The Confidentiality Advisory Group (CAG) is a specialised body that advises the Health Research Authority (HRA) and the Secretary of State for Health on requests for access to confidential information, in the absence of informed consent from its owners. Its primary role is to oversee the safe use of such information and to counsel the governing…

This article provides responses from academic neurologist Navid Seraji-Bozorgzad to questions posed by Don Ambrose. After moving from Iran to the United States in 1984, Navid Seraji-Bozorgzad attended The Roeper School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan for high school. He studied physics as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. After…

This article presents an interview with Thuy Vu, Research Coordinator at the University of Washington and Project Director at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Washington. In this interview, Vu talks about what she does, how she got these jobs, how her education ties in, and her first job out of college. The interview concludes…

Genetic and epigenetic differences exist within monozygote twin-pairs and might be especially important in the expression of autism. Assuming phenotypic differences between monozygotic twins are due to environmental influences may lead to mistaken conclusions regarding the relative genetic and environmental contribution to autism risk.

These are interesting days in the scientific, social, and political debates about human embryonic stem cell research. Pluripotent stem cells--cells that can, in principle, give rise to the body's full range of cell types--were previously derivable only from human embryos that were destroyed in the process. Now, a variety of somatic cell types can…

Nearly 30 years ago, renowned immunologist James E.K. Hildreth, M.D., Ph.D., was compelled to start researching the virus that causes AIDS. He marveled at its enigma and was pressed into action by its ability to cut lives short and devastate communities. The disease set him on a course of medical inquiry that has included biomedical breakthroughs…

Non-medical research involves the same issues of justice, beneficence, and respect for persons that apply to non-medical research. It also may involve risk of harm to participants, and conflicts of interest for researchers. It is therefore not possible to argue that such research should be exempt from ethical review. This paper argues that…

The connection that critics make between medical genetics and eugenics is historically fallacious. Activists on the political right are as mistaken as activists on the political left: Genetic screening was not eugenics in the past, is not eugenics in the present, and, unless its technological systems become radically transformed, will not be…

Of all animal-rights issues, medical research is perhaps the thorniest. The human use of animals--for companionship, entertainment, food, clothing--always assumes a hierarchy, one that puts humans at the top or the center of either the evolutionary order, God's creation, or the food chain. Although most people can come to terms with the use of…

In this essay, I propose that the field of composition/rhetoric can make important contributions to the understanding of ethics based on our critical perspective on language as interactional and rhetorical. The actual language of decision making with ethical dimensions has rarely been studied directly in the literature, a crucial gap our field can…

This essay examines the effects of commercialization on education with particular focus on corporatization of academic research. This trend results from a business model of education, which I identify as profit-based inquiry. I contrast profit-based inquiry with Nicholas Maxwell's conception of wisdom-based inquiry and conclude that the business…

Aside from the appeal to administrators as a tool to reduce costs by combining less robust departments with heftier relations, interdisciplinarity is a powerful idea because it implies that different branches of knowledge can benefit from talking to one another: a grand, unified theory of knowledge in which each discipline contributes building…

The concept of premature discovery in science entails the publication of an important idea which remains uncited for a long period. Thereafter, a deluge of citations of its substance would occur. An overlooked example concerns the discovery in 1963 of how lung cancer cells stimulate the formation of new lymph vessels in man. Subsequently called…

Using a question-and-answer format, this section addresses questions and concerns about the role of institutional review boards (IRBs) in monitoring the treatment of human participants in evaluation. According to the American Evaluation Associations Guiding Principles for Evaluators, Evaluators should abide by current professional ethics,…

Discusses how new knowledge may be generated by information retrieval techniques on bibliographic databases. Examples from medical research are used to illustrate the possibility of making discoveries by synthesizing the literature; hidden correlations between factors are discussed; and the creative use of information retrieval systems is…