Search

Applications of biomedical R&D currently imply substantial societal concerns. This paper explores, based on semi‐structured interviews with scientists in Norway, how biomedical researchers experience and tackle such concerns in their daily work. It shows how ritualised routine responses to dislocatory moments help maintain order in the daily work of the interviewed scientists; they do not address directly but instead smooth over concerns by a ritualised way of using ethics. This may foreclose substantive reflection and function as a stabiliser for 'business as usual'. Overall, the current way of responding to concerns as described by the interviewees may contribute to a depoliticisation of important issues. The paper contributes to sociological work on ethics by linking it to recent discussions on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and by the empirical research presented. The insights can also help improve science policies such as RRI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the emerging bioethical debate on assisted reproductive technology (ART) in Ireland, which is shaped by the long-standing contentious issue of abortion and the constitutional protection afforded to the ‘unborn’. The focus of the paper is on the way in which the terms of this debate are shaped and constrained by the historical relations of power between church, state and medicine. Since the representation of Ireland as a post-Catholic, plural republic is becoming increasingly mainstream to cultural and political discourse, we pay particular attention to how the Catholic Church embraces bioethics as a meta frame or code for refocusing questions of values, beliefs and meanings to sustain the ideal of Ireland as a ‘pro-life’ and essentially Catholic nation. The Catholic Church is not simply asserting its voice of dissent in the context of public debate as one voice amongst a plurality of other voices, but to shape the emerging debate as a powerful, institutional actor. The opportunity to do so is afforded by the lack of public debate on bioethical issues and the exceedingly slow pace at which bioethics is moving towards an institutionalised framework in Ireland. These events can be explained by the legacy of the social power of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the direct and indirect influence it has long exercised over public policy vis-à-vis the state and its institutions, including medicine. There are two interconnected threads to the contextual analysis presented in our case study: first, the legacy of the social power wielded by the Catholic Church, and its slow and incremental demise reflected in the pace of secularisation in Ireland and the privatisation of morality; second, the emergence of a bioethical regulatory debate on ART, which is mired in the abortion controversy. Our analysis focuses on a number of key contradictions and tensions in the way in which the key institutions of church, state and medicine navigate their own positions vis-à-vis a bioethics debate, and how this constrains public participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the importance of a broad sociological engagement with bioethics. It begins by considering why sociologists should be interested in bioethics and then goes on to explore the cognitive critique of bioethics developed by ethnographers. Some of these authors have also suggested that a more robust bioethics might emerge through the incorporation of the tools of ethnographic analysis. In this paper, it is argued that this is an important claim which needs to be analysed further and that Foucault's concept of discursive formations provides a useful framework for doing so. Once bioethics is redescribed as a discursive formation, the paper explores the challenges and obstacles that sociology and ethnography face in their attempt to open up a space for themselves in bioethics. The paper concludes by suggesting that sociologists and ethnographers need to reflect on the ways in which they might democratically secure legitimacy for their own claims in the field of social ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Change in the way new drugs are developed, including the privatisation of clinical trials, has altered the arrangement and roles of healthcare professions. In this paper I examine one aspect of this change: the role of research coordinators in the conduct of contract research in the United States. My focus on coordinators highlights the ethical conflicts embedded in clinical trials. I describe the ways in which coordinators experience and contend with the conflict between research and care and show how their construction of ethics is distinct from institutional conceptions formally associated with human subjects research. My analysis demonstrates how the coordinators’ focus on ethics is a response to their role conflict and an attempt to reinsert individualised care into the context of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a history of neglect, bioethicists have recently turned their attention to the topic of infectious disease. In this paper we link bioethicists’ earlier neglect of infectious disease to their under-appreciation of the extent to which the problem of infectious disease is related to social factors and thus to questions of justice. We argue that a social causation of illness model – well-known to sociologists of medicine, but incompletely understood by bioethicists – will improve future bioethical analysis of issues related to infectious disease. By emphasising the relationships between social and economic structures of inequality and health, the social causation model provides a richer approach to ethical issues associated with infectious disease than the more commonly used biomedical model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years international bioethics bodies have made prominent declarations about the uses of donated tissue and related information in genetic research 1 . Following the ‘legislative’ mode of bioethics 2 , these organisations have put forward a number of general principles with a view to promoting the fair and equitable use of donated tissue in such research. However, government policies in this field are shaped differently in different national regimes. In this paper, I use recent debates in the UK about a national genetic ‘biobank’ to illustrate how the shape and texture of policy discussions surrounding the use of donated blood for genetic research have been built upon a prior national consensus that regarded blood as a public good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing frequency, the oldest members of US society are undergoing medical interventions aimed at prolonging life. Using cardiac care as a case study, this paper explores how a discourse of risk infuses and legitimates high-tech clinical treatments in late life. In particular, we examine how the diminishing risks associated with biomedical procedures produce a sense of medical possibility regarding life extension, and push the definition of 'old age' into a receding future. Simultaneously, physicians, patients and families come to understand the management and reduction of future cardiac risks to be germane for individuals even near the end of life. Driven by the logic and language of risk, decisions to intervene are experienced as incremental and largely unremarkable, and the pursuit of an open-ended future via biomedical means is perceived as an ethical imperative, trumping deliberation or discussion of the utility of intervention and the ultimate ends being pursued. For practitioners and patients alike, the engagement of risk, the preservation of hope it facilitates and the routinisation of intervention it produces all contribute to the emerging mandate to treat at ever-older ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]