Research involving recently deceased humans that are physiologically maintained following declaration of death by neurologic criteria—or ‘research involving the recently deceased’—can fill a translational research gap while reducing harm to animals and living human subjects. It also creates new challenges for honouring the donor’s legacy, respecting the rights of donor loved ones, resource allocation and public health. As this research model gains traction, new empirical ethics questions must be answered to preserve public trust in all forms of tissue donation and (...) in the practice of medicine while respecting the legacy of the deceased and the rights of donor loved ones. This article suggests several topics for immediate investigation to understand the attitudes and experiences of researchers, clinical collaborators, donor loved ones and the public to ensure research involving the recently deceased advances ethically. (shrink)

ExcerptIn recent years, rhetoric has heated up about a “new Cold War” between the West and China. After a short-lived “end of history,” the regime in Beijing has been cast as a strategic rival whose geopolitical ambitions threaten the West-centered liberal order. In parallel with the prospect of great-power conflict, dark speculation also abounds about dystopian technologies of control. Fears of Western decline and of high-tech Big Brother involve global trends. Even without China, late modernity’s demographics and innovations would probably (...) be tilting toward a less Western and more regulated world. Yet China looms large in narratives of “West” and “East,” of liberty and dystopia, because repression and technology with Orwellian potential converge there. (shrink)

Medical coverage often stops at borders, for both travellers and long-term migrants. Such patchiness imposes a de facto limit on free movement. This article considers this phenomenon not as a mere policy choice or technical matter, but as a form of territorial discrimination that is incoherent and even unjust. This legacy of nationally bounded social citizenship rests on a mistaken version of solidarity. Moreover, with growing mobility and rising expectations of medical coverage around the world, the fragmenting of safety nets (...) by the political honeycomb of statehood will become a vexing problem in coming decades. A proper understanding of the health sphere not only can justify incremental reforms that lessen territorial discrimination, without impairing either solidarity or sustainability. It also foreshadows a radically different vision of how social provision might work in a future global space beyond the nation-state. (shrink)