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The Stem Cell Hope and Our Indefinitely Delayed Future
By Kyle Munkittrick On June 29, 2012 · In Bioethics, Book, Government, Health Care, Law, Medicine, Rights
Alice Park’s new book The Stem Cell Hope, convinced me it is time to retire, “Where is my jetpack!?” once and for all. After reading her new book, Park will have you screaming, “Where are my stem cells?” from every rooftop.
Jetpacks are a puerile toy that we all know would be impractical, deadly, [...]
A reader commenting on a home birthing thread on Andrew Sullivan’s the Dish sums up how medical regulations can fail better than I’ve heard before:
The tragedy to me in this whole story is that once again a medical debate is being left to the extremes. Screams of “death panels!” drowned out any fair [...]
Asimov had some good ideas, but we need to, you know, actually write some laws now:
As they become smarter and more widespread, autonomous machines are bound to end up making life-or-death decisions in unpredictable situations, thus assuming—or at least appearing to assume—moral agency. Weapons systems currently have human operators “in the loop”, but as [...]
Searing, intense, personal account of being mother to a child with Tay-Sachs, perhaps the archetypal disease used for discussing wrongful life. Emily Rapp’s take on prenatal testing is the opposite of abstract. Read it all:
That it is possible to hold this paradox as part of my daily reality points to the reductive and [...]
Anthony Gregory, a researcher with the Independent Institute, makes the case in The Atlantic for legalizing organ sales:
Several years ago, transplant surgeon Nadley Hakim at St. Mary’s Hospital in London pointed out that “this trade is going on anyway, why not have a controlled trade where if someone wants to donate a kidney for [...]
The reason I study transhumanism and human enhancement is because cutting-edge tech forces us to revisit what we believe to be the “central” issue in a practice or action. Ross Douthat and Adam Serwer trade paries and thrusts over the use of abortion for sex-selection and the bias towards males. Douthat starts, then Serwer [...]
I don’t think there is a direction the future is supposed to go, but I sure enjoy it when it goes the way I hope. A snippet from my post last summer “The Sci-fi Explanation of Why Gay People Must Be Allowed to Marry” in reaction to the ruling on Prop 8:
[...]
Two Democratic senators, Sens. Charles Schumer of New York (whom I will be voting against as soon as I can) and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have decided to do what congressmen do best and try to fix something by breaking it to death. Silk Road, an online site where illicit substances can be purchased [...]
I am not an expert on copyright. I’m the opposite of that. But Dave Fagundes at PrawfsBlawg is something of an expert, and was recently exploring the copyrighting of a nose job. In the process, he meandered into transhumanist territory.
Nose jobs, it seems to me, may well lack originality in the majority of cases. [...]
Well, not precisely robot lawyers. More like A.I. interns. Immensely powerful data-sifting software is allowing law firms to discover relevant data and documents for a case from among millions of pages of information:
“The catch here is information overload,” said Aaref A. Hilaly, Clearwell’s chief executive. “How do you zoom in to just the [...]
About
Pop Bioethics, written by Kyle Munkittrick, is an effort to study the ethics of the continuing evolution of the human species via the lens of pop culture and be somewhat entertaining in the process.
Kyle's writing can also be found at Discover's The Crux, Slate's Future Tense, and at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. For questions or comments: comments [at] popbioethics [dot] com
All opinions, ideas, and words either explicit or implicit found within this website are my own and represent no other person, organization, or group.Categories
