In light of the human genome project, establishing the genetic aetiology of complex human diseases has become a research priority within Western medicine. However, in addition to the identification of disease genes, numerous research projects are also being undertaken to identify genes contributing to the development of human behavioural characteristics, such as cognitive ability and criminal tendency. The permissibility of this research is obviously controversial: will society benefit from this research, or will it adversely affect our conceptions of ourselves and each other? When assessing the permissibility of this research, it is important to consider the nature and deterministic significance of behavioural genetic information. Whilst todate there has been much discussion and debate about the properties of genetic information per se and genetic determinism, this has not been applied to behavioural genetic research and its ethical implications. Therefore, this paper elucidates how behavioural genetic information can be distinguished from other types of genetic and non-genetic information and also synthesises the determinative significance of genetic factors for the development of human behavioural traits. Undertaking this analysis enables the ethical issues raised by this research to be debated in an appropriate context and indicates that separate policy considerations are warranted.
The U.S. Supreme Court's majorityopinion in Vacco v. Quill assumes thatthe principle of double effect explains thepermissibility of hastening death in thecontext of ordinary palliative care and inextraordinary cases in which painkilling drugshave failed to relieve especially intractablesuffering and terminal sedation has beenadopted as a last resort. The traditionaldoctrine of double effect, understood asproviding a prohibition on instrumental harmingas opposed to incidental harming or harming asa side effect, must be distinguished from otherways in which the claim that a result is notintended might be offered as part of ajustification for it. Although double effectmight appropriately be invoked as a constrainton ordinary palliative care, it is not clearthat it can be coherently extended to justifysuch practices as terminal sedation. A betterapproach would reconsider double effect'straditional prohibition on hastening death as ameans to relieve suffering in the context ofacute palliative care. 相似文献
This paper gives an overview of the placebo effect in popular culture, especially as it pertains to the work of authors Patrick
O’Brian and Sinclair Lewis. The beloved physician as placebo, and the clinician scientist as villain are themes that respectively
inform the novels, The Hundred Days and Arrowsmith. Excerpts from the novels, and from film show how the placebo effect, and the randomized clinical trial, have emerged into
popular culture, and evolved over time.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “Placebo: Its Action and Place in Health Research
Today,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 12–13 April, 2003. 相似文献
This paper attempts to define the concept of placebo as it is used in the clinical context The author claims that X is a placebo
if and only if X has such a property dp, that whenever in a therapeutic situation T a stimulus S appears, then in attending conditions A, it will cause a beneficial
reaction R in the patient. Formally, the same structure may be used to define any pharmacologically active drug. The main
difference between the drug and a placebo is in the range of possible substitutions for X and the property d. For the active
drug there is only one possible substitution for X and property d and it can be scientifically explained why, and how the
drug works. In the case of a placebo a set of possible substitutions for X and d is open, and so far it is impossible to offer
any scientifically valid explanation of the action mechanism of placebo. 相似文献
A robust finding in the cross-cultural research is that people's memories for faces of their own race are superior to their memories for other-race faces. However, the mechanisms underlying the own-race effect have not been well defined. In this study, a holistic explanation was examined in which Caucasian and Asian participants were asked to recognize features of Caucasian and Asian faces presented in isolation and in the whole face. The main finding was that Caucasian participants recognized own-race faces more holistically than Asian faces whereas Asian participants demonstrated holistic recognition for both own-race and other-race faces. The differences in holistic recognition between Caucasian and Asian participants mirrored differences in their relative experience with own-race and other-race faces. These results suggest that the own-race effect may arise from the holistic recognition of faces from a highly familiar racial group. 相似文献
Most of the research on developmental dyslexia comes from English-speaking countries. However, there is accumulating evidence that learning to read English is harder than learning to read other European orthographies (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). These findings therefore suggest the need to determine whether the main English findings concerning dyslexia can be generalized to other European orthographies, all of which have less irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences than English. To do this, we conducted a study with German- and English-speaking children (n=149) in which we investigated a number of theoretically important marker effects of the reading process. The results clearly show that the similarities between dyslexic readers using different orthographies are far bigger than their differences. That is, dyslexics in both countries exhibit a reading speed deficit, a nonword reading deficit that is greater than their word reading deficit, and an extremely slow and serial phonological decoding mechanism. These problems were of similar size across orthographies and persisted even with respect to younger readers that were at the same reading level. Both groups showed that they could process larger orthographic units. However, the use of this information to supplement grapheme-phoneme decoding was not fully efficient for the English dyslexics. 相似文献
Six male albino rats were placed in running wheels and exposed to a fixed-interval 30-s schedule of lever pressing that produced either a drop of sucrose solution or the opportunity to run for a fixed duration as reinforcers. Each reinforcer type was signaled by a different stimulus. In Experiment 1, the duration of running was held constant at 15 s while the concentration of sucrose solution was varied across values of 0, 2.5. 5, 10, and 15%. As concentration decreased, postreinforcement pause duration increased and local rates decreased in the presence of the stimulus signaling sucrose. Consequently, the difference between responding in the presence of stimuli signaling wheel-running and sucrose reinforcers diminished, and at 2.5%, response functions for the two reinforcers were similar. In Experiment 2, the concentration of sucrose solution was held constant at 15% while the duration of the opportunity to run was first varied across values of 15, 45, and 90 s then subsequently across values of 5, 10, and 15 s. As run duration increased, postreinforcement pause duration in the presence of the wheel-running stimulus increased and local rates increased then decreased. In summary, inhibitory aftereffects of previous reinforcers occurred when both sucrose concentration and run duration varied; changes in responding were attributable to changes in the excitatory value of the stimuli signaling the two reinforcers. 相似文献
B. F. Skinner's Science and Human Behavior (1953) became the main source of my understanding of behavior during my first semester as a college professor in 1955 at Kansas University. It has continued to exert a major influence throughout my career as the basis for a completely deterministic science of behavior, as a handbook to be consulted as a first step in dealing with any issue in behavior analysis, and as a tutorial in behavioral interpretive analysis--in the use of a small number of behavioral concepts and principles to understand behavior of all degrees of complexity. I describe four general interpretive orientations or maxims that are of broad significance for behavior analysis, and also two underappreciated major theoretical contributions. 相似文献