medical ethics

In the not-too-distant future, when biotechnological advances have made synthetic bodies and brains possible but illegal, a seventeen-year-old girl, recovering from a serious accident and suffering from memory lapses, learns a startling secret about her existence.

Readers will learn about medical advances in many fields, such as prosthetics and organ transplants.

Explores reproductive technology, discussing the religious viewpoint, history of eugenics, genetic engineering, egg and sperm donation, and more.

"George Orr is haunted by dreams that become reality. In a world where pollution has destroyed the ice caps and plagues rage unchecked, a psychiatrist sees Orr's power as a way for humanity to escape its bleak fate. But as each attempt to direct Orr's dreaming ends in failure, the doctor's obsession with playing God grows stronger."--Container.

"Shocking cases of abusive medical research and the whistleblowers who spoke out against them, sometimes at the expense of their careers. 'The Occasional Human Sacrifice' is an intellectual inquiry into the moral struggle that whistleblowers face, and why it is not the kind of struggle that most people imagine. Carl Elliott is a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota who was trained in medicine as well as philosophy. For many years he fought for an external inquiry into a psychiatric research study at his own university in which an especially vulnerable patient lost his life. Elliott's efforts alienated friends and colleagues. The university stonewalled him and denied wrongdoing until a state investigation finally vindicated his claims. His experience frames the six stories in this book of medical research in which patients were deceived into participating in experimental programs they did not understand, many of which had astonishing and well-concealed mortality rates. Beginning with the public health worker who exposed the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and ending with the four physicians who in 2016 blew the whistle on lethal synthetic trachea transplants at the Karolinska Institute, Elliott tells the extraordinary stories of insiders who spoke out against such abuses, and often paid a terrible price for doing the right thing"--Provided by publisher.

Ideally, science would indeed be focused entirely on facts, truth, and objectivity. But the reality is different. Science cannot be separated from the human experience. As long as science is a human endeavor, it will carry with it the biases of society.

"[The author] tells the true story of what happens when unfettered ambition pushes otherwise rational men and women to cross the line in the name of science, trampling ethical boundaries and often committing crimes in the process. [This book] . . . guides the reader across two thousand years of history, beginning with Cleopatra's dark deeds in ancient Egypt. The book reveals the origins of much of modern science in the transatlantic slave trade of the 1700s, as well as Thomas Edison's mercenary support of the electric chair and the warped logic of the spies who infiltrated the Manhattan Project. But the sins of science aren't all safely buried in the past. Many of them, [the author] reminds us, still affect us. We can draw direct lines from the medical abuses of Tuskegee and Nazi Germany to . . . vaccine hesitancy, and connect icepick lobotomies from the 1950s to the contemporary failings of mental-health care"--Provided by publisher.

Presents a brief overview of the issues of medical ethics, and examines a range of difficult questions--both personal and politcal--from euthanasia, to treating mental illness, and gentic testing.

Examines the experiences of the children and husband of Henrietta Lacks, who, twenty years after her death from cervical cancer in 1951, learned doctors and researchers took cells from her cervix without consent which were used to create the immortal cell line known as the HeLa cell; provides an overview of Henrietta's life; and explores issues of experimentation on African-Americans and bioethics.