Hot Topics: Sports Ethics

Blog Posts (2)

April 24, 2013

In quest for excellence, athletes ingest unregulated drugs

Craig Klugman, Ph.D.

Have you ever wondered what happens to drugs when a company finds them to lack promise or they prove to be dangerous in animal testing?…

June 15, 2012

AJOB's July Issue Online Now with Free Content!

We are happy to share that AJOB’s July issue (a few weeks ahead of schedule) is now available online on bioethics.net and here.…

Published Articles (1)

American Journal of Bioethics: Volume 12 Issue 7 - Jul 2012

Out of Bounds? A Critique of the New Policies on Hyperandrogenism in Elite Female Athletes Katrina Karkazis

News (12)

March 18, 2013 5:04 pm

NFL medical standards, practices are different than almost anywhere else

There is medicine, and then there is National Football League medicine, and the practice of the two isn’t always the same.

January 23, 2013 4:08 pm

So Long, Lance. Next, 21st-Century Doping (New York Times)

Lance Armstrong’s sad saga of doping and lying is over, allowing us to turn our attention to a far more important issue arising from the Armstrong era: what to do about the rise of ever more potent bio-enhancers in sports.  Dr. Magnus and others challenge the idea that the use of certain enhancers is inherently cheating.

January 10, 2013 1:44 pm

Junior Seau (football) had degenerative brain disease CTE (from playing) when he committed suicide (CBS News)

Junior Seau, one of the NFL’s best and fiercest players for nearly two decades, had a degenerative brain disease when he committed suicide last May, the National Institutes of Health told The Associated Press on Thursday.

January 7, 2013 6:26 pm

NFL retirees more likely to have depression and cognitive problems, brain study shows (CBS News)

A new study of NFL players adds to the evidence that repeated head blows absorbed during a football career could lead to changes in the brain that affect the athletes’ behavior.

December 6, 2012 9:00 pm

No evidence of EPO benefit, say scientists (AFP)

Cyclists who dope themselves with EPO may not gain any performance advantage even though they are putting their health at risk, scientists said on Thursday.

October 29, 2012 4:59 pm

The Future of sport: Natural-Born Winners? (The Guardian)

Although sporting world records continue to be set, the improvements are getting smaller, suggesting that human athletic performance is reaching its limit. As athletes move ever closer to this performance ceiling, the search for ways of identifying and developing future champions grows increasingly frenetic, and debate returns, inevitably, to the perennial question of whether winners are born or made.

September 13, 2012 1:28 pm

The activist athlete (Philadelphia Inquirer)

When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Boston in the late 1960s, I had little firsthand contact with minorities. But I knew a lot about one African American man who kept showing up on our new color television and in the sports pages that I devoured every day: Muhammad Ali.  Due to chronic illness, Ali can’t speak as eloquently as he once did. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been heard.

July 25, 2012 8:39 am

Football and the Sexual Side Effects of Head Trauma (The Atlantic)

At the session, I was dismayed to learn that life-changing head injuries from sports are not limited to NFL and NCAA players, but also can affect high schoolers and even younger children. Moreover, while the symptoms of CTE are perhaps the most striking, repeated head trauma could cause many more subtle neurological problems.  This got me thinking of my main line of work, sex research. As it turns out, another group of work acquaintances of mine, based at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, has been working to ascertain the bases for pedophilia. Although no one can point to a simple cause-effect chain for any sexual orientation, the Toronto group, led by psychologists Ray Blanchard and James Cantor, has found evidence that pedophiles, as a group, seem to have a greater history of childhood head trauma than non-pedophiles.

July 17, 2012 4:01 pm

The Ethics of Sports 'We Need an Open Market for Doping' (Spiegel Online)

It is commonly accepting that doping in sports should be strictly prohibited. But Oxford bio-ethicist Julian Savulescu disagrees. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE on the eve of the London Olympics, he explains why bans are unrealistic and demands an open market for doping.

July 2, 2012 3:32 pm

The IOC's superwoman complex: how flawed sex-testing discriminates (The Guardian)

This is not science. It is a gender witchhunt, and it is foul play. This is why experts in sports, gender, and bioethics – and those battling discrimination against female and LGBT athletes – have been mobilizing against this policy ever since its basic shape was announced last year.  What’s really driving these policies is suspicion of women perceived as gender “deviant”. We see this all too often in women’s sports when women athletes monitor and denigrate their peers who “play like men” or look too masculine.

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