 180 of those reports reached conclusions about associations among genetics, health outcome and race or ethnicity.Conclusions: More attention needs to be given to the definition of race and ethnicity in genetic studies, especially in those diseases where health disparities are known to exist. (shrink)

Explores the moral dimensions of the current global role of the U.S. military.

Can the institutional systems that prepare Black nurse researchers question the ways their systemic pathways have impacted health equity knowledge development in nursing? We invite our readers to keep this question in mind and engage with our conversation as Black nurse researchers, scholars, educators, and clinicians. The purpose of our conversation, and this article, is to explore the transactional impact of knowledge development pathways and Black faculty retention pathways on the state of health equity knowledge in nursing today. Over a (...) series of conversations, we discuss the research exploitation of communities of color, deficit research funding, knowledge capitalization, the marginalization of diversity as a continuous process, a lack of sociocultural authority, and our thoughts on solutions. We conclude by using the wisdom of a generation to answer our initial question. (shrink)

A puzzle is generated by two intuitions about artworks: 1. There is no prima facie reason to take artworks to be mind-independent objects; 2. Aesthetic judgments are objective. These intuitions seem to be in tension, for if artworks or their aesthetic properties are mind-dependent, how can aesthetic judgments be objective? The common solution to the puzzle lies in rejecting or revising one of the two intuitions. Typically, realists reject 1, and many antirealists reject 2. I develop an antirealist aesthetic theory (...) that accommodates both intuitions, focusing on critical disagreement between epistemically optimal judges, realist difficulties with supervenience and response-dependence, the role of imagination in the experience of artworks, and the metaphorical quality of aesthetic discourse. The hallmark of realism, namely the mind-independence of aesthetic qualities, is an untenable commitment that yields an impoverished view of artworks. A cognitivist anti-realism is available which preserves the objectivity of aesthetic discourse and yields a richer conception of artworks and our interaction with them. (shrink)

Do just war principles allow resort to war, or require it? For those who feel the force of the question, the ongoing war in Ukraine has provided an urgent case study.A video shot in late February 2...

Pragmatism is a philosophical school of thought emphasizing action, practices, and practical reasoning whereas prophecy is an ancient religious concept that requires belief in the reality of God. Although these two concepts seem to not be a natural fit with one another, the authors demonstrate why prophetic pragmatism is “pragmatism at its best.”.

This book brings Jewish moral reasoning into conversation with Richard Rorty's secular neo-pragmatist philosophy, which often comes across as anti-religious. The result is a type of hope for the future concerning the relationship between Judaism and secularism.

Angiogenesis, the generation of new blood vessels from pre‐existing vessels, is an integral component of wound healing, responses to inflammation and other physiologic processes. It is also an essential part of tumor growth; in the absence of new vessel formation, tumors cannot expand beyond a small volume. Although much is known about angiogenesis and its regulation, there is no overall theory that describes or explains this process. It is here suggested that the intracrine hypothesis, which ascribes to certain extracellular signaling (...) peptides (whether hormones, growth factors, DNA‐binding proteins or enzymes) a role in both intracellular biology and extracellular signaling, can contribute to a more general understanding of angiogenesis. Intracrine factors participate in angiogenesis in the following ways: (1) they can act within the cells that synthesized them (type I intracrine action), (2) they can be secreted and then taken up by their cell of synthesis to act intracellularly (type II intracrine action ), or (3) they can be secreted and internalized by a distant target cell (type III intracrine action). The parallels between the intracrine growth factor mechanisms cancer cells employ in stimulating their own growth and the mechanisms operative in endothelial cell proliferation during angiogenesis (“intracrine reciprocity”) are discussed. Collectively, these explorations lead to testable hypotheses regarding the regulation of normal and pathological angiogenesis, and point to similarities between tumor‐induced angiogenesis and tissue differentiation. BioEssays 28: 943–953, 2006. © 2006 Wiley periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Reflections on, and analysis of, ethical issues facing military service in the United States.

Although military personnel are required to follow all legal orders, morally the traditional contract between soldier and state rests on shared assumptions about the purposes for which national militaries will and will not be used.

Live streaming is a unique form of media that creates a direct line of interaction between streamers and viewers. While previous research has explored the social motivations of those who stream and watch streams in the gaming community, there is a lack of research that investigates intimate self-disclosure in this context, such as discussing sensitive topics like mental health on platforms such as Twitch.tv. This study aims to explore discussions about mental health in gaming live streams to better understand how (...) people perceive discussions of mental health in this new media context. The context of live streaming is particularly interesting as it facilitates social interactions that are masspersonal in nature: the streamer broadcasts to a larger, mostly unknown audience, but can also interact in a personal way with viewers. In this study, we interviewed Twitch viewers about the streamers they view, how and to what extent they discuss mental health on their channels in relation to gaming, how other viewers reacted to these discussions, and what they think about live streams, gaming-focused or otherwise, as a medium for mental health discussions. Through these interviews, our team was able to establish a baseline of user perception of mental health in gaming communities on Twitch that extends our understanding of how social media and live streaming can be used for mental health conversations. Our first research question unraveled that mental health discussions happen in a variety of ways on Twitch, including during gaming streams, Just Chatting talks, and through the stream chat. Our second research question showed that streamers handle mental health conversations on their channels in a variety of ways. These depend on how they have built their channel, which subsequently impacts how viewers perceive mental health. Lastly, we learned that viewers’ reactions to mental health discussions depend on their motivations for watching the stream such as learning about the game, being entertained, and more. We found that more discussions about mental health on Twitch led to some viewers being more cautious when talking about mental health to show understanding. (shrink)