Synthetic biology, which aims to design and build organisms that serve human needs, has potential applications that range from producing biofuels to programming human behaviour. The emergence of this new form of biotechnology, however, raises a variety of ethical questions - first and foremost, whether synthetic biology is intrinsically troubling in moral terms. Is it an egregious example of sc…
Includes index.One of the founding fathers of bioethics describes the development of the field and his thinking on some of the crucial issues of our time.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
The provocative contention of the postmodernist and feminist essays in Ethics of the Body is that conventional bioethics is out of touch, despite its growing profile. It is out of touch with an ongoing phenomenological sense of bodies themselves; with the impact of postmodernist theory as it problematizes the certainties of binary thinking; and with a postmodern culture in which bioscientific d…
Parents routinely turn to prenatal testing to screen for genetic or chromosomal disorders or to learn their child's sex. What if they could use similar prenatal interventions to learn (or change) their child's sexual orientation? Bioethicists have debated the moral implications of this still-hypothetical possibility for several decades. Some commentators fear that any scientific efforts to unde…
Title from PDF title page (viewed on Oct. 11, 2012)."'Human dignity' has been enshrined in international agreements and national constitutions as a fundamental human right. The World Medical Association calls on physicians to respect human dignity and to discharge their duties with dignity. And yet human dignity is a term--like love, hope, and justice--that is intuitively grasped but never clea…
Joanna Zylinska examines the ethical challenges presented by technology to the allegedly sacrosant idea of the human & makes a proposal for a new ethics of life rooted in the philosophy of
How developing a more expansive, non-formal conception of reason produces richer ethical understandings of human situations, explored and illustrated with many real examples.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Legal texts have been with us since the dawn of human history. Beginning in 1953, life too became textual. The discovery of the structure of DNA made it possible to represent the basic matter of life with permutations and combinations of four letters of the alphabet, A, T, C, and G. Since then, the biological and legal conceptions of life have been in constant, mutually constitutive interplay -…
"Throughout history, humanity has been seen as being in need of improvement, most pressingly in need of moral improvement. Today, in what has been called the beginnings of "the golden age of neuroscience," laboratory findings claim to offer insights into how the brain "does" morality, even suggesting that it is possible to make people more moral by manipulating their biology. Can "moral bioenha…
Legal, regulatory, and ethical perspectives on balancing social benefit and human autonomy in research using human biospecimens. Advances in medicine often depend on the effective collection, storage, research use, and sharing of human biological specimens and associated data. But what about the sources of such specimens? When a blood specimen is drawn from a vein in your arm, is that specimen …