The End of the World by Pandemic: The Dance Remix

Greg Dahlmann hosted Northeast Public Radio's Weekly Rundown, a great program that died too soon but lives in spirit by podcast, and is the genius-in-progress working on the complete redesign of the blog you are reading right now. He noticed that an admirer of the program from London and musician, Rav Casley Gera, decided to turn my interview with Dahlmann into an apocalpytic song called Memorial Warning. I'm featured as "some guy." Which I guess beats being called a wannabe. Anyway it sounds like Phillip Glass, but on light propofol sedation. If you listen all the way through you will look like this guy.

Living Wills Do Not Work

The Hastings Center Report article on living wills' failure has drawn notice pretty much everywhere in the major media. Many others have made similar claims (e.g., here), but this piece is quite good and apparently timely as well.

Living wills have become one of bioethics' most embarrassing failures - an imaginative idea that has the support of the majority of bioethicists despite a total lack of support for their efficacy. From the start it has been clear to at least some of us that these documents just make things more confusing and litigious. An incredibly imaginative experiment, it is time to call living wills just that - an experiment, based on little data and thrust out into the medical community at large on the strength of a few prominent persistent vegetative state cases. Given the coverage of this most recent missive in the debate about how to handle patient wishes at the end of life, it will be interesting to see if hospital ethics committees continue to assert that living wills are a smart thing for patients to have.

It is high time for some legislative retooling of the Patient Self-Determination Act and supporting state legislation. The experiment has failed. Time to pull the plug.

Mel Gibson, Stem Cell Advocate

Ok, he's not suffering from anything, nor does he have any other personal stake in the matter. But like Michael J. Fox, he is famous. And that seems to be enough for Mel, who shared with Good Morning America's viewers his passion for embryonic sanctity. Debating, well, me (McGee) with a self-described bioethicist by his side, he argued that there's nothing an embryonic cell can do that an adult cell can't. He'll be publishing that finding soon. UPDATE: Already the Southern Baptist Press is joining a growing chorus of conservatives in celebrating the first anti-stem cell celebrity.

Proposed Protest at ASBH Against Kass

From MCW Today a Proposal to Protest Leon Kass, which comes right on the heels of an international media conversation about how the President is misusing bioethics, an argument made in nature. The protest idea is from Rosamond Rhodes:

Dear ALL,

When ASBH first announced the inclusion of Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama on the meeting program, I privately voiced my objections. Nevertheless, their spot on the program remained and the ASBH website promotes it as "A notable two-hour Keynote session."

I had considered boycotting the session. I have decided that an invisible protest might allow me the illusion of clean hands, but as a bioethicist I have a moral responsibility to do more.

Professional meetings are usually inappropriate venues fr political action. Yet, the inclusion of the Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, on the ASBH program Thursday, 1:15-3:15, is political. I shall be protesting Kass & Fukuyama's positions, actions, and inclusion on the program with silence (NO APPLAUSE). Protest signs (my favorite so far is "SAVE LIVES, CLONE STEM CELLS.") or leaving in the middle of the speech are other possibilities. I invite you to share your ideas in this forum as well.

Yours, Rosamond Rhodes

Rhodes' is accessible by email at Rosamond.Rhodes@mssm.edu. Alex Capron and others have argued that a protest would be inappropriate or unseemly. McGee has replied that a protest is right on target and on time.

Bioethics Tenure and Moves from Penn

The Chronicle ran "Penn's Medical School Denies Tenure to 2 Bioethicists" in this week's issue, in a piece whose purported focus was the move of McGee from Penn to Albany. Jeffrey Brainard commented on the tenure situation in the Penn department of medical ethics. Brian Leiter blogs the topic.

What is This?

This weblog is written by the Editors of The American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB). We are told by research librarians in a position to make such claims and whom we did not pay off that this was the first editors' blog for a medical or biomedical science journal, and that this seems true was confirmed in an article in Nature in December. But now, lots of editors are blogging in that capacity, including editors' blogs at Nature Neuroscience, Nature Genetics and Scientific American.

The blog format allows the editors to tap an incredible stream of information that relates to bioethics as it flows through our offices.

If you like the blog, you may indeed want to try the dry scholarly stuff - The American Journal of Bioethics itself can be found at http://bioethics.net and represents the collective, peer-reviewed efforts of a traditional scholarly journal, one that represents the diversity of methods, views and institutions that characterize the rich field of bioethics.

The Editors are: Glenn McGee PhD - Alden March Bioethics Institute (AMBI) of Albany Med - Editor in Chief, David Magnus PhD - Stanford University - Associate Editor, and Paul Root Wolpe PhD - University of Pennsylvania - Associate Editor.

Glenn McGee, in combinastion with other members of the editorial group, authors any post without specific attribution to someone else. Art Caplan of Penn and Stuart Rennie of UNC Chapel Hill are regular guest bloggers these days, and each of their posts are identified by name; others have contributed as well, recent regulars include Alicia Ouellette. Guest blog postings are always identified by name.

We have spawned several other blogs and most of them keep close touch with us, and Karama at sowhatcanido bought us a cup of coffee in thanks. We link to every one of them, and as many others as we find.

FAQ:

WHY WOULD A MEDICAL JOURNAL'S EDITORS WRITE A BLOG? Plenty of people wrote us and complained that the Journal's web site 1) did not cover all the news (only a few things fit there), 2) did not discuss the news or put it in context. So, now we think we've solved that problem. Editing a journal makes this a much, much easier proposition: not only do we get news items from lots of reporters and other contributors, we are happily blessed with students and others who volunteer time to help synthesize it.

Bioethics clearly needs a good blog and AJOB is trying to create it. That we happen to run bioethics' most-visited web site does, admittedly, make it much easier to get feedback quickly and from lots of people. We hope you like this thing enough to add it to your daily diet. And please send us your advice.

SHOULD I USE INFORMATION IN THIS PAGE TO TREAT MY PATIENTS OR MAKE HEALTHCARE DECISIONS? Only if you are out of your mind, or are Jack Kevorkian, or both. Ok, no, seriously, this is our disclaimer:

Statements on this site do not represent the views of anyone other than those writing the posts, nor do views expressed in comments reflect the views of any authors of posts or of the Editors and Editorial Board and publishers of The American Journal of Bioethics. Views expressed herein are not represented in any way to be those of Albany Medical College or Albany Medical Center or Alden March Bioethics Institute or of Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, or their hospitals or other associated institutions, or the Editorial Board of The American Journal of Bioethics, or Taylor & Francis Health Sciences. Nor has any editor been in any way induced or compensated for expressing any view or discussing any subject on the blog, and, where apparent to the Editor in Chief, any conflict of interest or commitment pertaining to any post will be disclosed as a subtext to any message in which the potential conflict obtains. Nor do the editors profit from the blog or any portion thereof while part of the blog, although of course the authors retain all copyright through the terms of the Creative Commons license on the site, and thus may use or publish any post elsewhere in compliance with U.S. copyright law.

The information on this site is intended for discussion purposes only, and not as recommendations on how to diagnose or treat illnesses. There is no link whatever between blog.bioethics.net and any research project involving any subject of any kind: human,animal vegetable or mineral. No confidential patient or research subject information held by any author of any posting will be placed on the blog, nor should any information you post in comments or email written to the authors or managers of the blog, authors of its postings, in comments, to management, or to our design or technical support staff be considered confidential. Do not post or otherwise utilize confidential information of any kind on this site.

WHO FUNDS THE BLOG? Here's a list of sponsors from 2005, but in brief, the blog was funded in part by a grant from The Greenwall Foundation (#5-39182 (8), "Bioethics Education Network") to PI Glenn McGee. The blog is independent from the Journal in one very important sense: Taylor & Francis do not fund, support or hold copyright on it. That said, as editors of the Journal we take care to ensure that ads on the blog not detract in any way from the AJOB mission or compromise in any way the editorial process.

THIS FAQ LAST UPDATED: 3/8/6