Dive et al. argue to limit the scope, scale, and quantity of results in genomic screening programs at the population level. Their analysis offers two interrelated reasons for this recommendation: f...

The last epigrammatist named by Meleager as contributing to his Garland is Phanias, who, with Meleager's customary irrelevance, is said to be represented there by cornflowers . No inferences can be drawn from his place in the catalogue, which is neither chronological nor topographical in arrangement, and with one possible exception the epigrams give no hint of his home or date. In A.P. 6. 299.

The last epigrammatist named by Meleager as contributing to his Garland is Phanias, who, with Meleager's customary irrelevance, is said to be represented there by cornflowers. No inferences can be drawn from his place in the catalogue, which is neither chronological nor topographical in arrangement, and with one possible exception the epigrams give no hint of his home or date. In A.P. 6. 299.

After the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, a number of states have immediately banned abortion. Pro-choice activists are responding by promoting medication abortions – a do-it-yourself form of abortion. Women can take pills at home to induce an abortion in the first few weeks of pregnancy. -/- The Biden Administration [1] has backed the abortion pill, too. Attorney-General Merrick B. Garland and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra both issued statements endorsing it. -/- “We stand (...) ready to work with other arms of the federal government that seek to use their lawful authorities to protect and preserve access to reproductive care,” said the Attorney-General. “In particular, the F.D.A. has approved the use of the medication mifepristone. States may not ban mifepristone based on disagreement with the F.D.A.’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.” -/- As the New York Times [1] has noted, this sets the scene for legal battles. The obvious one is: will anti-abortion states prosecute medication abortions? -/- But – based on experience in the United Kingdom - the use of the abortion pill could give pro-life doctors headaches as well. -/- In the past year, UK has witnessed the saga of two Catholic doctors who have been brought in front of the professional regulator, the General Medical Council, after accusations of professional misconduct. Their crime? They had supplied abortion pill reversal (APR) treatment to women. Accusations of this misconduct have been brought forward by pro-choice organisations [2]. -/- The problem is that some women might panic when they discover that they are pregnant or are pressured to make a rash decision. They obtain abortion pills, often without seeing a doctor faceto- face, and soon after taking the first pill, they regret their decision. -/- Is it too late for them to save their pregnancy? Not necessarily. -/- A treatment developed in the US works about half the time. It involves the woman taking progesterone after the first abortion pill to counteract the abortifacient action of the drug. -/- Seventy-three women in the UK are reported to have taken a full APR course, of whom, 38 – more than half — successfully remained pregnant. Admittedly, the procedure is controversial [3], with pro-choice writers denouncing it as unproven, unscientific, and unethical. This has triggered some healthcare practitioners and scholars to analyse the commitments of the pro-choice movement to APR. In a recently published paper in The New Bioethics [4], two colleagues, Dominic Whitehouse and Steven Bow, and I argue that those espousing a pro-choice worldview should actually support abortion pill reversal and that the current evidence indicates that they should actually be doing it. -/- While some pro-choice activists might be happy simply to expand women’s reproductive choices, some might also want to ensure that these choices are safe and effective at achieving the desired outcome, which in principle includes maintaining a pregnancy. -/- We then review the scientific evidence with respect to the ability of APR to halt an abortion, look at the potential impact of APR on mental health, as well as its procedural safety. While highlighting that gold-standard evidence is lacking, we note that APR is associated with about two times higher rate of embryo survival compared to not completing the full early medical abortion course, that there is large agreement in the literature that women who are ambiguous about abortion are at risk of poorer mental health outcomes after abortion (and argue that women who request APR fall into this category), and highlight that there is no evidence that APR is more dangerous than abandoning an initiated early medical abortion. -/- The latter fact is important, as the results of the only randomised-controlled trial of APR have been at times misrepresented in the media [5.6], creating the impression that APR is not safe while most of the adverse effects occurred in the study group that did not receive APR. As our paper argues, with respect to APR the two UK doctors were “champions of women’s choice and should be congratulated, not condemned, by pro-choice advocates”. -/- While the cases against the two doctors have now been dropped (and there have even been accusations against a member of one of these pro-choice organisations that they pressurised a patient into complaining about one of the doctors and twisted the patient’s experience of the treatment [7]), we argue that it is important to set-up systems to facilitate the future provision of APR to protect both patients and healthcare staff. -/- Our conclusion is that, while being open to any change in evidence, those espousing a pro-choice outlook should “support calls for an APR framework that will protect women and the healthcare professionals caring for them” “and certainly not oppose” APR. -/- The debate over abortion pill reversal will be heading to the United States soon. It is quite possible that it will be denounced as dangerous misinformation. It’s not. But pro-life defenders should be prepared to defend their ground. -/- This article was first published by Mercatornet. (shrink)

With In Search of Mechanisms, Carl F. Craver and Lindley Darden offer both a descriptive and an instructional account of how biologists discover mechanisms. Drawing on examples from across the life sciences and through the centuries, Craver and Darden compile an impressive toolbox of strategies that biologists have used and will use again to reveal the mechanisms that produce, underlie, or maintain the phenomena characteristic of living things. They discuss the questions that figure in the search for mechanisms, characterizing the (...) experimental, observational, and conceptual considerations used to answer them, all the while providing examples from the history of biology to highlight the kinds of evidence and reasoning strategies employed to assess mechanisms. At a deeper level, Craver and Darden pose a systematic view of what biology is, of how biology makes progress, of how biological discoveries are and might be made, and of why knowledge of biological mechanisms is important for the future of the human species. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RUSSEL:rS ANTI-COMMUNIST RHETORIC BEFORE AND AFTER STALIN'S DEATH STEPHEN HAYHURST History / Copenhagen International School Copenhagen, Denmark 1100 A communist regimes collapse in Eastern Europe, and the rhetoric of the Cold War is at last abandoned, it seems an appropriate time to examine an aspect of Bertrand Russell's political life and thought which has not been as well documented as, for example, his activities in the First World War (...) or the 1960s. In the decade following the end of the Second World War Russell could, with some justification, be accused of contributing to Cold War mistrust, and even of playing the role of a "Cold War Warrior". Between 1945 and 1953 not only was Russell, as he himself later admitted, well entrenched as part of the "Establishment", but he was also actively involved in denouncing Communism, Stalin, the Soviet Union, and at times even the Russian people. Russell's Cold War invective intruded into his private letters, newspaper and magazine articles, public lectures and some of his books during this period. For example, What is Freedom? and What is Democracy?, whilst not the best remembered of Russell's books, are illustrative of his vehement hatred of Stalin's regime, and are of especial interest because they underwent small but significant revisions after Stalin's death. This brief survey of Russell's anti-Stalinism is, by necessity, highly selective, and has intentionally focussed on some of Russell's more extreme statements. A much more comprehensive study would be necessary to analyze the overall significance of Russell's anti-Stalinism. Russell's political thought in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War is dominated by what has been called his "preventative war phase". His proposal that the Soviet Union should be ru II: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives McM rer University Libraty Press n.s. II (summer 1991): 67-81 ISSN 0031>-01631 68 STEPHEN HAYHURST pressured into signing the Baruch Plan for the international control of nuclear weapons, was made on at least twelve separate occasions between 1945 and 1949 and was, he later confessed, "the worst thing" he ever said.I This episode, characterized by controversy, proposals, denials and counter-denials, and reasonably well discussed by both critics and commentators, has direct relevance to Russell's anti-communist rhetoric.2 His prescient awareness of the staggering implications of nuclear weapons led him to demand, within two weeks of the destruction of Hiroshima, the urgent implementation of some procedure of international control.3 Since the First World War Russell had always maintained a vigorous belief in the long-term necessity of world government. Although this internationalism had been a central component of Russell's political thought, it had remained at least until 1945, at the level of a political ideal rather than a concrete proposal. In his more pessimistic moods, Russell had maintained that it would only arise through American hegemony, and at all times he had argued that a world government would only be effective if it possessed a monopoly ofweapons.4 Suddenly with the development of the atomic bomb, conditions had changed. Until 1949 the United States had a monopoly of this new monstrous weapon. Despite his very mixed views about both American political ideology and practice, Russell now clearly looked to the United States for international leadership. From the outset he accepted that international control of the bomb may not arise voluntarily. In October 1945 he wrote, "I think a world government supremely important, and I do not expect to see it established without I The twelve occasions are set out in I. F. Stone, "Bertrand Russell as a Moral Force in World Politics", Russell, n.s. I (1981): 7-25. Interview by Cedric Belfrage in the National Guardian, New York, 8, no. 35 (18 June 1956): 6. 2 Clark: D. P. Lackey, "Russell's Contribution to the Study of Nuclear Weapons Policy", Russell, n.s. 4 (1984): 243-52; Alan Ryan, Bertrand Russell, a Political Lift (London: Allen Lane the Penguin P., 1988): Stone, "Bertrand Russell as a Moral Force in World Politics~'. l "The Bomb and Civilization", Forward. Glasgow, 39, no. 33 (18 Aug. 1945): I, 3... (shrink)

"Public Bioethics collects the most influential essays and articles of James F. Childress, a leading figure in the field of contemporary bioethics. These essays, including new, previously unpublished material, cohere around the idea of "public bioethics," which involves analyzing and assessing public policies in biomedicine, health care, and public health, often through public deliberative bodies. The volume is divided into four sections. The first concentrates on the principle of respect for autonomy and paternalistic policies and practices. The second explores the (...) tension among bioethics, public policy, and religious convictions. It pays particular attention to the role of religious convictions in the formation of public policies and to the basis and limits of exemptions of health care providers who conscientiously oppose providing certain legal and patient-sought services. The third section looks at practices and policies related to organ transplantation. Childress focuses particularly on determining death, obtaining first-person consent for deceased organ donation, and allocating donated organs effectively and fairly. The book's fourth and final section maps the broad terrain of public health ethics, proposes a triage framework for the use of resources in public health crises, addresses public health interventions that potentially infringe civil liberties, and sheds light on John Stuart Mill's misunderstood legacy for public health ethics."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

We applaud the authors’ efforts to provide a theoretical basis for and more clearly link clinical ethics support services (CESS) to organisational-level quality improvement (QI). We agree that additional theorising and testing of the resultant theoretical frameworks is of benefit to the field of clinical ethics and that the outcome of a CESS is more valuable than the sum of the individual cases that it handles. We would suggest that the authors have emphasised the output of the CESS without fully (...) considering the process by which it happens. While moral case deliberation does provide an example pathway for QI, such improvements do not necessarily need to occur through the mechanism of moral case deliberation. Further engagement with QI literature could provide valuable insights to quality within the field of clinical ethics. For example, combining the QI concepts of organisational culture and high reliability organisations (HROs) with the clinical ethics... (shrink)

Engaging recent developments within the bio-cultural study of religion, Shults unveils the evolved cognitive and coalitional mechanisms by which god-conceptions are engendered in minds and nurtured in societies. He discovers and attempts to liberate a radically atheist trajectory that has long been suppressed within the discipline of theology.

Religion in Multidisciplinary Perspective provides the first comprehensive treatment of the work of Wesley J. Wildman, one of the most inventive thinkers in the field of religious studies. Scholars with expertise in philosophical, theological, and scientific approaches to the study of religion offer critical and constructive engagements with Wildman's astonishingly creative and integrative oeuvre. The essays address themes that will be of interest to those concerned with the current state of scholarship on religion from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, (...) theology, ethics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others. The volume concludes with a response by Wildman"-- Back ocover. (shrink)

Answer.--Education.--Work.--Intelligence.--Disease.--War.--Commerce.--Morality.--Humanity.--Religion .--Success.--Conclusion.

Essays that put noted political thinkers of the past—including Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Wollstonecraft, Marx, and Confucius—in dialogue with current environmental political theory. Contemporary environmental political theory considers the implications of the environmental crisis for such political concepts as rights, citizenship, justice, democracy, the state, race, class, and gender. As the field has matured, scholars have begun to explore connections between Green Theory and such canonical political thinkers as Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, and Marx. The essays in this volume put important figures (...) from the political theory canon in dialogue with current environmental political theory. It is the first comprehensive volume to bring the insights of Green Theory to bear in reinterpreting these canonical theorists. Individual essays cover such classical figures in Western thought as Aristotle, Hume, Rousseau, Mill, and Burke, but they also depart from the traditional canon to consider Mary Wollstonecraft, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and Confucius. Engaging and accessible, the essays also offer original and innovative interpretations that often challenge standard readings of these thinkers. In examining and explicating how these great thinkers of the past viewed the natural world and our relationship with nature, the essays also illuminate our current environmental predicament. Essays on Plato • Aristotle • Niccolò Machiavelli • Thomas Hobbes • John Locke • David Hume • Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Edmund Burke • Mary Wollstonecraft • John Stuart Mill • Karl Marx • W. E. B. Du Bois • Martin Heidegger • Hannah Arendt • Confucius Contributors Sheryl D. Breen, W. Scott Cameron, Peter F. Cannavò, Joel Jay Kassiola, Joseph H. Lane Jr. Timothy W. Luke, John M. Meyer, Özgüç Orhan, Barbara K. Seeber, Francisco Seijo, Kimberly K. Smith, Piers H. G. Stephens, Zev Trachtenberg, Andrew Valls, Harlan Wilson. (shrink)

What if the Big Bang was an exodus of non-existing reality into existence? In this book a theory of the reality is started from the principle that 'existing takes time' but in states of the universe there are pre-things in moments, thus non-existing, which realize in strings over specific time intervals as existing phenomena. Causality must be reviewed now and new paradigms for reality follow. The existing and observed universe are discontinuous and "limits" in mathematical models do not correspond to (...) reality. New interpretations in evolution theory and the human condition are being investigated. (shrink)