Half a million babies are born prematurely in the United States every year. In this gripping medical narrative, Dr. Adam Wolfberg brings readers into the complex world of newborn intensive care, where brilliant but imperfect doctors do all they can to coax life into their tiny, injured patients. As a specialist in high-risk obstetrics and the father of a child born prematurely, Wolfberg explores the profound questions raised by such fragile beginnings, both from the front lines of the NICU and f...
This rich collection, popular among teachers and students alike, provides an in-depth look at major cases that have shaped the field of medical ethics. The book presents each famous (or infamous) case using extensive historical and contextual background, and then proceeds to illuminate it by careful discussion of pertinent philosophical theories and legal and ethical issues.
For one-quarter/semester courses in Medical Ethics, Biomedical Ethics, Allied Healthcare, Healthcare Ethics, and Healthcare Law and Ethics. Tong, a well-known biomedical ethicist, combines medical ethics, bioethics, and her own unique insights to provide a comprehensive survey of contemporary health care ethics issues.
Regenerative Medicine Ethics
This book puts the ethics, policy and politics of stem cells into context in a way that helps readers understand why past and current issues have developed the way they have and what the implications are for their work going forward. It also addresses emerging issues as the field progresses towards clinical and industrial uses.While there is a superabundance of material on the ethics of embryo use and questions of embryonic "personhood," there is little that covers what practicing scientists a...
Brain-Computer Interfaces
by Theodore W. Berger, John K. Chapin, Greg A. Gerhardt, Dennis J. McFarland, Jose C. Principe, Walid V. Soussou, Dawn M. Taylor, and Patrick A. Tresco
We have come to know that our ability to survive and grow as a nation to a very large degree depends upon our scientific progress. Moreover, it is not enough simply to keep 1 abreast of the rest of the world in scientific matters. We must maintain our leadership. President Harry Truman spoke those words in 1950, in the aftermath of World War II and in the midst of the Cold War. Indeed, the scientific and engineering leadership of the United States and its allies in the twentieth century played k...
A leading geneticist explores what promises to be one of the most transformative advances in health and medicine in history Almost every week, another exciting headline appears about new advances in the field of genetics. Genetic testing is experiencing the kind of exponential growth once seen with the birth of the Internet, while the plummeting cost of DNA sequencing makes it increasingly accessible for individuals and families. Steven Lipkin and Jon Luoma posit that today’s genomics is like...
Designing Our Descendants
From uttering a prayer before boarding a plane, to exploring past lives through hypnosis, has superstition become pervasive in contemporary culture? Robert Park, the best-selling author of Voodoo Science, argues that it has. In Superstition, Park asks why people persist in superstitious convictions long after science has shown them to be ill-founded. He takes on supernatural beliefs from religion and the afterlife to New Age spiritualism and faith-based medical claims. He examines recent controv...
Perspectives in Bioethics, Science, and Public Policy
In this book, nine thought-leaders engage with some of the hottest moral issues in science and ethics. Based on talks originally given at the annual “Purdue Lectures in Ethics, Policy, and Science,” the chapters explore interconnections between the three areas in an engaging and accessible way. Addressing a mixed public audience, the authors go beyond dry theory to explore some of the difficult moral questions that face scientists and policy-makers every day. The introduction presents a theoreti...
The challenge of scaling the highest mountain, exploring the deepest ocean, crossing the hottest desert, or swimming in near-freezing water is irresistible to many people. Life at the Extremes is an engrossing exploration of what happens to our bodies in these seemingly uninhabitable environments. Frances Ashcroft weaves stories of extraordinary feats of endurance with historical material and the latest scientific findings as she investigates the limits of human survival and the remarkable adapt...
Understanding Aging and Diversity (Routledge Advances in Sociology)
by Patricia Kolb
The demographic phenomena of increased life expectancy, increasing global population of older adults, and a larger number of older people as a proportion of the total population in nations throughout the world will affect our lives and the life of each person we know. The changes will result in challenges and benefits for societies and people of all ages. These events need to be understood, explained, and their consequences addressed; sociological theories about aging are an essential part of th...
Becoming Donor–Conceived – The Transformation of Anonymity in Gamete Donation (Body Cultures)
by Amelie Baumann
While it has been argued that anonymity in gamete donation has been brought to an end by legal changes and technological developments, Amelie Baumann suggests that this is in fact still in transformation. By focusing on the narratives of those who were conceived with anonymously donated gametes in the UK and Germany, she examines this transformative process and the role which donor-conceived persons play in it. This book shows that it is not someone's decision to procreate that turns "being dono...
Strangers at the Bedside
David Rothman gives us a brilliant, finely etched study of medical practice today. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the practice of medicine in the United States underwent a most remarkable--and thoroughly controversial--transformation. The discretion that the profession once enjoyed has been increasingly circumscribed, and now an almost bewildering number of parties and procedures participate in medical decision making. Well into the post-World War II period, decisions at the bedside were the almos...
When Medicine Went Mad (Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics, and Society)
by Arthur L. Caplan
In When Medicine Went Mad, one of the nation's leading bioethicists-and an extraordinary panel of experts and concentration camp survivors-examine problems first raised by Nazi medical experimentation that remain difficult and relevant even today. The importance of these issues to contemporary bioethical disputes-particularly in the thorny areas of medical genetics, human experimentation, and euthanasia-are explored in detail and with sensitivity.
This book is designed to be an easy-to-use guide to understanding the ethical and biosecurity implications of life science research. It provides a framework that will enable scientists, lab managers, researchers, students and teachers to anticipate how research may be used to cause harm, and to identify the steps that can be taken to minimise this risk.Life science research is covered by two international weapons treaties and the tools presented in this book will help scientists and researchers...
Biotechnology and Culture (Theories of Contemporary Culture)
by Paul Brodwin
The cultural debates over biotechnology clarify the fears and longings of our age. Biotechnologies are not just medical interventions; they pose profound challenges to conventional notions about identity, human connectedness, and society. With every new media frenzy over surrogacy, cloning, organ transplantation, and the like, people raise troubling questions: can a child have two mothers? Should we learn our genetic futures? Are organs gifts or commercial products? This book traces such questio...
In the era of the Internet and Oprah, in which formerly taboo information is readily available or freely confided, secrecy and privacy have in many ways given way to an onslaught of confession. Yet for those who are HIV positive, decisions about disclosure of their diagnosis force them to confront intimate, fundamental, and rarely discussed questions about truth, lies, sex, and trust. Drawing from interviews with over seventy gay men and women, intravenous drug users, sex workers, bisexual men,...
The Understanding of Nature (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, #23)
by Marjorie Grene
No student or colleague of Marjorie Grene will miss her incisive presence in these papers on the study and nature of living nature, and we believe the new reader will quickly join the stimulating discussion and critique which Professor Grene steadily provokes. For years she has worked with equally sure knowledge in the classical domain of philosophy and in modern epistemological inquiry, equally philosopher of science and metaphysician. Moreover, she has the deeply sensible notion that she shoul...
Bioethics in a European Perspective (International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, #8)
In this book, developed by a group of collaborating scholars in bioethics from different European countries, an overview is given of the most salient themes in present-day bioethics. The themes are discussed in order to enable the reader to have an in-depth overview of the state of the art in bioethics. Introductory chapters will guide the reader through the relevant dimensions of a particular area, while subsequent case discussions will help the reader to apply the ethical theories to specific...
The Human Use of Animals
The first set of case studies on animal use, this volume offers a thorough, up-to-date exploration of the moral issues related to animal welfare. Its main purpose is to examine how far it is ethically justifiable to harm animals in order to benefit mankind. An excellent introduction provides a framework for the cases and sets the background of philosophical and moral concepts underlying the subject.Sixteen original, previously unpublished essays cover controversies associated with the human use...
Sawyer, a well-known leech specialist, surveys the most recent research on this biologically and medically important group of animals. Useful to neurobiologists, molecular biologists, zoologists, and ecologists, these volumes include coverage of the leech's increasingly important role in neurobiological and neurophysiological studies.