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Enhancement
Yale to host conference on non-human personhood
Michael Cook | 13 April 2013 |
A conference to be held at Yale University in December brings together animal rights activists and fans of human enhancement who are interested in the rights of robots and aliens.
Make the world a better place. Take nice drugs.
Michael Cook | 02 February 2013 |
Is moral bioenhancement the answer to the dark clouds gathering over the future of humanity?
Will Armstrong’s confession change cycling?
Michael Cook | 19 January 2013 |
The canary is dead. Now, what about the coal mine? After Lance Armstrong’s confession to Oprah Winfrey in a 90-minute television that he won all of his seven Tour de France titles with the help of performance-enhancing drugs, will cycling become drug-free?
What happens if soldiers get a “psychological vaccination”?
Michael Cook | 07 December 2012 |
What happens if soldiers are taught to ignore compassion?
Savulescu and Harris debate enhancing morality
Michael Cook | 07 December 2012 |
Two utilitarians slug it out over enhancing morality.
Another Hollywood bioethics lesson
Michael Cook | 15 November 2012 |
The bioethics angle in Cloud Atlas.
Are drugs or democracy our bulwark against the apocalypse?
Michael Cook | 21 October 2012 |
A new book by Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, Unfit for the Future, fills in the case for biomedical moral enhancement which they have been making in journal articles recently
Paralympic cheats: is pain a drug?
Michael Cook | 01 September 2012 |
In a practice called boosting, paralympic athletes subject their body to extreme pain to raise their blood pressure and heart beat.
Russian billionaire offers immortality by 2045
Michael Cook | 04 August 2012 |
The dream of achieving biological immortality may have taken a big step forward. A 31-year-old Russian billionaire, Dmitry Itskov, claims that his research team will be able to transplant a human brain into an artificial body by 2020, And by 2045 he is sure that he will be able to create hologram avatars with the same capabilities as the humans in the James Cameron film.
Bourne gets enhanced!
Michael Cook | 02 August 2012 |
Hollywood takes a definitive look at genetic enhancement in the latest instalment in the Bourne series, The Bourne Legacy – to be released next week.
Should Olympic athletes be allowed to use performance-enhancing drugs?
Michael Cook | 28 July 2012 |
The London Olympics have arrived and with them come familiar controversies over drug cheats. IOC President Jacques Rogge said yesterday that tests had identified more than 100 cheats in the lead-up to the Games. Years of tough restrictions appear to be bearing fruit, with fewer scandals every time the Olympics are held.
Are cognitive neuroenhancing drugs ethical? German ethicists say No
Michael Cook | 26 May 2012 |
The near frontier of human enhancement is coffee on steroids: the drugs of the future that will make you smarter, sharper and quicker. This is misguided and risks being unethical, argue four German ethicists in the latest issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics.
“Love is the drug”, from the Best Of Julian Savulescu
Michael Cook | 26 May 2012 |
Two Oxford bioethicists have proposed a novel solution to the scourge of 50% divorce rates – use love drugs to keep the flame of love alive. Writing in New Scientist, Julian Savulescu, of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and Anders Sandberg, of the Future of Humanity Institute, argue that evolution made humans unfit for lifelong marriage.
Yet another Modest Proposal: save the world from climate change by genetically engineering your kids
Michael Cook | 17 March 2012 |
Modest proposals, in sense given the phrase by the great 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift, are flavour of the month in the bioethics community.
Towards a cure for racism?
Michael Cook | 09 March 2012 |
Can you cure racism with drugs? Probably not, but a common heart disease medication, propranolol, can affect a person's subconscious attitudes towards race, Oxford University researchers have found. In a study published in Psychopharmacology, researchers gave 18 people the drug propranolol and 18 people a placebo and found that the propranolol group had significantly less subconscious racial bias. There was no significant difference in the groups' explicit attitudes to other races.
UK bioethics group investigates new wave of brain technologies
Michael Cook | 02 March 2012 |
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics in the UK launched a consultation this week on the ethics of new types of technologies and devices that ‘intervene’ in the brain, such as brain-computer interfaces, deep brain stimulation, and neural stem cell therapy.
Korea’s obsession with cosmetic surgery
Jared Yee | 25 February 2012 |
The internet is fanning the flame of a cosmetic surgery obsession in South Korea, experts say.
Whose design will be used for designer brains?
Michael Cook | 20 February 2012 |
Do we need a morality pill?
Michael Cook | 30 January 2012 |
Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer and a research assistant, Agata Sagan, proposed a “morality pill” in a column in the New York Times this week. They speculate that moral behaviour is at least in part biochemically determined. Hence, it should be possible to engineer moral behaviour with drugs. Here is the scenario that they paint:
Brother, can you spare some time?
Michael Cook | 02 December 2011 |
New Zealand writer-director made one of the all-time classic bioethics films, Gattaca, about the pursuit of genetic perfection. His latest is a thriller about life extension, In Time, with Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. The premise is that the world overlords have developed a robber baron technology for controlling population growth in the year 2061.
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