In a recent Slate magazine article, Douglas Pet highlights several worries with the international surrogacy industry, particularly in respect to the poor women who contract out their gestational labor. Pet focuses on India, and rightfully so--one report predicts that by the end of 2012, the medical travel industry in India (also a hotspot for organ transplants) [...]
Predatory pricing practices and support of draconian copyright 'reforms' have led to a boycott of academic publisher Elsevier, boycott which has been gathering a significant amount of momentum: about 3,000 academics have pledged to neither publish, referee, or do editorial work for journals associated with Elsevier (this article from the Guardian offers further background). The [...]
In a recent Viewpoint piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Prasad et al. discuss some the challenges in turning medical practice away from established therapies. They begin by observing that in the ideal case, an old practice is replaced by a new one after the new practice is robustly evaluated in comparative [...]
‘Nothing is required for this Enlightenment,’ Kant wrote in 1784, ‘except freedom … the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.’ A philosophy blog could do worse than adopt such a motto: for Kant, the ‘Enlightenment’ was, after all, not a new set of dogmas to replace the old, but a dawning courage to [...]