Worth Your Time: Selections from the Bioethics Library
C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture
The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession by Farr Curlin, MD and Christopher Tollefsen
Written by a palliative care physician/ethicist and a philosopher, The Way of Medicine is both diagnostic and prescriptive. Curlin and Tollefsen begin by showing readers why medicine is in crisis. At the heart of the crisis is the “provider of services model” (PSM) as the role of the physician which has not only eroded the profession qua a profession, but has helped to make medicine just another consumer good. Physicians are merely providers and patients ...read more
What Does It Take to Alter Our Next Generation?
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director
I have been thinking about how one generation proactively alters the succeeding one. As I contemplated this conundrum, I found myself writing a story instead of a list. That story was published as a SALVO blog piece, and the link is below. The “angsty” pirate lives in a dystopia created by childhood desire, indulgent parents, a cooperative, complicit medical-industrial complex, and a legal climate in which desire is codified into law. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Click here to read the story. Then, send any comments to us through the Contact Us feature here ...read more
A Day in the Life of a Patient
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director
30 November 2022
Her son asked if I could be there by 9:00 A.M., when the hospitalist would likely make rounds. I agreed, and made the three-hour journey on a Monday in November. My friend was the patient, and I, a visitor. What I saw in the ensuing hours made me beyond sad.
A nurse came in to “take her vitals.” That meant she wheeled in a cart with various measuring components: a wristband to measure blood pressure, a probe to take the patient’s temperature, and a pulse oximeter to measure blood oxygen content. The patient was ...read more
What We’re Reading
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director
Summer often presents us with some time to relax, rejuvenate, and read. We thought you may wish to know what we’re reading. We’d enjoy receiving your comments about any of these after you’ve read them. You can contact us here. You are welcome to share with us what you’re reading as well!
C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D.:All That Moves Us by Jay Wellons: 9780593243367 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
Irreversible Damage – The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters | Regnery Publishing
You’re Only Human | Baker Publishing Group
Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D.:Synthetic mouse embryos created from stem cells — without sperm, eggs, ...read more
Who is He and what has he done to our children?
Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University
Remember He Jiankui? He is the Chinese scientist who used CRISPR technology to edit the CCR5 gene for the HIV receptor in the genomes of human embryos. His goal was to make them HIV resistant. He reported at an international conference in 2018 that two of the edited embryos had resulted in the live births of non-identical twins, Nana and Lulu. There were also reports of a third child born in 2019. His revelations in a public forum provoked moral outrage from the scientific community. Global pressure caused Chinese authorities to suspend ...read more
Life and Choice
Janet Liljestrand, M.D., M.A.
In 1862 Louis Pasteur performed the definitive experiment that proved even the smallest organisms, those only seen under the microscope, derived from other like organisms. (1) Life came from life. Fast forward to 1973, and Justice Blackmun, writing for the majority decision in Roe v. Wade stated “We need not resolve the difficult decision of when life begins”. (2) What was the Justice’s definition of life? The human zygote contains all it needs for cellular division–and thus growth–at the union of a living sperm and living egg. How then has its human life not begun? Yes, in ...read more
Guinea Pigs
Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University
Successful xenotransplantation, animal donor to human recipient organ transfer, is the holy grail for medical doctors and scientists who study organ transplant. Why? Approximately 107,000 people are awaiting organ transplant in the US. Most will wait up to 2 to 3 years. About 17 people die per day because there are not enough organs available to meet the demand (1). Animal organs that have been genetically engineered to remove tissue molecules that cause transplant rejection would go a long way toward relieving the organ shortage.
A recently proclaimed major transplantation breakthrough attracted widespread ...read more
The Ethics of Rationing COVID-19 Vaccine for the Sickest Among Us
C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D Distinguished Fellow
We must not allow our combined COVID-19 fatigue to prevent us from asking important questions about public health ethics. At the time I am writing this essay, we are just transitioning into Phase 2 of the vaccination plan. I am sure our public health officials are doing the best they can under unprecedented circumstances, so we should give them the benefit of the doubt. But for the sake of clarity in the future, some retrospective analysis will be crucial.
For instance, in our own state, we have abandoned traditional triage ethics in favor of a purely age-based ...read more
The Prescription for Flourishing Embodiment in Public Bioethics
A Book Review
C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow
American public bioethics does not have a sterling history because it misunderstands its most important subject, the human subject. This is the claim of a brilliant new book by O. Carter Snead, the Director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture and professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.
In What it Means to be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard, 2020), Snead offers a genealogy of American public bioethics. Public bioethics, as contrasted with clinical bioethics, is the realm of human subjects research where, instead ...read more
