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Exemplary and surrogate models: two modes of representation in biology.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: Abstract:Biologists use models in two distinct ways that have not been clearly articulated. A model may be used either as an exemplar of a larger group, or as a surrogate for a specific target. Zebrafish serve as an exemplary model of vertebrates in developmental biology; rodents are both exemplary vertebrates and specific surrogates for humans in biomedical research. The distinction between exemplary and surrogate models is important, because the criteria for and implications of model choice diverge in significant ways, depending on which role the model is to serve. So, too, do the kinds of conclusions we ca...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - October 29, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Why is modern medicine stuck in a rut?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: Abstract:There is a growing perception that modern medicine is approaching a state of crisis characterized by creative inertia, non-innovation, and non-productivity. Compared to the remarkable progress during the first 30 years after World War II, the last 30 years have been characterized by a self-congratulatory illusion of progress, the fruits of which have failed to reach our patients. The problem may lie with the fact that the (often lone) clinical innovator of the past who made all the difference to the spectacular progress of medicine during the golden age has been marginalized to the extent that he is ...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - October 29, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

The placebo effect: illness and interpersonal healing.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: Abstract:The placebo effect has been a source of fascination, irritation, and confusion within biomedicine over the past 60 years. Although scientific investigation has accelerated in the past decade, with particular attention to neurobiological mechanisms, there has been a dearth of attention to developing a general theory of the placebo effect. In this article, we attempt to address this gap. To set the stage, we review evidence relating to the reality and clinical significance of the placebo effect. Next we investigate the scope and limits of the placebo effect by examining the hypothesis that the placebo ...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - October 29, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Variational causal claims in epidemiology.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article examines definitions of cause in the epidemiological literature. Those definitions describe causes as factors that make a difference to the distribution of disease or to individual health status. In philosophical terms, they are "difference-makers." I argue that those definitions are underpinned by an epistemology and a methodology that hinge upon the notion of variation, contra the dominant Humean paradigm according to which we infer causality from regularity. Furthermore, despite the fact that causes are defined in terms of difference-making, this doesn't fix the causal metaphysics but rather reflects the "v...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - October 29, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

The painless brain: lobotomy, psychiatry, and the treatment of chronic pain and terminal illness.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article examines the use of lobotomy as a treatment for chronic intractable pain and reconstructs then-common perceptions of pain and of the patients who suffered from it. It delineates the social expectations and judgments implicit in physicians' descriptions of the patients, analyzing what was expected from such patients and how the medical establishment responded to non-normative expressions of suffering. I argue that the medicalized response to an expectation for normativity demonstrates the convergence between psychiatric and palliative interventions. Based on a historically informed perspective of psychiatric in...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - October 29, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Richard bradley: a unified, living agent theory of the cause of infectious diseases of plants, animals, and humans in the first decades of the 18th century.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: Abstract:During the years 1714 to 1721, Richard Bradley, who was later to become the first Professor of Botany at Cambridge University, proposed a unified, unique, living agent theory of the cause of infectious diseases of plants and animals and the plague of humans. Bradley's agents included microscopic organisms, revealed by the studies of Robert Hooke and Antony van Leeuwenhoek. His theory derived from his experimental studies of plants and their diseases and from microscopic observation of animalcules in different naturally occurring and artificial environments. He concluded that there was a microscopic w...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - October 29, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Creativity in biological research.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: Abstract:During the past century, several biologists have studied the mental processes involved in creativity. In recent years psychologists have approached the subject experimentally. In one such study (), creativity has been shown to originate in the subconscious mind and to be transmitted to the conscious mind as a result of a decrease in latent inhibition, an ordinarily strong cognitive barrier between the conscious mind and the subconscious. In my scientific work I have found evidence for creativity in the design of experiments, in which the addition of apparently superfluous controls has led to importan...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - October 29, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Compassionate solidarity: suffering, poetry, and medicine.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: Abstract:Suffering is the experience of distress or disharmony caused by the loss, or threatened loss, of what we most cherish. Such losses may strip away the beliefs by which we construct a meaningful narrative of human life in general and our own in particular. The vocation of physicians and other health professionals is to relieve suffering caused by illness, trauma, and bodily degeneration. However, since suffering is an existential state that does not necessarily parallel physical or emotional states, physicians cannot rely solely on knowledge and skills that address physiological dysfunction. Rather, th...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - October 29, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

An old doctor grows older.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: Abstract:An old man, I am convinced that aging is no disease, but a normal part of living, just like childhood. Society should provide for our inevitable decline rather than support research to postpone our dying. Retirement, now so arbitrary, defines when men and women are old, and so discards contributions from the elderly who want to work. As a physician, I am sure that many of us over 65 could help to assist the caregivers who have so little time. Ageism is part of the problem: medical students learn ageism in their early training, and that ageism is reinforced by later contact with the frail sick elderly...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - October 29, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Horizons on the world.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19694072 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - August 23, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Hughes JC Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Dissecting vision in early science and medicine.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19694073 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - August 23, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Brain RM, Whitmer KJ Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Losing dignity.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19694074 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - August 23, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Brudney D Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

The insulin immunoassay after 50 years: a reassessment.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: In 1960 Berson and Yalow published a method for the radioimmunoassay (RIA) of plasma insulin based on the concept that the extent to which unlabeled insulin displaces labeled insulin from anti-insulin antibody is proportional to the concentration of unlabeled insulin. The RIA for insulin has greatly increased knowledge of the physiology of glucose homeostasis and of the diverse causes of diabetes mellitus. Beyond this, the insight on which the RIA-or, more broadly, the competitive protein-binding assay-is based has provided the means to measure nanomolar or picomolar concentrations of a vast array of compound...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - August 19, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

A new curriculum to link the basic science of aging with geriatric practice.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article recommends a collaboration between basic scientists and geriatricians in order to develop a curriculum that would identify how new knowledge derived from basic aging research bears on the inception of aging-related conditions and diseases that emerge over time. This information could be used to create new approaches to reducing or postponing diseases in later life. Health providers participating in this curriculum would gain new insights about aging, health maintenance, risk factors for disease inception, and appropriate interventions over the life course of their adult patients, helping them to achieve a heal...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - August 19, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Genetic counseling for thalassemia in the islamic republic of iran.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: The response of groups to pressing medical problems cannot be predicted on theoretical grounds. An example is the program for the control of beta-thalassemia in Iran, a country with a tradition of inbreeding and a conservative religious culture, and in which thalassemia is common. Thalassemia is largely treatable, but the treatment is lifelong and onerous and creates a serious economic burden for the individual family and for the national health budget. The genetics are simple, and inexpensive screening tests are available to identify carriers. An Iranian program requiring mandatory premarital screening was s...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - August 19, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Revisiting the beginning of bioethics: the contribution of fritz jahr (1927).Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: Van Rensselaer Potter is usually credited with coining the term bioethics and with founding this field. However, the rediscovery of the article "Bioethics: A Panorama of the Human Being's Ethical Relations with Animals and Plants," published in 1927 by Fritz Jahr in the German magazine Kosmos, necessitates a revision of this history of the foundation of bioethics. While Potter made significant contributions to this field, the importance of Jahr to the founding of bioethics should be recognized. PMID: 19684372 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - August 19, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

The avoidance of human suffering.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: Suffering is frequent among patients, and it is common for physicians to attempt to avoid contact with individuals who are dying, debilitated, or in pain. Both patients and physicians are harmed when this happens: patients feel abandoned, resulting in unnecessary suffering, and physicians miss moments of meaning and renewal through direct connection. Ernest Gaines's novel A Lesson Before Dying is not a medical story, yet one character, Grant Wiggins, behaves like a physician when he tries to avoid direct, personal contact with Miss Emma, a community member who is suffering. This novel illuminates the tendency...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - August 19, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Homage to robert hooke (1635-1703): new insights from the recently discovered hooke folio.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: Microorganisms were first observed by Robert Hooke and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek between 1665 and 1678. In 1665, Hooke published Micrographia, which depicted the details of 60 objects as seen in the microscope. One chapter was devoted to the microfungus Mucor, the first microbe observed by the human eye. Leeuwenhoek, despite having no scientific training, became the first to observe protozoa, red blood cells, the sperm cells of animals, and bacteria, which he described in numerous letters to the Royal Society of London. In 1677, Hooke became Secretary of the Royal Society and, in the same year, confirmed some of...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - August 19, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

"More fatal than powder and shot": dysentery in the u.s. Army during the mexican war, 1846-48.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: In terms of deaths due to disease, the Mexican War (1846-48) was the deadliest of all American wars. Nearly 13% of the entire U.S. force perished from disease. Of the total 12,535 war deaths, 10,986 (88%) were due to infectious diseases (overwhelmingly dysentery, both bacterial and amoebic); seven men died from disease for every man killed by Mexican musket balls. Camp pollution was the greatest error committed by U.S. troops in the Mexican War. The indifference of line officers and recruits to the need for proper sanitation and military hygiene fueled the dysentery outbreaks, and the poor conditions in milit...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - August 19, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Henry James's "The Ambassadors": The Promise to Lonely Adolescents that There Will Be a Future.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: Adolescence is a lonely time for all of us, as we shift our emotional attachment from our parents to our own autonomous selves and to those people outside our families who will be essential to our emotional growth. Perhaps because Henry James's novel The Ambassadors (1903) deals so masterfully with this subject, it promised the author that there would be a future beyond her senior year in college. The novel has two protagonists: a young American who has arrived at his maturity in Paris, and a middle-aged man who lives in a gray, ungratifying world because he has missed the opportunity to complete his unfoldin...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - August 19, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

In Sickness and in Health Care: A Student's Thoughts Before Beginning His Medical Training.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: This essay is a "prespective"-the musings of a soon-to-be MD/PhD student on various aspects of the practice of medicine, written just before he began his training in the fall of 2008. It discusses some of the issues-genomic medicine, healthcare reform, and evidence-based medicine-that will likely impact medicine and medical care during his career. These thoughts are interwoven with the personal story of his grandfather's fight against disease and the complications of diagnosis and treatment. PMID: 19684377 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - August 19, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

I Was a Mole in an IRB.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Authors: The need to ensure the maximal safety of patients participating in clinical research has led to a number of regulations and oversight measures. None of these has had a more profound effect on the way such research is carried out in the United States than the establishment of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) system. While the individual rights of patients must be respected and confidentiality assured, such official scrutiny may actually inhibit the ability of physicians to initiate and conduct clinical research, thus defeating, at times, the very purpose of this research: the ultimate improvement in patien...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - August 19, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Evidence-based medicine again.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19395816 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Schechter AN, Perlman RL Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

The nature of evidence in evidence-based medicine: guest editors' introduction.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19395817 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Goldenberg MJ, Borgerson K, Bluhm R Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Iconoclast or creed? Objectivism, pragmatism, and the hierarchy of evidence.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article redirects critical attention toward EBM's rigid hierarchy of evidence as the culprit of its objectionable epistemic practices. It reframes the EBM discourse in light of a distinction between objectivist and pragmatic epistemology, which allows for a more nuanced analysis of EBM than previously offered: one that is not either/or in its evaluation of the decision-making technology as either iconoclastic or creedal. PMID: 19395818 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Goldenberg MJ Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Justice in health research: What is the role of evidence-based medicine?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article examines flaws in the current processes of research production and the implications of these for justice and for vulnerable patients, and explores possible solutions. PMID: 19395819 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Rogers W, Ballantyne A Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Sequestered evidence and the distortion of clinical practice guidelines.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article discusses how the withholding of clinical trial information by pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers affects the reliability of clinical guidelines. It first offers a case study analysis of the U.K. drug regulator's failure to prosecute GlaxoSmithKline, manufacturer of the bestselling antidepressant Seroxat (manufactured as Paxil in North America), for withholding information on the safety of Seroxat from regulators. It next examines the idea of a "Sarbanes- Oxley for Science," a recent proposal that seeks to introduce legislation forcing companies to disclose clinical trials that have indeterminat...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: McGoey L Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Valuing evidence: bias and the evidence hierarchy of evidence-based medicine.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article argues that two familiar justifications offered for the EBM hierarchy of evidence-that the hierarchy provides special access to causes, and that evidence derived from research methods ranked higher on the hierarchy is less biased than evidence ranked lower-both fail, and that this indicates that we are not epistemically justified in using the EBM hierarchy of evidence as a guide to medical research and practice. Following this critique, the article considers the extent to which biases influence medical research and whether meta-analyses might rescue research from the influence of bias. The article concludes wi...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Borgerson K Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Theory-based medicine and the role of evidence: why the emperor needs new clothes, again.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The evidence-based medicine (EBM) movement was established to combat capricious reasoning in clinical care, particularly arguments from authority. Critique of authority and appraisal of evidence remain EBM's core values and should be revisited in this era of EBM's maturity and influence. We are now faced with a new form of under-questioned authority: evidence from well-designed and methodologically appraised randomized controlled trials (RCTs). RCT evidence is now prized even when it is incapable of providing meaningful information-in particular, when underlying causal theory is inscrutable. Experimental trial evidence...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Giacomini M Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Some observations on observational research.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article argues that what matters is whether the treatment and control groups are similar with respect to potential confounding factors, not whether they got that way through randomization. Moreover, nonrandomized studies tend to have other characteristics that make them useful sources of evidence, in that they tend to last longer and to enroll more patients than do randomized trials. Replacing the sharp dichotomy between randomized and nonrandomized studies with a continuum from "clean" studies (which have high internal validity but whose results do not readily generalize to clinical practice) to pragmatic studies (wh...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Bluhm R Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Making the grade: assuring trustworthiness in evidence.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Despite evidence-based medicine's (EBM's) significant evolution and maturation from its revolutionary origins to its current form as the preeminent means of practicing medicine, there are still good reasons to be unsatisfied with EBM. This essay explores two important new developments in EBM: recently articulated accounts of the scientific basis of EBM, and the related writings of the GRADE Working Group to create standards for interpretation of the medical literature and evaluation of recommendations. A review of Karanicolas, Kunz, and Guyatt's (2008) three-step articulation of EBM's scientific basis demonstrates that...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Upshur R Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Ethics and evidence in psychiatric practice.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article provides an overview of some of the main ethical issues within psychiatry and examines three interrelated questions: (1) to which ethical values is EBM committed? (2) which ethical theory is reflected in these values? and (3) can these values and theories resolve existing ethical issues in psychiatry? EBM strives for the "greatest good for the greatest number," where good is defined as improved health. This utilitarian orientation cannot, however, address critical areas of moral importance for psychiatry, such as how its practitioners differentiate normal from abnormal, how they determine which forms of suffer...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Gupta M Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Complementary and alternative medicine: between evidence and absurdity.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article outlines CAM's position between evidence and absurdity. It discusses misconceptions that often mislead the public and shows how CAM can and should be submitted to the principles of evidence- based medicine (EBM). Employing the example of acupuncture, the evidence as it currently stands is described. But there are numerous obstacles to applying EBM to CAM. EBM is defenseless against absurdity. We should, therefore, demarcate the absurd in order to avoid wasting time and resources. The new fad of "integrated" medicine has been proposed as a potential replacement for EBM. PMID: 19395826 [PubMed - in process] ...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Ernst E Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Evidence-based policymaking: a critique.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article draws from this debate in order to inform the discussions over the appropriateness of evidence- based policymaking and the related question of what is the nature of policymaking. The positivist, empiricist worldview that underpins the theory and practice of evidence-based medicine (EBM) fails to address key elements of the policymaking process. In particular, a narrowly "evidence-based" framing of policymaking is inherently unable to explore the complex, context-dependent, and value-laden way in which competing options are negotiated by individuals and interest groups. Sociolinguistic tools such as argumentati...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Greenhalgh T, Russell J Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Evidence-free medicine: forgoing evidence in clinical decision making.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Despite being the central concept to evidence-based medicine (EBM), evidence remains an elusive and controversial notion. Ongoing debates regarding evidence primarily serve to confuse and obfuscate. Examination of the nature of medical decision making without any appeal to evidence reveals a more complete understanding of the optimal practice of clinical medicine. An "evidence-free medicine" allows for the incorporation of a variety of facts and warrants, reasons and reasoning, into clinical decisions. The relative weighting of potentially conflicting warrants for a medical decision comprises the critical process of cl...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Tonelli MR Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

A footnote to the revolution in psychiatric diagnosis.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19395829 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Landau WM Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Evolution in the post-genome era.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The advent of nucleotide sequence data has created e new era in evolutionary biology. With theoretical underpinnings derived the work of the late Motoo Kimura, evolutionary concepts have played role in the development of the field of bioinformatics. However, the maturation of modern evolutionary biology has been hindered by a conception of natural selection as an all-powerful force shaping every aspect of phenotypic evolution. In new books, Joram Piatigorsky and Michael Lynch provide a corrective to some outdated views and thus provide a glimpse of what the evolutionary biology of the 21th century may look like. PM...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - June 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Hughes AL Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

The stem-cell century a new epoch and fresh challenges.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Stem-cell research is still a prominent part of the political, scientific, and public discourse. Scientific advances are being made at a rapid rate, while debates on the moral status of the embryo continue. In the United States, President George W. Bush has twice vetoed legislation that some maintain would be an improvement over the current funding environment; others argue the solution is not optimal for thoroughly exploiting the potential of this exciting new area of research. In addition, we face a number of additional policy and legal challenges, including such issues as intellectual property, oocyte procurement, a...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - March 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: McCormick JB, Scott CT Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Down with natural selection?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Biologists are increasingly reexamining the conceptual structure of evolutionary theory, which dates back to the so-called Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s. Calls for an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) cite a number of empirical and theoretical advances that need to be accounted for, including evolvability, evolutionary novelties, capacitors of phenotypic evolution, developmental plasticity, and phenotypic attractors. In Biological Emergences, however, Robert Reid outlines a theory of evolution in which natural selection plays no role or-worse-actually impedes evolution by what Reid calls "natural experime...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - March 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Pigliucci M Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Science without laws.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
During the 1970s, something deeply consequential happened in the cultural, economic, and social relationships between science and technology. Paul Forman has proposed that the abrupt reversal of the culturally ascribed primacy in the science-technology relationship circa 1980 be taken as a demarcation of postmodernity from modernity. Modernity's most basic cultural presuppositions-the superiority of theory to practice, the elevation of the public over the private and that of the disinterested over the interested, and the belief that the means sanctify the ends-were ascribed to science. In postmodernity, science is subs...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - March 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Schweber SS Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Welcome home, Descartes! rethinking the anthropology of the body.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
For many scholars, the Cartesian mind/body split is one of the fundamental mistakes of the Western scientific tradition. Anthropologists who study notions of the body in cultures around the world regularly take Descartes as their point of departure. Many also suggest that breaking free from Descartes is politically liberating: if the mindful body could be rediscovered, society could move away from its materialist, positivist, and commodity-fetishizing ways. Beyond the Body Proper is anthropology's best and most comprehensive anti-Cartesian manifesto to date. This volume brings together some of the finest studies on the...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - March 13, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Ecks S Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Darwinism and the cultural evolution of sports.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article outlines a Darwinian approach to sports that takes into account its profoundly cultural character and thereby overcomes the traditional nature-culture dichotomies in the sociology of sport. We argue that there are good reasons to view sports as culturally evolved signaling systems that serve a function similar to (biological) courtship rituals in other animals. Our approach combines the insights of evolutionary psychology, which states that biological adaptations determine the boundaries for the types of sport that are possible, and pure cultural theories, which describe the mechanism of cultural evolution wit...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - January 28, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: De Block A, Dewitte S Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Kawasaki disease in India: increasing awareness or increased incidence?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article addresses the question of whether the increased diagnosis of KD in India represents the emerging recognition of an illness that had been previously obscured by misdiagnosis, or whether KD is new to India and is increasing in incidence.Whichever answer turns out to be correct, the burden of KD is likely to pose a significant challenge to the health-care system in India in the coming years, due to the high cost of treatment and the potential for lifelong cardiovascular sequelae.Moreover, elucidating the factors that have contributed to the increased recognition of KD in India may provide useful insights for the ...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - January 28, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Kushner HI, Macnee RP, Burns JC Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Personal morality and professional obligations: rights of conscience and informed consent.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article examines the issue of expanding rights of conscience for health-care professionals to include rights grounded in claims of complicity. Our concerns relate to the nature of professional expertise, on the one hand, and an individual's right to live by his or her values, on the other. The fact that a patient is dependent on a physician's counseling about treatment options requires limiting conscience-based refusal to provide information, since allowing refusal would deprive patients of even knowing the options that exist for them. Sanctioning such claims of conscience not only would supplant one person's moral ju...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - January 28, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: May T, Aulisio MP Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Creating reflective spaces: interactions between philosophers and biomedical scientists.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article focuses on collaborations between philosophers and biomedical scientists in order to discuss how interdisciplinary collaborations may address ethical, social, and environmental concerns in ways that lead to improvements in people's health and quality of life. The article concludes with a consideration of some of the challenges that such collaborations face. PMID: 19168943 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - January 28, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Melo-Martín I Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Who Is Dürer's "Syphilitic Man"?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Who Is Dürer's "Syphilitic Man"? Perspect Biol Med. 2009;52(1):48-60 Authors: Eisler CT Among Albrecht Dürer's first known woodcuts is one showing a syphilitic man. The Nuremberg artist's image is the earliest known depiction of an individual suffering from this illness. Syphilis was probably brought by Conquistadores from the New World to Naples in the later 1490s and was then transmitted throughout Western Europe by Northern mercenaries (Landsknechten) returning from Italy to their native Germany and Switzerland. The attire worn by Dürer's Syphilitic Man is exactly that of the Landsknecht. This...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - January 28, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Eisler CT Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Edward Bancroft's "Torporific Eels".Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Edward Bancroft was a medical apprentice in Connecticut before running off to Guiana in 1763. While in South America, he practiced medicine and collected material for a lengthy book on the region, which he published after he settled in London. Bancroft's Essay (1769) contains a description of the "torporific eels" found in the warm rivers of Guiana, along with a series of experiments suggesting that the eel's powers are electrical. It also calls for studies to determine whether saltwater torpedo rays might demonstrate the same properties, which Bancroft expected would be the case. Today, Bancroft is best remembered for...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - January 28, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Finger S Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Poetry and the Brain: Cajal's Conjectures on the Psychology of Writers.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We present an English version of Cajal's essay, which may be of interest to both humanists and biologists, and which further denotes the celebrated neuroanatomist's attempt at understanding the mystery of the human mind. PMID: 19168946 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - January 28, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Triarhou LC, Vivas AB Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Medical education and the tyranny of competency.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article examines the intellectual origins and hidden assumptions of this concept and argues that it is an inadequate, and even harmful, concept to use as a guiding motif for professional education. The competency model-which tends to be top-down and prescriptive-does not provide the framework for objective educational assessment that it claims to provide. The alternative apprenticeship model is more appropriate for professional education and is more consistent with what psychological research has shown about the acquisition of expertise. PMID: 19168947 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - January 28, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Brooks MA Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals

Death, mourning, and medical progress.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A number of changes can be observed in the way people are coming to think about death, mourning, and medical progress. The palliative care movement was initiated some 30 years ago to respond to widespread ignorance or neglect of pain relief for the dying, which was then coming to public attention and becoming a key part of the nascent hospice movement. Yet if an important feature of the latter movement was acceptance of the reality of death, in recent years there has emerged a blending of clinical treatment and hospice care, a kind of compromise with the idea of death as an inevitability. Meanwhile, the combination of ...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - January 28, 2009 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Callahan D Tags: Perspect Biol Med Source Type: journals