Building on our previous achievements in machine ethics (Anderson et al. 2006a-b, 2007, 2008), we are developing and implementing a general interactive approach to analyzing ethical dilemmas with the goal to apply it toward the end of codifying the ethical principles that will help resolve ethical dilemmas that intelligent systems will encounter in their interactions with human beings. Making a...

The care of Very Important Patients (VIPs) is different from other patients because they may receive greater access, attention, and resources from health care staff. Although the term VIP is used regularly in the medical literature and is implicitly understood, in practice it constitutes a wide and heterogeneous group of patients that have a strong effect on health care providers. We define a V...

The Internet is an ideal tool for promoting public health goals of prolonging life, health, and improving the quality of life. There are many websites with health-related information where one can go to as an information source, for health advice, or selfdiagnosis. However, these health websites require a more acute awareness of ethical issues due to potential life threatening risks from misuse...

Plain English summary Researchers carrying out research in the NHS in England have to obtain approval for their study from an NHS Research Ethics Committee (REC). Involving the public in research helps to ensure studies are ethically acceptable to the people taking part, and therefore supports the REC review. The form used by RECs asks researchers to describe any involvement that has taken plac...

INTRODUCTION Lumbar radicular syndrome (LRS) can be a painful and debilitating condition. The optimum management strategies and their timing remain elusive despite extensive research. Surgery provides good short-term outcomes but has concomitant risks and costs. Physiotherapy is commonly practised for patients with LRS but its effects remain equivocal and there is a lack of consensus on the typ...

Internet searches were performed on projects involving non-human primates ('primates') funded under the European Union (EU) 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7), to determine how project proposals are assessed from an ethical point of view. Due to the incompleteness of the information publicly available, the types and severity of the experiments could not be determined with certainty, althoug...

The curriculum design, faculty characteristics, and experience of implementing masters' level international research ethics training programs supported by the Fogarty International Center was investigated. Multiple pedagogical approaches were employed to adapt to the learning needs of the trainees. While no generally agreed set of core competencies exists for advanced research ethics training, ...

BACKGROUND Approval of the research proposal by an ethical review committee from both sponsoring and host countries is a generally agreed requirement in externally sponsored research.However, capacity for ethics review is not universal. Aim of this study was to identify opinions and views of the members serving in ethical review and ethics committees in Sri Lanka on informed consent, essential ...

Severity (harm, invasiveness) scales focus the attention of both regulators and researchers on highly invasive experiments and thus help to promote the 3Rs, especially the refinement. A severity scale is critical to the quality of ethical review processes (ERPs) in limiting arbitrariness and situational opportunism of assessments, defining the acceptability ranges for some animal uses, especial...

INTRODUCTION There are an increasing number of people living with and beyond cancer, whose experience is further complicated by additional long-term health conditions in the context of an ageing population. The supportive care needs of this growing patient group should be recognised and addressed. There is a need to explore the experience of living with cancer and comorbid illness in order to d...