Information from forensic genetic tests of crime scene samples has been used to make claims about suspects' race and appearance. This article discusses and critiques the techniques used to make such claims, and raises policy concerns about them.

Human genomics is a translational field spanning research, clinical care, public health, and direct-to-consumer testing. However, law differs across these domains on issues including liability, consent, promoting quality of analysis and interpretation, and safeguarding privacy. Genomic activities crossing domains can thus encounter confusion and conflicts among these approaches. This paper suggests how to resolve these conflicts while protecting the rights and interests of individuals sequenced. Translational genomics requires this more translational approach to law.

This article argues that current data for the safety and efficacy of fecal microbiota transplants as a treatment for any indication, including recurrent Clostridioides difficile infection, is low-quality. It develops a governance proposal that encourages production of high-quality evidence by incentivizing well-designed RCTs of stool and stoolderived microbial products. The proposal would require that FDA change its current enforcement approach, but it would not require any change in statutes or regulations.

In the opening years of the 21st century, it became fashionable to describe the human genome as belonging to the common heritage of humanity. The United Nations, in its Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, now identifies the human genome as part of the common heritage, as does the international Human Genome Organization and the Council of Europe. The common heritage concept has played a prominent role in arguments against patenting the human genome or portions thereof. This (...) essay considers whether the common heritage designation will advance the political and legal goals of its proponents. (shrink)

This essay identifies two legal lineages underlying the common heritage concept, and applies each to the human genome. The essay notes some advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and argues that patenting of human genes would be allowable under either approach.

“DNAPrint Genomics, Inc. has applied the most recent advancements in human genomic technology for the deciphering of an individual's race. We are proud to introduce to the forensic community DNA WITNESS 2.0, a genetic test for the deduction of the heritable component of race, called Biogeographical Ancestry.”–Z. Gaskin“One definite and obvious consequence of the complexity of human demographic history is that races in any meaningful sense of the term do not exist in the human species.”–D. B. Goldstein and L. Chikhi.

The biosciences have become information sciences, in which knowledge is often produced in silica, by the manipulation and analysis of large datasets. Genomics has been at the forefront of the data explosion and is a model for bioscience as a large-scale endeavor. Large genome research datasets are frequently shared through research repositories. To protect the interests of people from whom the data were derived , human data are often shared through a controlled access mechanism, in which data repositories can, in (...) theory, place limitations on who uses the data and for what purpose. Controlled access is an innovative governance mechanism, but it may not protect data sources the way policy makers intended. Here, I describe one controlled access process in some detail, and provide insight into how and why researchers fail to comply with data use restrictions. (shrink)

Biomedical research is increasingly data intensive and computational, and “big data science” is migrating into the clinical arena. Unfortunately, ethicists, regulators, and policy‐makers have barely begun to explore the ethical, legal, and social issues raised by the variety of analytical and computational approaches in use and under development in biology and medicine. Most scholarship concerning big data bioscience has focused on privacy, a vitally important consideration but not the only one. Among the issues raised by new computational technologies are questions (...) about safety and safety assessment, justice, and how to obtain proper informed consent. These technologies also raise a myriad of regulatory issues that could influence the probability of translating new assays or computational tools to the clinical or public health spheres. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: Introduction Background on Patent Law: Fighting the Myths and Misconceptions The Ethics of Patenting Human Genes.

It has become increasingly difficult for individuals to exercise meaningful control over the personal data they disclose to companies or to understand and track the ways in which that data is exchanged and used. These developments have led to an emerging consensus that existing privacy and data protection laws offer individuals insufficient protections against harms stemming from current data practices. However, an effective and ethically justified way forward remains elusive. To inform policy in this area, we propose the Ethical Data (...) Practices framework. The framework outlines six principles relevant to the collection and use of personal data—minimizing harm, fairly distributing benefits and burdens, respecting autonomy, transparency, accountability, and inclusion—and translates these principles into action-guiding practical imperatives for companies that process personal data. In addition to informing policy, the practical imperatives can be voluntarily adopted by companies to promote ethical data practices. (shrink)

Delivering high quality genomics-informed care to patients requires accurate test results whose clinical implications are understood. While other actors, including state agencies, professional organizations, and clinicians, are involved, this article focuses on the extent to which the federal agencies that play the most prominent roles — the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services enforcing CLIA and the FDA — effectively ensure that these elements are met and concludes by suggesting possible ways to improve their oversight of genomic testing.

Individuals living with rare conditions are faced with important challenges derived from the rarity of their conditions and aggravated by the low priority given to rare disease research. However, current realities of rare disease research require consideration of the relationship between subjectivity and ‘traditional’ objectivity. Objectivity in research has traditionally been associated with processes and descriptions that are independent of the investigator. The need for researchers to provide unbiased knowledge and achieve a balance between objectivity and the underlying values in (...) nursing and scientific research requires an examination of how objectivity is conceptualized within the context of rare disease research. The aim of this paper is to examine scientific objectivity in rare disease research from a philosophical viewpoint and, in doing so, demonstrate the need to redefine it to reflect the current scientific environment. As such, healthcare providers working on this field need to redefine objectivity around ethical and moral obligation to advance science in an equitable manner with the end goal to produce knowledge that is trustworthy and beneficial to our patients. (shrink)

La epistemología social es un área de estudio que fue propuesta por dos bibliotecarios.

In Dellunde et al. 997–1015), we determined the complete theory Te of modules of separably closed fields of characteristic p and imperfection degree e, eω{∞}. Here, for 0≠eω, we describe the closed set of the Ziegler spectrum corresponding to Te. Further, we establish a correspondence between certain submodules and n-types and we investigate several notions of dimensions and their relationships with the Lascar rank. Finally, we show that Te has uniform p.p. elimination of imaginaries and deduce uniform weak elimination of (...) imaginaries. (shrink)

Background:Moral courage is defined as courage to act according to one’s own ethical values and principles even at the risk of negative consequences for the individual. In a complex nursing practice, ethical considerations are integral. Moral courage is needed throughout nurses’ career.Aim:To analyse graduating nursing students’ moral courage and the factors associated with it in six European countries.Research design:A cross-sectional design, using a structured questionnaire, as part of a larger international ProCompNurse study. In the questionnaire, moral courage was assessed with (...) a single question (visual analogue scale 0–100), the questionnaire also covered several background variables.Participants and research context:The sample comprised graduating nursing students (n = 1796) from all participating countries. To get a comprehensive view about graduating nursing students’ moral courage, the views of nurse managers (n = 538) and patients (n = 1327) from the same units in which the graduating nursing students practised were also explored, with parallel questionnaires.Ethical considerations:Ethical approvals and research permissions were obtained according to national standards in every country and all participants gave their informed consent.Results:The mean of graduating nursing students’ self-assessed moral courage was 77.8 (standard deviation 17.0; on a 0–100 scale), with statistically significant differences between countries. Higher moral courage was associated with many factors, especially the level of professional competence. The managers assessed the graduating nursing students’ moral courage lower (66.5; standard deviation 18.4) and the patients slightly higher (80.6; standard deviation 19.4) than the graduating nursing students themselves.Discussion and conclusions:In all countries, the graduating nursing students’ moral courage was assessed as rather high, with differences between countries and populations. These differences and associations between moral courage and ethics education require further research. (shrink)

La paradójica Revolución francesa sigue siendo objeto de estudio y fascinación en nuestra época, y mucho más ahora, en estos tiempos de aguas revueltas en la política, de populismos a diestra y siniestra, de confusiones ideológicas e ignorancias y olvidos de la más elemental cultura democrática, así como de los entramados históricos que nos han costado nuestras libertades. Por eso, se agradece que el profesor Francisco Javier Espinosa Antón haya traducido y editado con mimo una excelente antología de textos de (...) uno de los personajes más emblemáticos -aunque menos conocido- de aquel proceso revolucionario, Anacharsis Cloots, defensor de una República universal y comprometido con la Revolución, pero que acabaría siendo guillotinado en 1794, engullido por el terror de Robespierre. ¿Cuáles fueron los avatares en su vida que lo llevaron al ardor revolucionario? En realidad, se llamaba Joannes Baptista Cloots, barón de Gnadenthal, nacido en 1755 en el castillo del mismo nombre y propiedad de su familia, de estirpe holandesa y católica, dedicada a las fianzas e instalada en Prusia. Eligió el nombre de Anacharsis, por ser el de un filósofo escita que conoció la república ateniense y defendió el ideal de la unificación de Grecia, Escitia y Oriente, allá por el siglo VI a.c. Ese mismo impulso republicano y universalista será el motor de todos los discursos de Cloots. Culto, cosmopolita, estuvo presente en París inmediatamente después de la toma de la Bastilla, y en la capital francesa vivió intensamente aquellos turbulentos años. El hecho concreto que marcó su entrada en la escena política fue el siguiente: el 19 de junio de 1790 accedió a la Asamblea nacional encabezando un grupo de 36 extranjeros, y sus palabras fueron: "Venimos de Europa, venimos de Asia, venimos de América. Somos la Humanidad". El discurso de Cloots causó una viva impresión y fue bautizado como "el orador del género humano". En 1792 obtuvo la nacionalidad francesa, al igual que Paine, Bentham o Washington. A continuación fue elegido diputado de la Convención y se publicó su obra más destacada, La República universal. Sus discursos enardecidos, de lenguaje 568 Pilar Benito Olalla Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 22, nº 43. Primer semestre de 2020. Pp. 567-570. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2020.i43.28 directo y pegados a la más viva actualidad, tenían un amplio eco en sus conciudadanos. Pero las disensiones e intrigas dentro del grupo jacobino al cual pertenecía se convirtieron en una trampa mortal. Y la sombra alargada del paranoico Robespierre tendió sus redes para acusarlo de "ser barón, alemán y rico, traidor y conspirador contra la República", como muy bien nos cuenta el profesor Espinosa Antón. Un juicio injusto condujo derecho al patíbulo a este jacobino prusiano, galófilo y ateo. (shrink)

El volumen que edita Pascual Martínez-Freire constituye una de las mejores compilaciones de los últimos años de Filosofía de la Ciencia en castellano. Cuenta con las aportaciones de un nutrido grupo de investigadores españoles de primera línea y de pensadores de gran talla internacional como son Ronald N. Giere, Susan Haack, Ilkka Niiniluoto y Nicholas Rescher.

Evaluative markers of diminution and augmentation typically express quantity or intensity. Prior evidence suggests that they also convey emotions, although it remains unexplored as to whether this function is mediated by their role in expressing quantification/intensification. Here we investigated the effects of evaluative suffixes on the assessment of word affective properties by asking participants (N = 300) to score valence and arousal features for augmentatives, diminutives and base words with negative, positive or neutral valence. Diminutives and, to a lesser extent, (...) augmentatives were assessed more positively than base forms in negative words and more negatively than bases in positive words. The capacity of diminution to express attenuated emotions is in line with its function in conveying quantity. By contrast, valence effects for augmentatives suggests a role in expressing pejoration and amelioration that is not mediated by quantification. With regard to arousal, negative, neutral and positive augmentatives showed higher scores than base words, which, in addition, were also rated higher than diminutives. These incremental effects suggest that suffixes which convey larger quantity are also associated with increased arousal. Thus, with the exception of valence effects in augmentatives, it seems that evaluative suffixes encode both valence and arousal through quantification. (shrink)

Censurado durante la última década, sale finalmente a la luz Biografía de las ideas, de Isaiah Berlin. El libro pone de relieve el modo en que el sector liberal-conservador más poderoso, con sede en Oxford, ha construido la ficción en torno a la figura de Isaiah Berlin. Sir Isaiah Berlin es conocido como una lumbrera del pensamiento político del siglo XX, uno de los máximos exponentes intelectuales del liberalismo democrático, un pensador moralmente comprometido con la causa de la libertad y (...) la lucha contra el totalitarismo. El lector podrá comprobar que la imagen que se atribuye a Isaiah Berlin es una mitificación, una ficción forjada con el propósito de defender una serie de intereses académicos (y reforzar así la marca Oxford), políticos (en torno al sector liberal-conservador anglosajón) y nacionales (al objeto de cantar la leyenda de una Corona británica comprometida –así dicen– por la defensa de la democracia Occidental). Como Research Fellow en la Universidad de Oxford, el autor ha tenido oportunidad de examinar esta realidad y ver con sus propios ojos cómo los liberal-conservadores fabrican sus mitos. Las conclusiones de este estudio no dejarán indiferentes ni a académicos –principalmente, del área de Historia de las Ideas, y Teoría Política y Moral–, ni a escritores y políticos como el Premio Nobel Mario Vargas Llosa o la marquesa Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, auto-denominados liberal-conservadores, porque derrumba un pilar de su religión. (shrink)

Durante el año 2008, el Seminario de Sociedad y Cultura Contemporáneas de nuestra universidad quiso celebrar un ciclo de conferencias sobre la actualidad de lo trágico. Nuestra convicción era que la cultura contemporánea volvía a necesitar la voz y la energía del pensamiento de la tragedia, después de que estas hubieran sido interesadamente neutralizadas en los últimos tiempos. Para este proyecto, se contó con la presencia de toda una autoridad mundial en esta área, Sergio Givone, así como con reputados profesores (...) españoles como Luis Enrique de Santiago Guervós, Pilar López de Santamaría, Marco Parmeggiani o Celso Sánchez Capdequí; acompañados a su vez de jóvenes promesas del panorama nacional. El resultado de ese ciclo es este volumen, donde se recorre a ese respecto un trayecto tanto cronológico (que pasa por Schopenhauer, Dostoievski, Nietzsche, Unamuno, los futuristas) como temático (con asuntos tales que la libertad, el amor fati, el arte contemporáneo, la novedad y la educación). (shrink)

The idea that love changes who we are is widely shared, and has been mostly explored from a stance in the middle stage of love (i.e., when people already love each other). But how do we get there? And what happens when love ends? In this chapter, I explore how self-understanding may be shaped in different ways at different stages of love through the notions of narrative and existential feeling. As I will argue, love gains narrative momentum at the beginning, (...) which is maintained during the middle, and ultimately extinguished at the end. This momentum is triggered and later sustained by the existential feeling that ‘things make sense’, which keeps the lovers oriented towards each other. (shrink)

A common approach in the philosophy of love defines love as caring about one another and promoting one another's interests, aims and values. The view faces several problems and has been re-formulated to avoid them. However, here I argue that a larger re-formulation of the definition of love is needed in order to accommodate three instances of what I call 'non-harmonious' relationships. I identify three types of non-harmonious love (featuring problematic interests, opposing interests and neutral interests the lovers do not (...) care about) and ultimately claim that our definition of love must incorporate conflict and self- interest, and we should then abandon the excessive focus on the sharing of values. (shrink)

The stream on political corporate social responsibility argues that companies have recently assumed state-like roles to influence global governance. However, following emerging calls for greater contextualization of CSR, we trace the historic evolution of PCSR in the case of Colombia and argue that such political engagement by firms is not new. Looking beyond a linear chronological account, we reveal the sedimentation process behind PCSR by exploring the archetypical political roles businesses have taken on in providing public goods and acting as (...) regulators, and chart their transformation. Our findings allow us to make two main contributions. First, by unearthing different strata of business and society relations, we enrich the research on PCSR, highlighting its historical sedimentation dynamics. By integrating institutional and historical perspectives, we respond to calls for complementary accounts of one of the premises found in the literature that considers globalization as the starting point of PCSR. Second, our exploration of the past and present of PCSR in Colombia provides scholars and practitioners with an overview of the complex state and stakes of CSR in that country. We also discuss the implications of sedimentation for PCSR theory and future research directions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is to present a pluralist thesis about the inferential role of logical constants, which embraces classical, relevant, linear and ordered logic. That is, I defend that a logical constant c has more than one correct inferential role. The thesis depends on a particular interpretation of substructural logics' vocabulary, according to which classical logic captures the literal meaning of logical constants and substructural logics encode a pragmatically enriched sense of those connectives. The paper is divided (...) into four parts: first, I introduce the motivation for the pluralist thesis of the paper; second I introduce the calculus for the different logics endorsed in the pluralist thesis; third, I motivate how the different behaviors of the logical vocabulary of these logics can be pragmatically interpreted, and fourth, I motivate how the different inferential roles that each substructural logic attribute to logical constants can coexist, and how we should reason with a logical constant c given this plurality. (shrink)

Critical aspects in the field of education are currently related to low levels of socioemotional competences and high rates of school dropouts. However, there are no standard practices or guidelines for helping countries to assess and train social and emotional competences. To overcome this limitation, the project Learning to be (L2B) aims to propose a comprehensive model of the assessment and development of social and emotional competences that bring together policymakers, researchers, teachers, school authorities and learners from different participating countries: (...) Finland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain. The project attempts to create an international framework for regulating activities and supporting teachers working on the social and emotional competences of the students and to provide tools which can be used across countries. The aim of the paper is to describe how L2B has been developed in Spain by analyzing the contributions of the international framework and extracting the specific needs in the Spanish context. Specifically, we describe two products of the project: a) the process for creating a toolkit, a tool focused on creating activities and materials for helping teachers develop social and emotional competences of students and b) the results of an exploratory study in Spain in which social and emotional competences are assessed and compared to the international framework. First, we explain the definition of social and emotional competences used for creating the toolkit. Second, we analyze responses of Spanish students to questionnaires administered before applying the toolkit in the schools. The paper describes social and emotional competences in Spain and evaluates the overlap between relevant variables in Spain and those used for developing the toolkit, the international tool. Specific needs in Spain are discussed, as well as the contribution of the project for promoting the improved development of students’ social and emotional competences, improving learning outcomes and stronger social cohesion in schools and local communities, as well as the utility of the results for creating new educational policies. (shrink)

Partiendo de la constatación husserliana de la crisis filosófica como crisis vital de una humanidad que se ha desviado de su _télos_ al implantar el modelo tecno-científico del dominio del mundo, el artículo investiga el lugar de la filosofía en el sistema educativo, explorando las reformas propuestas en Baviera y Prusia por Niethammer y Humboldt a principios del siglo XIX y que plantean, cada una a su modo, la necesaria incorporación de la filosofía a una educación de Estado que, frente (...) a las pretensiones utilitarias del filantropismo, logre elevar al hombre a su humanidad. En este sentido, retorna al concepto humanista de formación (_Bildung_) al que se consagran ambas reformas y que Gadamer recupera precisamente en _Verdad y método_ como un ideal para enfrentar la pretensión de universalidad de la ciencia moderna en relación a las nociones de conocimiento y de verdad, así como para pensar el horizonte ontológico de la experiencia hermenéutica. Es precisamente este ideal el que permite localizar el lugar de la filosofía en el conjunto del saber y conducir al hombre a su humanidad. (shrink)