Summer is normally one of the quieter times at the Nuffield Council offices – (at least theoretically) a good time to clear inboxes, to-do lists and cupboards. A good time then, we thought, to carry out some improvement works on our website as we wanted it to better reflect the increasingly varied types of projects and activities that the Council has engaged in since we published our strategic plan in 2012. (more…)

This is a question we are often asked, as you might imagine. On any given day there are long, short and medium answers. The in-a-nutshell version is something like this: (more…)

Guest post by Clare Wenham

My time as the first Nuffield Council on Bioethics POST Fellow has come to an end – and what a whirlwind of fun it has been! The idea of a POST fellowship is to produce a four-page research briefing (a POSTnote) on a topic related to science and technology that is of policy interest to both Members of Parliament and Peers. The topic that I was allocated was biobanks, which I have to admit, due to my own ignorance, was something I knew nothing about! However, this proved beneficial throughout my time at POST as the idea is to write an independent, a-political and balanced piece, and the fear would be that if it were a topic which you were familiar with there would be too many ready formulated opinions which would need to be challenged. (more…)

Part 1 – The Global Summit 

It’s over a fortnight since I got back from Mexico City, where I had a busy week at the Global Summit (of National Ethics Committees) and the World Congress (of the International Association of Bioethics). If they sound like pretty grand events, they do sometimes look that way too. Here is the set-up for the Global Summit: (more…)

This morning, an unprecedented number of peers are seeking to speak in the Second Reading of Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill. Anglican Archbishops have taken to the newspapers to contribute their views. Former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, wrote in the Daily Mail that ‘the case of Mr Nicklinson had exerted the ‘deepest influence’ on him. ‘His distress made me question my motives in previous debates. Had I been putting doctrine before compassion, dogma before human dignity?’ In the Observer, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was reported as being in favour of assisted dying, saying ‘What is life? And isn’t death part of living – a natural part of life?’ and reflected on the indignities to which Nelson Mandela was subjected at the end of his life. (more…)

Professor Bobbie Farsides

Council Member and Chair of the Working Party on Children and Research

Around this time last year we held the first stakeholder meeting of the Working Party on Children and Clinical Research. An amazing group of young people joined us to share their knowledge and experience of participating in clinical research, and they gave us a pretty firm steer on how to take things forward.  The meeting had been prompted in part by a comment made by the Chair of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, who in a different forum had made it clear that any document offering guidance on the treatment of children and young people in a medical setting needed to have been written with their involvement and participation. ‘Nothing about me without me’ had to become part of our way of thinking. (more…)

A man walks into a doctor’s surgery. The doctor says, “Sir, you have Alzheimer’s disease. Come back to see me again in a year.”

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Earlier this year, science hit the headlines for the wrong reasons. A high profile piece of stem cell research, published in Nature and initially hailed as breakthrough work, attracted a different kind of attention when people started asking questions about the underlying science. (more…)