Longing for Life Extension: Science Fiction and Late Life

Rejuvenescence has long been a topic of legend and medicine. As the body became the property of medical science, speculative fiction asked how fantastic experiments with bodies would affect the life course. In science fiction, medical breakthroughs promise or threaten to forestall or even reverse the decline from midlife through old age to senility and decrepitude. Responding to debates over evolution, eugenics, and scientific experimentation with human and animal subjects, rejuvenescence novels such as Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire (1996) ask readers whether they desire long life or heightened quality of life; the consolations of age or the hungers of youth; short-lived intensity or perpetual ennui.     

The continuing need for disinterested research

For scientific knowledge to be trustworthy, it needs to be dissociated from material interests. Disinterested research also performs other important non-instrumental roles. In particular, academic science has traditionally provided society with reliable, imaginative public knowledge and independent, self-critical expertise. But this type of science is not compatible with the practice of instrumental research, which is typically proprietary, prosaic, pragmatic and partisan. With ever-increasing dependence on commercial or state funding, all modes of knowledge production are merging into a new, ‘post-academic’ research culture which is dominated by utilitarian goals. Growing concern about conflicts of interest is thus a symptom of deep-seated malaise in science and medicine. An expanded version of this paper was presented at an International Conference on “Conflict of Interest and its Significance in Science and Medicine” held in Warsaw, Poland on 5–6 April, 2002.     

Email, voicemail, and privacy: What policy is ethical?

Business people repeatedly asked Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) to recommend a policy to deal with email and voicemail. After many such requests to our organization, we attempted to construct guidelines that we could endorse. This paper outlines the guidelines that we proposed and the public reaction to them. The paper discusses the tensions inherent in a business environment, and the means of identifying ethical behavior for both companies and their employees. A version of this paper was presented at ETHICOMP98, the Fourth International Conference on Ethical Issues of Information Technology, March 25–27, 1998. Erasmus University, the Netherlands. Dr. Woodbury is the former Chair of CPRS. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. She is also a curriculum developer and faculty member of the Information Group of the Women’s International University (ifu) in Germany in 2000.     

The gap between law and ethics in human embryonic stem cell research: Overcoming the effect of U.S. Federal policy on research advances and public benefit

Key ethical issues arise in association with the conduct of stem cell research by research institutions in the United States. These ethical issues, summarized in detail, receive no adequate translation into federal laws or regulations, also described in this article. U.S. Federal policy takes a passive approach to these ethical issues, translating them simply into limitations on taxpayer funding, and foregoes scientific and ethical leadership while protecting intellectual property interests through a laissez faire approach to stem cell patents and licenses. Those patents and licenses, far from being scientifically and ethically neutral in effect, virtually prohibit commercially sponsored research that could otherwise be a realistic alternative to the federal funding gap. The lack of federal funding and related data-sharing principles, combined with the effect of U.S. patent policy, the lack of key agency guidance, and the proliferation of divergent state laws arising from the lack of Federal leadership, significantly impede ethical stem cell research in the United States, without coherently supporting any consensus ethical vision. Research institutions must themselves implement steps, described in the article, to integrate addressing ethical review with the many legal compliance issues U.S. federal and state laws create. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own, and are not necessarily the opinions of others, including Children’s Hospital Boston. Portions of earlier versions of this article were previously published by the American Bar Association and the New York State Bar Association.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul
John P. Burgess and Gideon Rosen, A Subject with No Object; Strategies for Nominalistic Interpretation of Mathematics
Stewart Shapiro, Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology
Patrick Grim, Gary Mar and Paul St. Denis, The Philosophical Computer
Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art
Robert Eliot, Faking Nature: The Ethnics of Environmental Restoration     

Culture Is More than a Static Residual: Introduction to the Special Section on Culture and Foreign Policy

The literature on international relations frequently refers to culture in broad, macro-level ways to explain what cannot be explained by economic or military power. The assumptions that culture is simple, uniform and the opposite of power are, in the view of the authors, erroneous. Also, the authors note that there is a lack of scholarly interaction among psychologists interested in cross-cultural phenomena and international relations specialists interested in questions of identity and foreign policy. As an introduction to a special section on culture and foreign policy, this article calls for more communication among these scholarly communities; provides a set of observations about foreign policy and culture understood as a complex, dynamic concept; and calls for specific kinds of studies to better understand foreign policy in the context of cultural complexity and richness.     

Darwin, Social Theory, and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

This essay considers ways in which Darwin's account of natural processes was influenced by economic, ethical, and natural-theological theories in his own day. It argues that the Anabaptist concept of "the gospel of all creatures" calls into question alliances between evolutionary theory and social policy that are based on the dominance of conflictual images such as "the survival of the fittest" and questions the negative images of both nature and God that Darwinism has been taken to sponsor. The essay also considers developments in biology that have called into question dualist accounts of human nature as body and soul, thus reminding us that we are fully a part of the natural world and thus contributing, in turn, to a better theological grasp of God's relation to nature.     

Where Do We Go from Here?

Beginning with the End represents an excellent collection of articles devoted to the thought of Wolfhart Pannenberg. This volume includes many of the most important thinkers in the science-religion dialogue and shows as well the importance and impact of Pannenberg's theology. This response addresses themes that surface in several of the articles: What is religion? What is science? What is theology? What is God? On some of these themes there is agreement, on others sharp disagreement. The conclusion also considers what this volume suggests about the future of Pannenberg's theology.     

Books received

Analytical Psychology
Yeoman, A. Now or Neverland. Peter Pan and the Myth of Eternal Youth. A Psychological Perspective on a Cultural Icon.
Pieri, P. F. Dizionario Junghiano.
Group Psychotherapy
Schermer,Victor L. & Pines, M. Group Psychotherapy of the Psychoses. Concepts, Interventions and contexts.
Psychoanalysis
De Groef, J. and Heinemann, E. Psychoanalysis and Mental Handicap.
Psychotherapy and Counselling
Wiener, J. and Sher, M. Counselling and Psychotherapy in Primary Health Care.
Bergler, E. M. D. The Talent for Stupidity. The Psychology of the Bungler, the Incompetent, and the Ineffectual.
Ripa di Meana, G. Figures of Lightness. Anorexia, Bulimia and Psychoanalysis.
Cohen, B. T., Etezady, H. M., Pacella, L. B., The Vulnerable Child, Volume 3.     

ON MARTIN EGER'S "A TALE OF TWO CONTROVERSIES"

Abstract. Criticisms are presented against Eger's challenge to the demarcation between the natural sciences and ethics. Arguments are given both against his endorsement of the "new" philosophy of science and against his rejection of the fact-value dichotomy. However, his educational recommendations are reinforced rather than weakened by these criticisms