This post was written by Dr Agomoni Ganguli Mitra, Research Associate (Liminal Spaces Project) and Teaching Fellow, Mason Institute, School of Law, University of Edinburgh and Dr Nayha Sethi, Research Fellow (Liminal Spaces Project) and Deputy Director, Mason Institute, School of Law, University of Edinburgh. It first appeared on The Motley Coat – a blog of the Mason Institute

In 2016, in the wake of the Ebola and the Zika outbreaks, the international community’s response to global health emergencies and their associated moral, regulatory and political implications once again came under intense scrutiny. (more…)

In September 2016 I arrived at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) to begin a three-month Fellowship funded by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. The aim of the Fellowship is to produce a four-page briefing document for parliamentarians (known as a ‘POSTnote’) on an area of science and technology that raises bioethical issues. The topic that the POST Board had chosen was ‘integrity in research’, a subject which built on previous work conducted by the Nuffield Council into the culture of research in the UK. (more…)

By Tara Clancy, Council Member

Patients, families and advocacy groups are amongst those who have an interest in the ethical questions that non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) raises. So, what have we done to ensure their views and experiences are included and to enable them to contribute to the Council’s current project on NIPT? (more…)

‘Has bioethics contributed to scientific progress?’ and ‘Has bioethics itself progressed?’ These were the two very challenging questions posed by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics at its symposium at the World Congress of the International Association of Bioethics, in Edinburgh in June 2016. The daunting task of addressing these questions (surely not answering them) was given to a panel of four academics working in bioethics: Professor Ruth Macklin, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, USA; Professor Christian Munthe, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Dr Calvin Ho, National University of Singapore and me, Professor Erica Haimes, Director of the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences (PEALS) Research Centre, Newcastle University. (more…)

   Guest post by Stephen Barrie

In September 2015 I began a Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) fellowship, funded by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.  I was faced with the 3-month task of researching, interviewing experts, summarising and condensing ‘Global Health Inequalities’ into four sides (plus references) for a general parliamentary audience. (more…)

The Human Gene Editing Summit in Washington DC was much anticipated and generated many commentaries, before, during and after its completion. Headlines appeared on a daily basis, describing how ‘top scientists’ assembled to discuss the ‘excitement’ of genome editing and its potential to deliver ‘cures’ for almost all diseases, but how there are also ‘ethical concerns’ over ‘designer babies’ and scientists ‘playing God’. Giddy stuff. (more…)

As part of my role as commissioned poet for  the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ naturalness project, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we use language and also how language resists these uses. (more…)