The middle of the Covid-19 pandemic is not an auspicious moment to cast doubt upon the reliability of scientific research. However, writing in a BMJ blog, Richard Smith, editor of The BMJ until 2004, launched a withering attack, saying that the system is riddled with fraudulent studies. “ It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary,” he says.

Dr Smith does not mention the pandemic, but it would come as no surprise if Covid-19 research did not… MORE

The Code of Hammurabi. The Ten Commandments. The Beatitudes. The Magna Carta. The Declaration of Independence. Throughout history, statements such as these have proclaimed that people deserve freedom, security and dignity. Why have universal human rights remained largely unchanged?

According to an article in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, it's because humans share the same nervous system. “Universal rights are thus based on fundamental features of human brain structure, function, and development,” they contend. This is the foundational principle of what they call “dignity neuroscience”.

The authors argue that numerous studies in developmental psychology and… MORE

Another poll in the United Kingdom and another dispute about how to interpret it. According to a press release from YouGov, “there is overwhelming public support for doctor-assisted suicide for patients suffering from a terminal illness, but ... MPs are heavily divided on this issue.”

YouGov found that “73% of Britons support allowing doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill”. This showed, it claimed, that MPs were out of touch with their constituents, as only 35% felt the same. 

However, support for doctor-assisted suicide plummeted for those who are not terminally ill. Only 50% of respondents agreed that “someone suffering… MORE

Another film promoting assisted suicide, this time from France: Tout S'Est Bien Passé (Everything Went Fine). It’s an art-house flic, beautifully acted, with snappy dialogue and on Rotten Tomatoes, it scores 92% with the critics.

Rather than debating the ethics of assisted suicide, it treats a request to die as the framework for a family drama. An elderly man with a muirky past, estranged from his wife, has a disabling stroke. He asks one of his two daughters to help him die. This rattles her, but eventually she agrees to take him to a suicide clinic in Switzerland. It is… MORE

Much of the media is taken up with how close vaccines are to bringing the Covid-19 pandemic to a close. But how about a vaccine against the blizzard of fake news and misinformation? Some social science researchers have experimented with “cognitive vaccines” but, says an article in PNAS, “researchers have found that this is not as simple as providing people with correct information and hoping it will supplant false beliefs”.

One disturbing feature of the fight against fake news which has become more evident after years of fierce debates over climate change, US election results and Covid is that… MORE

People are easily polarised by birth certificates. In Pink News, an LGBT website, the headline over a resolution made by the American Medical Association at its annual meeting is: “Right-wing cranks rage at sound, rational plan to drop ‘sex’ from birth certificates”. In the Daily Signal, a conservative site, the corresponding headline is: “American Medical Association, Descending Into Wokeness, Calls for Eliminating Sex on Birth Certificates”.

What actually happened?

The AMA passed a resolution calling for “the removal of sex as a legal designation on the public portion of the birth certificate”.

Birth certificates have two sections… MORE

Toward the end of his famous novel La Peste (The Plague), Camus remarks: “One of the signs that a return to the golden age of health was secretly awaited was that our fellow citizens, careful though they were not to voice their hope, now began to talk—in, it is true, a carefully detached tone—of the new order of life that would set in after the plague.”

There are similar stirrings now. Oxford’s Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology and Oxford’s Centre for Global History have established a multi-disciplinary project about “How Epidemics End”.

As Alberto… MORE

Harvard University is a greenhouse for thought-leaders. So an initiative promoting polyamory rights at Harvard Law School suggests that a new set of civil and human rights is in the making.

The Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition (PLAC) is a multi-disciplinary coalition supported by some Harvard academics. Its head, Alexander Chen, who was the first openly trans editor of the Harvard Law Review, told Harvard Law Today that empirical research supports polyamory. “This research shows that these types of relationships are not unhealthy for families and children and can be healthy and stable,” says Chen.

Polyamory is often decried… MORE

^{Photo by Yogendra Singh on Unsplash}

Countries with a skewed sex ratio at birth because of a cultural preference for sons will lose another 4.7 million girls by 2030, according to research in the journal BMJ Global Health.

This loss could reach 22 million globally by 2100 if all countries at risk of boosting this ratio above its natural level, including densely populated countries such as Nigeria and Pakistan, do so.

Prenatal sex selection has helped skew the sex ratio at birth in favour of boys in several countries from South East Europe to South East Asia since the… MORE

^Prague

The Czech Republic will compensate Roma (Gypsy) women who were forcibly sterilised both before and after the fall of Communism.

The Roma have always been a stigmatised minority -- in the Czech Republic and in many other European countries. Under Communism, women were often sterilised after childbirth without their consent – and the practice continued until 2012. After years of campaigning for justice, the government has decided to award women who were unlawfully sterilised between 1966 and 2012 a grant of CZK 300,000 (US$14,000). About 400 women are expected to claim compensation – although thousands are… MORE