Caplan, Arthur L.
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Publication Bioethics and the Brain(2003-06-01) Foster, Kenneth R; Wolpe, Paul Root; Caplan, Arthur L.Microelectronics and medical imaging are bringing us closer to a world where mind reading is possible and blindness banished - but we may not want to live there. New ways of imaging the human brain and new developments in microelectronics are providing unprecedented capabilities for monitoring the brain in real time and even for controlling brain function. The technologies are novel, but some of the questions that they will raise are not. Electrical activity in the brain can reveal the contents of a person's memory. New imaging techniques might allow physician to detect devastating diseases long before those diseases become clinically apparent. And researchers may one day find brain activity that correlates with behavior patterns such as tendencies toward alcoholism, aggression, pedophilia, or racism. But how reliable will the information be, how should it be used, and what will it do to our notion of privacy? Meanwhile, microelectronics is making access to the brain a two-way street. The same electrical stimulation technologies that allow some deaf people to hear could be fashioned to control behavior as well. What are the appropriate limits to the use of this technology? Ethicists are only now beginning to take note of these developments in neuroscience.Publication Halfway there: the struggle to manage conflicts of interest(2007-03-01) Caplan, Arthur L.Conflicts of interest are known to create problems for the integrity of biomedical research. The editors of the JCI have set out a rigorous policy to help manage conflicts. But they focus only on financially generated conflicts. Here I identify other sources of conflict and offer some suggestions for their management.Publication Protecting Subjects' Interests in Genetics Research(2002-04-01) Merz, Jon F; Magnus, David; Caplan, Arthur L.; Cho, Mildred KBiomedical researchers often assume that sponsors, subjects, families, and disease-associated advocacy groups contribute to research solely because of altruism. This view fails to capture the diverse interests of many participants in the emerging research enterprise. In the past two decades, patient groups have become increasingly active in the promotion and facilitation of genetics research. Simultaneously, a significant shift of academic biomedical science toward commercialization has occurred, spurred by U.S. federal policy changes.Publication Special Supplement: Ethical and Policy Issues in Rehabilitation Medicine(1987-08-01) Caplan, Arthur L.; Callahan, Daniel; Haas, JanetThe field of medical rehabilitation is relatively new, a product in great part of the rapid developments in medical science during and after the Second World War. Until recently, the ethical problems of this new field were neglected. There seemed to be more pressing concerns as rehabilitation medicine struggled to establish itself, somtimes in the face of considerable skepticism or hostility. There also seemed no pressing moral questions of the kind and intensity to be encountered, say, in high technology acute care medicine or genetic engineering. With eyes focused on the dramatic and wrenching problems, those in biomedical ethics could and did easily overlook the quiet, less obtrusive, issues of rehabilitation.Publication "Who Lost China?" A Foreshadowing of Today's Ideological Disputes in Bioethics(2005-06-01) Caplan, Arthur L.Throughout the early 1950s, as the Korean War raged, a single contentious question consumed political debate in the United States: Who lost China? Political opponents tossed this question back and forth hoping that the tar baby would stick to someone on the other side and let them affix blame both for the Korean War and, more importantly, for allowing communists to seize control of the most populous nation on earth.Publication Embryo disposal practices in IVF clinics in the United States(2004-08-09) Gurmankin, Andrea D; Sisti, Dominic; Caplan, Arthur L.BACKGROUND. The moral status of the human embryo is particularly controversial in the United States, where one debate has centered on embryos created in excess at in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics. Little has been known about the disposal of these embryos. METHODS.We mailed anonymous, self-administered questionnaires to directors of 341 American IVF clinics. RESULTS. 217 of 341 clinics (64 percent) responded. Nearly all (97 percent) were willing to create and cryopreserve extra embryos. Fewer, but still a majority (59 percent), were explicitly willing to avoid creating extras. When embryos did remain in excess, clinics offered various options: continual cryopreservation for a charge (96 percent) or for no charge (4 percent), donation for reproductive use by other couples (76 percent), disposal prior to (60 percent) or following (54 percent) cryopreservation, and donation for research (60 percent) or embryologist training (19 percent). Qualifications varied widely among those personnel responsible for securing couples’ consent for disposal and for conducting disposal itself. Some clinics performed a religious or quasi-religious disposal ceremony. Some clinics required a couple’s participation in disposal; some allowed but did not require it; some others discouraged or disallowed it. CONCLUSIONS. The disposal of human embryos created in excess at American IVF clinics varies in ways suggesting both moral sensitivity and ethical divergence.Publication Taken to Extremes: Newspapers and Kevorkian’s Televised Euthanasia Incident(2004-01-01) Caplan, Arthur L; Turow, JosephBook Description: Medicine and the media exist in a unique symbiosis. Increasingly, health-care consumers turn to media sources—from news reports to Web sites to tv shows—for information about diseases, treatments, pharmacology, and important health issues. And just as the media scour the medical terrain for news stories and plot lines, those in the health-care industry use the media to publicize legitimate stories and advance particular agendas. The essays in Cultural Sutures delineate this deeply collaborative process by scrutinizing a broad range of interconnections between medicine and the media in print journalism, advertisements, fiction films, television shows, documentaries, and computer technology. In this volume, scholars of cinema studies, philosophy, English, sociology, health-care education, women’s studies, bioethics, and other fields demonstrate how the world of medicine engages and permeates the media that surround us. Whether examining the press coverage of the Jack Kevorkian–euthanasia controversy; pondering questions about accessibility, accountability, and professionalism raised by such films as Awakenings, The Doctor, and Lorenzo’s Oil; analyzing the depiction of doctors, patients, and medicine on E.R. and Chicago Hope; or considering the ways in which digital technologies have redefined the medical body, these essays are consistently illuminating and provocative.Publication All Gifts Large and Small(2003-07-01) Caplan, Arthur L.; Katz, Dana; Merz, Jon FMuch attention has been focused in recent years on the ethical acceptability of physicians receiving gifts from drug companies. Professional guidelines recognize industry gifts as a conflict of interest and establish thresholds prohibiting the exchange of large gifts while expressly allowing for the exchange of small gifts such as pens, note pads, and coffee. Considerable evidence from the social sciences suggests that gifts of negligible value can influence the behavior of the recipient in ways the recipient does not always realize. Policies and guidelines that rely on arbitrary value limits for gift-giving or receipt should be reevaluated.Publication Professional Arrogance and Public Misunderstanding(1988-05-01) Caplan, Arthur L.Any assessment of the impact of required request legislation on organ and tissue procurement must begin by defining required request laws. Of the forty-one states that have passed such laws during the past three years, approximately, half have enacted strong required request policies. These states have mandated that hospital administrators be responsible for insuring that next-of-kin or legal guardians are asked about their willingness to donate organs and tissues of the deceased when a death has been pronounced in a hospital setting.Publication Bioethics and the Brain(2003-06-01) Foster, Kenneth R; Wolpe, Paul Root; Caplan, Arthur L.Microelectronics and medical imaging are bringing us closer to a world where mind reading is possible and blindness banished--but we may not want to live there. New ways of imaging the human brain and new developments in microelectronics are providing unprecedented capabilities for monitoring the brain in real time and even for controlling brain function. The technologies are novel, but some of the questions that they will raise are not. Electrical activity in the brain can reveal the contents of a person's memory. New imaging techniques might allow physician to detect devastating diseases long before those diseases become clinically apparent. And researchers may one day find brain activity that correlates with behavior patterns such as tendencies toward alcoholism, aggression, pedophilia, or racism. But how reliable will the information be, how should it be used, and what will it do to our notion of privacy? Meanwhile, microelectronics is making access to the brain a two-way street. The same electrical stimulation technologies that allow some deaf people to hear could be fashioned to control behavior as well. What are the appropriate limits to the use of this technology? Ethicists are only now beginning to take note of these developments in neuroscience.