A Quebec ‘mercy killing’ prompts a rethink on euthanasia law
Calls for legalisation of advance directives for dementia patientsMichel Cadotte, his sister and his sister-in-law entering court The ink was hardly dry on Canada’s right-to-die...
German interest in racial theories foreshadowed in WWI
The strange adventure of an Aboriginal Australian in a WWI POW campAlthough the interest of some German scientists in now-discredited racial theories is best known...
A cool idea for an afterlife
Two bioethicists discuss the morality of 'cryothanasia'“To die in order to live” is one of the commonplaces of Christian piety. So it was a bit...
‘Digital dust’
A foray into the poetry of transhumanismNow for something completely different – at least for BioEdge: bioethics-inspired poetry. Johann Roduit sent us some thoughts in...
Shameless self promotion
We have a number of very important stories this week: a paper in Nature about gene-editing human embryos, a rise in euthanasia figures in the...
Human embryos modified to eliminate a single-gene disease
Is it time to begin talking about a revival of eugenics?American and Korean scientists have published in Nature the details of how they successfully edited...
Commercial surrogacy still thriving in India
Even if the government has banned overseas clientsSome of the 47 women in a Hyderabad clinic / NDTV Efforts to ban commercial surrogacy in India...
New kid on the block: the bioethics of ageing
A process which is "even more fundamental and ubiquitous than procreation"There is ever-multiplying number of sub-specialties in bioethics -- procreative ethics, intergenerational ethics, neuroethics, robot...
Latest end-of-life statistics from the Netherlands
Nearly 1 death in 20 is due to euthanasiaMore statistics about euthanasia from the Netherlands, based on the latest figures from 2015. Nearly one death...
Interview: Lydia S. Dugdale on death and dying
We need to recover a religious sense of dying, an ars moriendi. Assoc. Professor Lydia S. Dugdale MD is the Associate Director of the program for...
The drama of little Charlie Gard
We're back! And although the northern hemisphere summer is normally a slow-news season, bioethics has been on the front page of world newspapers. The drama...
Declining sperm count could lead to ‘extinction’
Experts suspect that chemicals are to blame. In the first systematic review of trends in sperm count, researchers this week reported in the journal Human...