Currently viewing the tag: "Medicine"
The placebo effect is well known. Tell someone, “Hey, this pill will make your headache go away” and, though the pill is just a sugar pill and has no pain mediating qualities, will indeed make the headache go away in some small percentage of the population. The placebo effect is the power of suggestion [...]
A drilless cavity solution that isn’t just speculation, FINALLY:
The gel or thin film contains a peptide known as MSH, or melanocyte-stimulating hormone. Previous experiments, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that MSH encourages bone regeneration.
Bone and teeth are fairly similar, so the French scientists reasoned that if the [...]
The Economist has a spiffy article on the growing potential for printable body parts, on demand:
The new machine, which costs around $200,000, has been developed by Organovo, a company in San Diego that specialises in regenerative medicine, and Invetech, an engineering and automation firm in Melbourne, Australia. One of Organovo’s founders, Gabor Forgacs [...]
In a superb, artful post, Anders Sandberg deftly picks apart arguments that cog-enhancing drugs would be unfair:
The unfairness issue might be fairly weak: cognition enhancers do not appear to be very expensive and could be made less expensive and more widely available by government subsidies if found useful. But there would likely be [...]
Prosthetics are amazing. Aimee Mullins and Oscar Pistorius are living examples of how a disability can become an opportunity not just for success, but for super-human ability. Our popular culture is packed with characters with enabling prostheses: Lt. Dan, Luke Skywalker, and Nina Sharp. Within the past decade, many [...]
I somehow missed the boat on this one for a while, but here is the trailer for Repo Men.
Ok, so it doesn’t look Blade Runner good, but it does at least look Equilibrium good.
Yesterday I talked about how our culture labels male erectile dysfunction and female low libido as pathological. The reverse, that men might have low libido or women might have trouble with physical arousal – both of which are real problems – goes totally unconsidered. Framing sexual problems (chronic or one-off) in this way is not [...]
About
Pop Bioethics, written by Kyle Munkittrick, is an effort to study the ethics of the continuing evolution of the human species via the lens of pop culture and be somewhat entertaining in the process.
Kyle's writing can also be found at Discover's The Crux, Slate's Future Tense, and at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. For questions or comments: comments [at] popbioethics [dot] com
All opinions, ideas, and words either explicit or implicit found within this website are my own and represent no other person, organization, or group.Categories
