ethics
amillikan | January 12, 2009This week, our regularly scheduled "Science Saturday" feature has become "Science Monday" due to some technical difficulties during our most recent upgrade. But the video is now up and features some of our very own bloggers, Janet (AKA Dr. Freeride) from Adventures in Ethics and Science, and Peter Lipson (AKA Dr. Pal) who contributes to Denialism Blog and regularly hosts thrilling podcasts.
This week, Janet and Dr. Pal explore the ethics behind different issues in medicine and science such as conscience clauses (for example, in which pharmacists can withhold prescriptions from consumers), the…
clock | January 11, 2009Listen to my SciBlings Janet and Pal,MD discuss scientific and medical ethics:
purepedantry | December 31, 2008PhRMA -- the association of pharmaceutical companies -- has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on drug paraphernalia given to doctors:
Starting Jan. 1, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on the kind of branded goodies -- Viagra pens, Zoloft soap dispensers, Lipitor mugs -- that were meant to foster good will and, some would say, encourage doctors to prescribe more of the drugs.
No longer will Merck furnish doctors with purplish adhesive bandages advertising Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus. Banished, too, are black T-shirts from Allergan adorned…
mikethemadbiologist | December 28, 2008I don't mean hope in the same way the Obama campaign did. Ian Welsh writes an incredibly powerful post about the personal politics of hopelessness--you should read the whole thing (it's arguably one of the best posts of the year). But this little section struck me:
The US now has the least intergenerational social mobility in the Western world (it used to have the most). The elites have become self-perpetuating, and they never had to stare in a mirror and know that they may never have more than minimum wage job; that probably this is as good as it gets....
That existence, hand to mouth,…
mikethemadbiologist | December 26, 2008So, if you go on the teevee machine and tell people that investment banks should be allowed to pay out dividends, and you're simply an economics professor, we should probably take the claim at face value. But what if you have tens of thousands of shares as compensation for being a board member? Oops:
I did some more checking, and Tyson has received over a million dollars in cash and stock options combined from Morgan Stanley. As I've noted before, you can't be a stateman and a salesman.
mikethemadbiologist | December 15, 2008...never mind believe in. Obama can do much better than former Clinton official and current corporate lobbyist David Hayes for Secretary of Interior. As a lobbyist for Ford, Hayes chose to side with Ford over a poor Native American community:
Trying to stick the cost of the clean-up of a toxic waste dump on a rural, economically disadvantaged American Indian community is not the kind of behavior one would want to see from a potential Secretary of the Interior. The Ringwood superfund site is a little-known American tragedy and David J. Hayes, as recently as 2007, was trying to get the…
mikethemadbiologist | December 3, 2008In case you missed it, there's a fascinating, albeit horrifying, article about the intersection of the business interests of retired military officers with their depiction in the mainstream media as unbiased commentators who are putting country first. Here's a sample:
The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles.
Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially…
jstemwedel | November 26, 2008Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf notes a recent retraction of an article from the Journal of Neuroscience. What's interesting about this case is that the authors retract the whole article without any explanation for the retraction. As PhysioProf writes:
There is absolutely no mention of why the paper is being retracted. People who have relied on the retracted manuscript to develop their own research conceptually and/or methodologically have been given no guidance whatsoever on what aspects of the manuscript are considered unreliable, and/or why.
So, asks PhysioProf, have these authors…
grrlscientist | November 12, 2008tags: seafood, fisheries, aquaculture, fish farming, tuna, swordfish, salmon, shrimp, sushi, book review
There's plenty of fish in the sea, as the old addage goes -- but are there, really? I experienced a rude awakening at the peak popularity of Orange Roughy, which I loved. I learned that Orange Roughy, Hoplostethus atlanticus, an extremely long-lived benthic species in the Western Pacific Ocean that doesn't even reach sexual maturity until 40 years of age, was being eaten out of existence by people like me. After I learned that, I never touched Orange Roughy again. But after I discovered…
mikethemadbiologist | October 28, 2008...I would be feeling like an idiot right about now. A while ago, I endorsed Sonia Chang-Diaz over Dianne Wilkerson for MA State Senate because I thought Wilkerson had some ethics problems. I didn't know the half of it (italics mine):
State Senator Dianne Wilkerson was arrested this morning after an 18-month undercover investigation by Boston Police and the FBI in which she allegedly accepted eight bribes worth $23,500.
The 15-year Democratic lawmaker allegedly accepted cash payoffs that ranged from $500 to $10,000 to help a nightclub secure a liquor license and to assist a private…
purepedantry | October 24, 2008A survey of American internists and rheumatologists has revealed that over 50% of them regularly prescribe placebos. Tilburt et al. surveyed internists and rheumatologists to see whether they were prescribing placebos, and if so how and what kind they were using. The study, published in BMJ, found the following:
679 physicians (57%) responded to the survey. About half of the surveyed internists and rheumatologists reported prescribing placebo treatments on a regular basis (46-58%, depending on how the question was phrased). Most physicians (399, 62%) believed the practice to be ethically…
mikethemadbiologist | October 20, 2008Hilzoy has a very interesting take on E.O. Wilson's essay "On Biology and Morality":
He takes the view that morality is a human contrivance to imply that we can answer moral questions only by understanding the biology behind our moral sentiments. It is worth noticing the implications of this argument. If we could not conduct any inquiry whose object is a human contrivance without inquiring into its biological roots, we would be unable to balance our checkbooks or figure out winning moves in chess without first understanding the selection processes that led us to engage in these activities --…
purepedantry | October 16, 2008Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel and psychologist Fiery Cushman have designed a moral sense test. The test poses scenarios and asks you to evaluate the relative morality or immorality of different actions. The purpose of the test for the researchers is to compare the responses between philosophers and non-philosophers to various ethical questions. (I imagine that the results will be not unlike when they check economist's ability to perform investment finance.)
I encourage you to go over to their site and help them collect some data.
Anyway, I was over on their site this morning, and one of…
grrlscientist | October 15, 2008tags: ethics, endangered species, conservation
Woman with a Parrot by Gustav Courbet (1866)
Oil on canvas
51 x 77 in. (129.5 x 195.6 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York [larger view].
A little while ago, I received an odd question from a reader, and I was slow in responding (my bad!), but her question has bothered me ever since I first read it and responded. First, her question:
You have to save the world (and I assume you also want to). You are the only one who can do so, and to do so, you have to destroy one or the other:
The Louvre (with everything inside but people)
or
one…
signout | September 24, 2008Courtesy of the excellent bioephemera's Jess Palmer comes this item of news, which concerns photographs of patients taken at the University of New Mexico Hospital and posted to a website. The photographs were reportedly close-ups of injuries being treated--no faces or patient-identifying features were shown. The employees who took and posted the photos have been fired, and several others have been disciplined as a result of these events.
My initial response to this was, "What's the big deal?" The implication of the firings is that taking someone's picture--even if it's not possible to…
grrlscientist | July 31, 2008
Everyone knows that the White House has been forcing scientists to only talk about research that conforms with GW's agenda, and the political cartoonists have been busily committing these shameful lies to paper in a form that we all can appreciate. One of those cartoons is pictured above. Thanks to a blog pal of mine, now is your opportunity to choose your favorite cartoon in the Union for Concerned Scientists' Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest. They have 12 cartoons there for you to choose between -- good luck! I am still trying to figure out which one I want to vote for (the…
revere | July 24, 2008The headline said, "Vaccination plan puts health care workers first," but you had to read the article to find out who goes next: the military. This according to the Guidance on allocating and targeting pandemic influenza vaccine released yesterday by the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The guidance is premised on the assumption that in the early phases of a pandemic, any vaccine will be in short supply and will need to be rationed. The document gives "strong advice" on how DHHS thinks this rationing should take place, although much is left unexplained. Since the allocation…
grrlscientist | July 17, 2008tags: explicit atheism, godlessness, religion, theism, rational living, freethinking, philosophy
Phylogeny of Christianity.
Image: FrostFireZoo.
All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God.
~ Baron d'Holbach, 1772.
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted) was recently added to the Atheist Blogroll. You can see the atheist doohickey on my left sidebar, which looks like this;
The Atheist Blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to atheist bloggers from around the world. As a new member, I was invited to write a little blurb (blurp?) about…
revere | July 11, 2008Most academic scientists -- including me and my colleagues -- don't want unnecessary federal interference with what we do. We're like any regulated community. Not happy to be regulated. Unfortunately we have made the unnecessary necessary by allowing improper conflicts of interest to infest academic medicine and predictably, Congress is about to step in.
Until now, the academic response to periodic external scrutiny of potential research conflicts has been increasingly to assert that it can police itself. In 2001, the Association of American Medical Colleges issued recommendations for strong…
grrlscientist | June 24, 2008tags: Ethics for the Real World, Ronald A. Howard, Clinton D. Korver, book review
We are confronted with seemingly small ethical choices every day of our lives, ranging from whether we should plagiarize a homework assignment, cheat on an exam, "pad" our resumes, pilfer office supplies, tell a "white lie" to a loved one ... if the average person cannot trust himself to behave in a consistently ethical way in such small matters, is it any wonder that most people do not trust their colleagues, neighbors, friends, families and even their elected officials? Unfortunately, small lapses in ethical…