Category: Bioethics Education

(Comment) – There is, of course, something a bit ridiculous to this whole scene: the “ideal” measurements for girls and boys at each month calculated down to the inch, the doctors with clipboards, the very concept of the most “scientific” baby. There is, too, something comical in the false confidence and the utter inadequacy of a score between one and a hundred to grab hold of even the smallest corner of the personhood of these babies—smiling and blinking and clutching at fingers—much less the personhood of all the babies not represented in those rosy, white rows.  

And yet there is also something unsettlingly familiar, something so human in the attempt. We want a world we can measure. We want a world we can master.  (Read More)

(WSJ) – Noelia Castillo Ramos was in despair. By helping her kill herself, the Spanish state destroyed her autonomy.

Advocates of assisted suicide present Castillo’s death as an exercise of individual liberty. They argue that choosing the timing of one’s death is a matter of autonomy, that one should be able to lay down one’s life at will rather than suffer through difficult circumstances. That argument has gained traction across several European nations, in Canada and in some U.S. states.

But autonomy means more than the presence of a choice. It depends on the conditions under which that choice is made. (Read More)

(Wired) – Meta’s Muse Spark model offers to analyze users’ health data, including lab results. Beyond the obvious privacy risks, it’s not a capable stand-in for a real doctor.

Meta claims that Muse Spark was designed, in part, to be better at answering questions people have about their health. The company even worked with “over 1,000 physicians to curate training data that enables more factual and comprehensive responses,” according to Meta’s announcement blog.

As the new model rolls out to millions of users, I tested Muse Spark to see how it would respond to health-related questions. (Read More)

(Wired) – OpenAI is throwing its support behind an Illinois state bill that would shield AI labs from liability in cases where AI models are used to cause serious societal harms, such as death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1 billion in property damage.

The effort seems to mark a shift in OpenAI’s legislative strategy. Until now, OpenAI has largely played defense, opposing bills that could have made AI labs liable for their technology’s harms. Several AI policy experts tell WIRED that SB 3444—which could set a new standard for the industry—is a more extreme measure than bills OpenAI has supported in the past. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – In desperation, the woman’s care team reached out to Müller, a hematologist-oncologist at the University Hospital of Erlangen, a roughly three-hour drive away by ambulance. In recent years, he and his colleagues have made a name for themselves pioneering experimental CAR-T cell treatments—a type of personalized immunotherapy originally developed for cancer—against a variety of autoimmune diseases, with promising early results. Small studies of CAR-T, as well as early results from several ongoing clinical trials, show that many people with autoimmune disease go into remission after treatment; some patients are now years out from CAR-T cell therapy and remain in good health without the help of any drugs. (Read More)

(Psychiatric Times) – As Canada approaches the planned implementation of their medical euthanasia program for patients with sole psychiatric illnesses, these authors make an argument as to why euthanasia should remain closed to patients with psychiatric disorders.

Unlike many other kinds of illnesses, futility or irremediability cannot be reliably resolved by clinicians in cases of psychiatric disorders, especially for any one particular individual. (Read More)

(New York Times) – While chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT can help narrow the information divide between patients and providers, they can also dispense flawed advice.

At a time when health care costs top Americans’ financial worries, more patients are turning to chatbots like Claude or ChatGPT as a no-cost, do-it-yourself way to navigate problems with medical bills or insurance coverage. The trend is significant enough that the American Hospital Association has alerted its members that patients are increasingly using artificial intelligence to help dispute bills. (Read More)

(MIT Technology Review) – Coles, a gerontologist who spent the latter part of his career studying human longevity, opted to have his brain cryogenically preserved when he died of pancreatic cancer.

After he was declared dead, Coles’s body was kept at a low temperature while he was transferred to Alcor, a cryonics facility in Arizona. His head was removed from his body, and a team perfused his brain with “cryoprotective” chemicals that would prevent it from freezing. They then removed it from his skull and cooled it to −146 °C.

Coles had another request. As a scientist, he wanted his cryopreserved brain to be studied. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – Even as they claim the right to train their models on work belonging to other people, the AI companies have rejected similar reasoning when it comes to their own products. Consider OpenAI’s terms of service for ChatGPT, which forbid use of the bot’s “output to develop models that compete with OpenAI.” Anthropic, Google, and xAI have similar clauses forbidding people from using the material generated by their chatbots to train competing products. In other words: We can train on your work, but you can’t train on ours.

In the current economic environment, it’s not surprising that companies vying for market dominance would operate with standards that serve their bottom line. But it’s striking nonetheless how sharply their actions can contradict their professed values. (Read More)

(The Guardian) – Caring for ageing parents is difficult in the best circumstances – when relationships are loving and siblings are collaborative. But for those who have had complicated relationships with their parents, especially those characterised by abuse, trauma or periods of estrangement – or simply a feeling that you weren’t very well cared for yourself – it can be far more complex. (Read More)