Faculty Bibliography

Arthur Caplan is the Emmanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics, Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and the Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests are transplantation research ethics, genetics, reproductive technologies, health policy, and general bioethics. He is the author/editor of twenty-five hooks and more than 500 papers. He writes a regular column for MSNBC.com, and is a frequent guest and commentator for major broadcast and print media outlets. Among his many appointments are chair of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations on Human Cloning and member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illnesses. Caplan is the recipient of many awards including Person of the Year-2001 from USA Today, and one of the fifty most influential people in American Health Care by Modern Health Care magazine

Hughes and Lerman have received consulting fees and grants from several for-profit and nonprofit organizations that develop or promote smoking cessation products and services, including nicotine replacement therapies

When one thinks of hunger strikes, two images likely come to mind. In 1980, seven Northern Irish Republican prisoners launched a hunger strike in Belfast's Maze prison. They were protesting the revocation of their prisoner-of-war status by the British government. This initial hunger strike led to a series of others, during which Bobbie Sands became the first of ten prisoners to die from starvation. More recently, many prisoners held at the US facility at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba have conducted hunger strikes. The first began in 2005 and involved as many as 130 men. They continue to the present day, with one or two prisoners involved in hunger strikes at any given time. Here, Caplan examines whether state officials should make a move to force-feed prisoners on hunger strikes

While our eyes usually glaze over at the continued talk of health care reform, there are a few particulars that bear repeating. So many of the parties involved fail to consider the most basic and most important of all the issues: health insurance is not a luxury, it is a right

AIM: We surveyed physicians' opinions and acceptance of influenza immunization. SCOPE: A web-based survey was sent to all physicians in two academic departments during spring 2009. RESULTS: 227 (40.5%) physicians responded. Physicians who frequently cared for high-risk patients self-reported higher immunization rates than physicians with infrequent contact (P=0.0002). There were no significant differences in immunization rates between emergency medicine (EM) and internal medicine (IM), between those with and without children at home, nor by age group. A majority (84.6%) supported mandatory vaccination. IM physicians were more supportive of mandates than EM physicians (P<0.0001). CONCLUSION: Self-reported immunization rates were high among study physicians. Acceptance of mandatory vaccination was substantial, but varied by specialty.

Obviously, health-care workers have the duty, proclaimed in their own professional associations' ethical codes, to put patient interest and safety first and get vaccinated. There is also, clearly, an unarguable foundation for insisting that all health-care workers who have regular patient contact get vaccinated as a job requirement. However, when hospitals and health departments have proposed vaccination mandates for health-care workers, they have almost invariably been met with lawsuits demanding the right to choose. Here, Caplan discusses why legal actions against mandates should be stopped

Others want to cite natural law or religious tradition to support claims of human dignity, yet the invocation of a long intellectual tradition is not an argument but only a sociological case study. Even the Christian notion of dignity that invokes both humanity's likeness to God in the grand scheme of things or praising human creations such as art, medicine, science, and philosophy can be secularised a bit so that it is simply the products of a conscious and socially cooperative, reflective creature that are infused with dignity due to their purposefulness and utility

There is increasing pressure for neuroscientists to communicate their research and the societal implications of their findings to the public. Communicating science is challenging, and the transformation of communication by digital and interactive media increases the complexity of the challenge. To facilitate dialogue with the public in this new media landscape, we suggest three courses of action for the neuroscience community: a cultural shift that explicitly recognizes and rewards public outreach, the identification and development of neuroscience communication experts, and ongoing empirical research on the public communication of neuroscience.