We live in an age of “high tech” medicine which affects both health care recipients and physicians who are taught its many wonders and uses. It is easy in this atmosphere of specialization for clinicians, professors and medical students to become isolated and to ignore social issues which affect health care in its broadest sense.Individuals who are committed to the “common good” are the ones historically who have been effective change agents. It would be tragic simply to stand back and (...) allow the cynical and greedy to dominate any profession which deals with the poor, the uninsured and the homeless.It is imperative for physicians to take a broad view of today's problems in health care delivery systems, for they can have an enormous impact on the kind of world our children will inherit. It is essential for physicians to become involved in social concerns, and in improving health care delivery, at all levels in their practice.Given their power and prestige, it is crucial for physicians and aspiring physicians to have positive role models. Dr. Julius B. Richmond provides an admirable example of a physician who cares about his profession, his patients and his nation. Through his research, his public service and his teaching, Dr. Richmond has demonstrated the difference a single individual can make in improving the quality of life for all Americans. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that cancer onset and progression represent a type of reversion to an ancestral quasi‐unicellular phenotype. This general concept has been refined into the atavistic model of cancer that attempts to provide a quantitative analysis and testable predictions based on genomic data. Over the past decade, support for the multicellular‐to‐unicellular reversion predicted by the atavism model has come from phylostratigraphy. Here, we propose that cancer onset and progression involve more than a one‐off multicellular‐to‐unicellular reversion, and are (...) better described as a series of reversionary transitions. We make new predictions based on the chronology of the unicellular‐eukaryote‐to‐multicellular‐eukaryote transition. We also make new predictions based on three other evolutionary transitions that occurred in our lineage: eukaryogenesis, oxidative phosphorylation and the transition to adaptive immunity. We propose several modifications to current phylostratigraphy to improve age resolution to test these predictions. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/3unEu5JYJrQ. (shrink)

Should engineering ethics be taught? Despite the obvious truism that we all want our students to be moral engineers who practice virtuous professional behavior, I argue, in this article that the question itself obscures several ambiguities that prompt preliminary resolution. Upon clarification of these ambiguities, and an attempt to delineate key issues that make the question a philosophically interesting one, I conclude that engineering ethics not only should not, but cannot, be taught if we understand “teaching engineering ethics” to mean (...) training engineers to be moral individuals (as some advocates seem to have proposed). However, I also conclude that there is a justification to teaching engineering ethics, insofar as we are able to clearly identify the most desirable and efficacious pedagogical approach to the subject area, which I propose to be a case study-based format that utilizes the principle of human cognitive pattern recognition. (shrink)

Pressures to contain budgets and provide cost‐effective care are widespread in the American health care system, no less in psychiatry than elsewhere. The ethical implications of such economically motivated trends, however, become even more important in the area of psychiatric medicine.

The author starts from the traditional American notion that technology might offer a way to decrease the horror and suffering of warfare. He points out that historically this assumption is flawed in that past technological advances, from gunpowder weapons to bombers, have only made warfare more--not less--bloody. With a relentless logic, Colonel Dunlap takes to task those who say that the Revolution in Military Affairs has the potential to make war less bloody. He covers the technological landscape from precision-guided munitions (...) and Information Warfare to the use of space for military operations to raise issues that could pose difficult ethical, legal and moral problems for statesmen and soldiers. Some of these conundrums are so confounding that the author could claim that in all humility his only purpose was to raise these issues to prompt debate. But Colonel Dunlap takes the next step to outline several broad thematic avenues that may help us all address the difficult problems that lie ahead. (shrink)

This essay seeks to identify significant theological, philosophical, cultural, political, and moral issues that are raised by the four participants of the exchange on responding to terrorism. It argues that the “just war” concept, as classically developed and refined within the mainstream of the Christian moral tradition over the last two millennia, furnishes the best—indeed, the only morally responsible—alternative to addressing and deterring the terrorist phenomenon, given the commitment to justice and neighbor-love which underpins the tradition.

Technical expertise must be accompanied by an appreciation of the social, political, and moral questions involved in its application. However, because such questions do not serve a utilitarian purpose in achieving short-term economic advantage, they are generally considered as superfluous frills, lying outside the framework of technical education. Therefore, a new philosophy is proposed—one that incorporates values thought to be important for a humane, just, and sustainable society. The author shares a perspective gained from 15 years of engineering experience in (...) industry and 15 years of community college teaching in engineering and technology. (shrink)

Alfred Loisy and Maude Petre, like others who were associated with the Modernist movement in the Roman Catholic Church, shared hopes in a renewed Catholicism that would bring it into a positive relationship with modernity. With the Vatican condemnation of Modernism in 1907, Loisy abandoned all optimism for viable reform in the Church, and instead looked forward to a Religion of Humanity. While Petre found Loisy's ideal attractive, she retained a hope that the Church would undergo renewal at some future (...) point. Each of them had to come to terms with a dark side of modernity that emerged with the Great War. Loisy's Guerre et religion and Petre's Reflections of a Non-Combatant preserve a record of their struggles to preserve their faith in modernity and in humanity. (shrink)

Louis Frédéric Ancillon was a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres whose imagined dialogue between Berkeley and Hume was read to the Academy in 1796 and published in 1799. It is important as an indicator of the reception of Hume and Berkeley in francophone philosophical circles in late eighteenth-century Prussia. Our introduction is followed by an English translation with notes.

The first part of the paper sketches the rationale for the classical theistic thesis that, though God is not really related to the world, the world is really related to God. Part II delineates four sets of recent criticisms ofthis thesis: (a) an objection which assesses it as conflating transparent and opaque construals of intentional propositions, (b) a dilemma which regards it as undermining either free divine creativity or God’s knowledge of the contingent, (c) arguments which view its adherence to (...) an absolute divine immutability and independence as in conflict both with God’s knowledge of a changing creation and with human knowledge of God, and (d) two religiously inspired objections which contend that the thesis is contradictory to the biblical claim that God is personally related to the world. Part III develops the linguistic essence of the classical thesis through the syntactical insights of Sommers’ logic and defends it against the objections posed. (shrink)

This essay-response attempts to underscore the priority of broader moral-philosophical questions over specific “difficult” scenarios in which human behavior has been “determined” by genetic predilection or changes in brain structure. That is to say, a society must be capable of making basic moral distinctions—between good and evil, justice and injustice, acceptable and unacceptable behavior—before it can even begin to adjudicate the more “difficult” cases—cases such as those wherein brain structure has been chemically or surgically altered. In the end, at issue (...) is whether human beings—all human beings, only some human beings, or no human being—can be held personally morally responsible for any actions. Notwithstanding the complexity of human behavior, in theological and moral-philosophical terms the matter is governed by our convictions about what it means to be truly “human” and how we understand the implications of being fashioned in the imago Dei. (shrink)

The H‐NS protein is a major component of the nucleoid in Gram‐negative bacterial cells. It is a global regulator of transcription that affects the expression of many genes, including virulence genes in pathogenic species. At a local level, it facilitates the formation of nucleoprotein structures that repress transcriptional promoter function. H‐NS can form bridges between different DNA molecules or between different sections of the same molecule, allowing it to compact and impose structure on the nucleoid. A recent paper by Dame (...) et al.1 reports new insights into H‐NS‐mediated DNA bridging that were obtained using an optical tweezers device. BioEssays 29: 212–216, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Man has the urge to thrust against the limits of language. Think for instance about one's astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question and there is no answer to it. Anything we can say must, a priori, be nonsense.