Word: ethicists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some people are worried about the trend toward making people more alike--taller, thinner, smarter. Maybe it's best for society as a whole to include those with a range of needs and talents and predispositions, warts and all. "As someone who morally values diversity," says ethicist Elizabeth Bounds of Emory University's Candler School of Theology, "I find this frightening. We run the risk of shaping a much more homogeneous community around certain dominant values, a far more engineered community." What sort of lottery would decide who is to leap ahead, who is to be held back...
...squeamish. A Manhattan resident was startled last year when her gynecologist handed her a catalog of nutritional supplements (complete with the physician's vendor number) as part of her annual checkup. "Patients in a doctor's office are in a particularly vulnerable situation," says Dr. John Lantos, a medical ethicist at the University of Chicago. They might feel pressured to buy the products just to please their physician. Wouldn't it be less of a conflict of interest, he wonders, only half in jest, if doctors ran a fast-food restaurant in the lobby...
...high, and the viewers use their remote controls and zap from station to station. They watch them," says Perret. Explains Manhattan psychologist Steven Fishman: "A lot of people have pent-up emotions, so it's cathartic for them to observe such violent action." But, says Sissela Bok, an ethicist at Harvard: "That just shows that the lines between news and entertainment have become very blurred." Former TV news producer Derwin Johnson, a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, is appalled. "It's a classic case of technology running the beast instead of a clear editorial process...
...Several nights ago on ABC Evening News, an in-depth "Closer Look" segment was devoted to Newman's patent. The report was largely one-sided (more 1984 than 1998), featuring the fears and rants of ethicist and frequent scientific critic Jeremy Rifkin, who charged that society threatens to "play God" by creating human chimerical animals...
...Minutes piece featured an attorney pushing a novel murder defense: that the victim was killed not by his client but by the harvesting of her organs. This was followed by an interview with an ethicist concerned that protocols proposed at the Cleveland Clinic would allow organ-preserving drugs to be given to patients expected to suffer cardiac death after life support is withdrawn. The ethicist feared that these drugs could actually hasten death...