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Can Enhancement Be Distinguished From Prevention in Genetic Medicine?

December 20, 2016

In discussions of the ethics of human gene therapy, it has become standard to draw a distinction between the use of human gene transfer techniques to treat health problems and their use to enhance or improve normal human traits. Some dispute the normative force of this distinction by arguing that it is undercut by the … Read more

Developing and Delivering New Medical Technologies

December 20, 2016

The articles in this issue illuminate psychosocial issues raised by the development and delivery of new medical technologies. Five kinds of questions surface repeatedly: questions about a technology’s purpose(s), the value judgments it presumes, the locus of its control, the external forces that drive it, and its long-term social risks. These questions take the discussion … Read more

Subtracting Injury From Insult

December 20, 2016

The emergence of implantable drug delivery systems will allow us to produce the effects of psychosurgery and surgical sterilization without their irreversible invasions of bodily integrity. However, this clinical advantage does not resolve the most important ethical problems these surgeries face, and may even obscure them when they arise in the practice of drug implantation.

The Clinical Introduction of Genetic Testing for Alzheimer Disease

December 20, 2016

OBJECTIVE: Primary caregivers should be aware of recent progress in the genetics of Alzheimer disease (AD) and of the clinical and ethical considerations raised regarding the introduction of genetic testing for purposes of disease prediction and susceptibility (risk) analysis in asymptomatic individuals and diagnosis in patients who present clinically with dementia. This statement addresses arguments … Read more

Recommendations on Predictive Testing for Germ Line P53 Mutations Among Cancer-Prone Individuals

December 20, 2016

Almost every form of cancer in humans has been reported to aggregate in families. These familial clusters can be due to inheritance of a mutated cancer-susceptibility gene, though other explanations include chance association and shared exposures to environmental carcinogens. In recent years, the chromosomal locations of some cancer-predisposing genes have been mapped by the new … Read more

Enhancing Cognition in the Intellectually Intact

December 20, 2016

As science learns more about how the brain works, and fails to work, the possibility for developing “cognition enhancers” becomes more plausible. And the demand for drugs that can help us think faster, remember more, and focus more keenly has already been demonstrated by the market success of drugs like Ritalin, which tames the attention … Read more

Germ-Line Gene Therapy

December 20, 2016

‘Human germ-line engineering’ is an aboriginal subject in bioethics. It was there in the beginning. It remains primitive. It inspires anxiety among pioneers. But it has much to teach us, if we will go out and meet it. The subject of human genetic engineering, along with organ transplantation, psychosurgery and mechanical ventilation, served to establish … Read more

Priorities in Professional Ethics and Social Policy for Human Genetics

December 20, 2016

According to a recent Congressional Office of Technology Assessment survey,1 genetic testing by employers for the purposes of excluding individuals from particular jobs remains rare. This should not be surprising. As the current report2 of the Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs of the American Medical Association points out, the potential of such tests as … Read more