Hot Topics: Environmental Ethics
First interview in the new Thinking Out Loud series on ‘Animals and Pandemics’: Katrien Devolder in conversation with Jeff Sebo, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU, on how our treatment of animals increases the risk of fut...
Full ArticleWhy do we force animals into close contact with each other, and with humans, while encouraging or even requiring humans to keep apart? Dangerous viruses do not distinguish between human and non-human vectors, so why do we?
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by Richard B. Gibson, MA
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended daily life and forced many people on the planet to alter their behaviour to combat the spread of the virus.…
Full ArticleHealthcare and Public Health Johns Hopkins University & Medicine: The Unequal Cost of Social Distancing“Right now, we must recognize that we cannot expect the most marginalized among us to bear the greatest costs of social distancing for weeks or months on end. If we devise policy based on the assumption that families who cannot put […]
Full ArticleBy Charles Foster Cross posted from The Conversation To be clear, and in the hope of heading off some trolls, two observations. First: of course I don’t welcome the epidemic. It will cause death, worry, inconvenience and great physical and economic suffering. Lives and livelihoods will be destroyed. The burden will fall disproportionately on the […]
Full ArticleWritten by Neil Levy Originally published in The Conversation I recently watched an interview with David Attenborough, in which he was asked whether there is hope that things can get better for our planet. He replied that we can only slow down the rate at which things get worse. It seems to me that this […]
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by Simon Coghlan, Ph.D. and Kobi Leins, Ph.D.
Xenobots have been called “novel living machines” and “living robots”. A co-author of the paper that recently introduced xenobots, said:
… Full ArticleThey’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal.
Written by Stephen Rainey In the midst of global climate change set to devastate entire ways of life, and ultimately on track to render the biosphere uninhabitable for all but the most adaptable organisms, it seems timely to question how political legitimacy relates to matters of scientific fact. While it seems mostly desirable that groups […]
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by Craig Klugman, Ph.D. and Keisha Ray, Ph.D.
The end of the year usually brings a media blitz of top ten lists for the year that is ending.…
Full ArticleBiomedical/Medical Ethics A Genetic Dating App Is a Horrifying Thing That Shouldn’t Exist “The app is being developed by a team of geneticists led by George Church, who, in the same interview, defended accepting money for his lab donated by convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Church’s lab is most famous for its work on the gene-editing technology CRISPR/Cas9, […]
Full ArticleOne Health, Bioethics, and Nonhuman Ethics
Ethical Dilemmas in Protecting Susceptible Subpopulations From Environmental Health Risks: Liberty, Utility, Fairness, and Accountability for Reasonableness
A Bridge Back to the Future: Public Health Ethics, Bioethics, and Environmental Ethics
We Can and Must Rebuild the Bridges of Interdisciplinary Bioethics
An international team of scientists is conducting a controversial experiment in Italy. The experiment is designed to test genetically modified mosquitoes that researchers hope could provide a powerful new weapon to fight malaria, which remains one of the world’s greatest scourges.
Full ArticleThe two-week-old shutdown has halted one of the federal government’s most important public health activities, the inspections of chemical factories, power plants, oil refineries, water treatment plants, and thousands of other industrial sites for pollution violations.
The Environmental Protection Agency has furloughed most of its roughly 600 pollution inspectors and other workers who monitor compliance with environmental laws. Those scientists, engineers and analysts are responsible for detecting violations that endanger human health, as they did, for example during an August 2018 airborne inspection that found that oil and gas fields in Karnes County, Tex., were leaking illegal levels of chemicals into the atmosphere, in violation of the Clean Air Act.
Full ArticleResearchers used a gene editing tool, CRISPR, to wipe out a population of malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the lab. Questions remain about how releasing this technology into the wild would impact the environment.
Full ArticleNearly four decades of global temperature data collected by satellites reveal the atmospheric fingerprint of climate change.
Full ArticleHawaii’s governor David Ige is expected to sign the world’s first ban on the sale of sunscreens containing the chemicals oxybenzone and octinoxate this week. The state is banning the products because of concerns they may be harming one of the state’s biggest attractions — coral reefs. While it doesn’t kick in until 2021, the move is already prompting a public health pushback.
Full ArticleLab-grown chicken, beef, and duck products are edging toward the U.S. market—despite enduring confusion about how they’ll be regulated. But language buried in a draft spending bill released by a U.S. House of Representatives appropriations panel this week suggests some lawmakers are eager to get rules in place. A one-sentence proposal in the bill would put the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in charge of regulating products made from the cells of livestock or poultry, and instructs the agency to issue rules about how it will oversee their manufacture and labeling.
Full ArticleThey concluded that the genetic change that produced spring-run Chinook occurred only once in the species’s history. And new data published on 29 April on bioRxiv show that in rivers where spring runs disappeared decades ago, less than 1% of the remaining fish carry a copy of the early migration version of the gene. The scarcity of that gene makes it very unlikely a spring run will reappear once lost.
Full ArticleThe world’s leading climate science body is expected to decide this week on whether to establish a new task force on promoting gender equity within the male-dominated group. The move comes on the heels of a study finding that although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has increased the proportion of women involved in writing its authoritative reports, barriers to participation remain.
Full ArticleClimate change is already affecting the health of populations around the world, but things are set to get worse if adequate changes aren’t made, according to an international consortium of climate experts. Fueling the impact is the fact that more than 2,100 cities globally exceed recommended levels of atmospheric particulate matter.
Biotech researchers here are celebrating the long-awaited passage of a bill this week that clears the way for large-scale field tests and commercial release of genetically modified (GM) crops. Uganda, with several engineered varieties waiting in the wings, is expected to join a handful of other African nations moving quickly to bring homegrown GM foods to the market.
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