Faculty Bibliography

The shortage of vital organs available for transplant continues to worsen in the USA, UK, Germany and many other nations. At the same time the demand for organs continues to grow year after year as the population ages and undergoes organ failure, morepeople with co-morbidity are admitted to transplant centres and the number of transplant centres and surgeons continues to increase. The shortage has led many to call for changes in the traditional ethical framework that has governed organ donation in the USA and the UK—voluntary altruism on the part of donors and the 'dead donor rule' in term s of eligibility for contributing a vital organ. As these proposals are considered it is important to keep in mind the fragile basis of public support for organ and tissue transplantation. It is also important not to compromise the available supply of organs in the hope of pursuing a new policy that engenders significant public mistrust that may translate into opposition to donation

The most important area in which cancer care and bioethics intersect is in the care of the dying. It is in the shift toward according more control to patients, more choice in the setting in which death will come, and in the willingness to take palliative care and comfort care seriously that bioethics has most usefully interacted with cancer care in the past and is likely to continue to do so in the future.

Caplan comments on the research regarding the ethical controversy of the embryo research. Commentators have warned that this experiment is the first step toward designer babies and eventually the widespread use of genetic engineering of children to achieve eugenic goals. However, doing such experiment should be done with the approval of a governmental regulatory agency that operates in a transparent, public manner

With the use of technologically constructed hypoxic environments (TCHE) in soccer as our case, we propose four check points from which to evaluate new performance-enhancing technologies in sport. These are (I) Is the technology beneficial, (II) Is it safe, (III) Can fairness be assured, and (IV) Is the technology in line with the spirit of or rationale for sport? The use of TCHE is ambiguous. On the one hand, in situations with grave inequalities between teams due to lack of acclimatization of one team, TCHE can be an efficient means to even the playing field and out of concern for athlete welfare and health. On the other hand, if used as a pure performance-enhancing means to enhance the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood independent of altitude, it belongs to a category of expert-assisted performance enhancement that may challenge athletic autonomy and the responsibility for one's own performance and, hence, the spirit of sport.

While mountains of articles have been written on the ethics of cloning human beings (hugely unlikely to happen anytime soon), the morality of using genetically engineered animals as sources of organs for transplants (ditto), and the moral defensibility of using treatments derived from embryonic stem-cell research to cure horrific diseases (a very long shot), hardly any literature exists on the ethics of current practices and policies in mental health. Scanning technologies far more powerful than the familiar CAT scan-tests like positron emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, multichannel electroencephalography, and near infrared spectroscopic imaging-already make it possible to "watch" neural activity in real time with impressive accuracy

Myriad Genetics holds a patent on testing for the hereditary breast and ovarian cancer genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, and therefore has a forced monopoly on this critical genetic test. Myriad launched a Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) marketing campaign in the Northeast United States in September 2007 and plans to expand that campaign to Florida and Texas in 2008. The ethics of Myriad's patent, forced monopoly and DTC campaign will be reviewed, as well as the impact of this situation on patient access and care, physician liability, and the future of DTC campaigns for genetic testing.