The Computational Modeling in Biology Network (COMBINE), is an initiative to coordinate the development of the various community standards and formats in computational systems biology and related fields. This report summarizes the activities pursued at the first annual COMBINE meeting held in Edinburgh on October 6-9 2010 and the first ...

The Applied Pharmaceutical Software Meeting is held annually. It is sponsored by The Boston Society, a not-for-profit organization that coordinates a series of meetings within the global pharmaceutical industry. The meeting generally focuses on laboratory applications, but in recent years has expanded to include some software applications for clinical trials. ...

The Second International Workshop on Advances in Electrocorticography (ECoG) was convened in San Diego, CA, USA, on November 11-12, 2010. Between this meeting and the inaugural 2009 event, a much clearer picture has been emerging of cortical ECoG physiology and its relationship to local field potentials and single-cell recordings. Innovations ...

When ethical decisions have to be taken in critical, complex medical situations, they often involve decisions that set the course for or against life-sustaining treatments. Therefore the decisions have far-reaching consequences for the patients, their relatives, and often for the clinical staff. Although the rich psychology literature provides evidence that ...

The aim of the study was to report the results of a systematically conducted literature review of empirical studies about healthcare organizations' ethics and management or leadership issues. Electronic databases MEDLINE and CINAHL yielded 909 citations. After a two stage application of the inclusion and exclusion criteria 56 full-text articles ...

Background: The rapid pace of progress in medical research, the consequent need for the timely transfer of new knowledge into practice, and the increasing need for ethics support, is making the work of Ethics Committees (ECs) ever more complex and demanding. As a response, ECs in many countries exhibit large ...

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (the College) Committee Opinion, "Planned Home Birth," invokes two core concepts of obstetric ethics, the right of a woman to make a medically informed decision about delivery and the informed consent process. We set out a framework for obstetric ethics that empowers the ...

Ethical frameworks are often used in professional fields as a means of providing explicit ethical guidance for individuals and institutions when confronted with ethically important decisions. The notion of an ethical framework has received little critical attention, however, and the concept subsequently lends itself easily to misuse and ambiguous application. ...

Different milestones have marked the development of the field of neuroendocrinology. This is an essay in which a new direction is proposed; one in which the field is marked more by a concern for ethical considerations than experimental procedures. Among the primary concerns is the need for a national registry ...

Ethical dilemmas frequently arise in the treatment of clients with eating disorders, and clinicians regularly encounter an array of ethical challenges related to whether or not overt and covert coercive tactics should be implemented. In this paper, the authors provide an overview of perplexing ethical questions relevant to medical, nutritional ...

Engineers are normally seen as the archetype of people who make decisions in a rational and quantitative way. However, technological design is not value neutral. The way a technology is designed determines its possibilities, which can, for better or for worse, have consequences for human wellbeing. This leads various scholars ...

Although the use of cochlear implants as a treatment designed to help deaf individuals hear has a relatively brief history, the use of this therapy has given rise to a number of ethical conflicts. This article identifies ethical conflicts in cochlear implantation therapy and shows how ethical principles that are ...

Sociological understandings of chronic illness have revealed tensions and complexities around help-seeking. Although ethics underpins healthcare, its application in the area of chronic illness is limited. Here we apply an ethical framework to interview accounts and identify ethical challenges in the early rheumatoid arthritis (RA) experience. In-depth interviews were conducted ...

We empirically examine the reflexive or automatic aspects of moral decision making. To begin, we develop and validate a measure of an individual's implicit assumption regarding the inherent morality of business. Then, using an in-basket exercise, we demonstrate that an implicit assumption that business is inherently moral impacts day-to-day business ...

This perspective article provides a justification, with an overview, of the use of phenomenological inquiry and the interpretation into the everyday ethical concerns of patients with disabilities. Disability is explored as a transformative process that involves physical, cognitive, and moral changes. This perspective article discusses the advantages of phenomenology to ...

Neurological illnesses can leave patients unable to make legally valid decisions about their medical treatment. However, this loss of decision making capacity can often be predicted in advance. The law in the UK now enables patients to make legally binding arrangements to either refuse specific treatments in advance or to ...

The doctor has a responsibility to develop and maintain an effective approach to ethical decision making and the skills to implement the correct moral action. At the heart of this process is the experience and knowledge of particular conditions and their outcomes, alongside excellence in communication skills and working with ...

There is an important gap in philosophical, clinical and bioethical conceptions of decision-making capacity. These fields recognize that when traumatic life circumstances occur, people not only feel afraid and demoralized, but may develop catastrophic thinking and other beliefs that can lead to poor judgment. Yet there has been no articulation ...

Psychiatrists face many difficult ethical decisions in which they must exercise their discretion. In the most difficult decisions they confront, there are significant "harms," regardless of what they choose. The best they can do in these instance is to be as acutely aware of the most important pros and cons ...

This study examined the role of key causal analysis strategies in forecasting and ethical decision-making. Undergraduate participants took on the role of the key actor in several ethical problems and were asked to identify and analyze the causes, forecast potential outcomes, and make a decision about each problem. Time pressure ...

The prevalent view of group splitting during group decisions is that a beneficial consensus has not been reached because time constraints, different individual information, or inter-individual conflicts lead to fission instead of a compromise. However, societies with high fission-fusion dynamics may allow their members to avoid consensus decisions that are ...

There remains a lack of a clear overarching policy framework for decision-making in pest control programmes. In comparison, ethical principles have been extensively developed for scientific procedures, such as those underlying the UK's Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986. This paper assesses the extent to which the principles and methodology underlying ...

PURPOSE: To examine the effects that existing courses on the responsible conduct of research (RCR) have on ethical decision making by assessing the ethicality of decisions made in response to ethical problems and the underlying processes involved in ethical decision making. These processes included how an individual thinks through ethical ...

This paper explores the interplay between individual values, espoused organisational values and the values of the organisational culture in practice in light of a recent Royal Commission in Queensland, Australia, which highlighted systematic failures in patient care. The lack of congruence among values at these levels impacts upon the ethical ...

This article explores universal normative bases that could help to shape a workable legal construct that would facilitate a global use of advance directives. Although I believe that advance directives are of universal character, my primary aim in approaching this issue is to remain realistic. I will make three claims. ...

Multidisciplinary teams, representing professionals from diverse disciplines, are often involved in addressing difficult ethical dilemmas as they work with older adults who hoard (e.g., resolving conflicts between the older adult's freedom to engage in hoarding behaviors versus individual or public safety). The purpose of this article is threefold: (a) to ...

Students of creativity have long been interested in the relationship between creativity and deviant behaviors such as criminality, mental disease, and unethical behavior. In the present study we wished to examine the relationship between creative thinking skills and ethical decision-making among scientists. Accordingly, 258 doctoral students in the health, biological, ...

The Suleman case has served as a catalyst to examine a range of clinical and ethical decisions, making the birth of the octuplets a truly transformative event.

Because of the importance of including ethical considerations in planning efforts for pandemic influenza, in February 2005 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requested that the Ethics Subcommittee of the Advisory Committee to the Director develop guidance that would serve as a foundation for decision making in preparing for ...

When tragic circumstances force families to focus on an individual's right to refuse treatment, society is forced to reexamine its views on life and death; these circumstances may result in legal rulings and state statutes. During media coverage of high-profile cases, reporters frequently used distinct terms like "brain dead," "persistent ...

CONTEXT: The assessment of ethical problem solving in medicine has been controversial and challenging. The purposes of this study were: (i) to create a new instrument to measure doctors' decisions on and reasoning approach towards resolving ethical problems; (ii) to evaluate the scores generated by the new instrument for their ...

This chapter reviews some basic concepts underlying ethical issues in adolescence and provides a step-by-step procedure to address ethical dilemmas involving minor adolescents, based on a deliberative approach. "Deliberation" with the patient, along with involving the opinion of relevant stakeholders if possible, allows for a careful, multidisciplinary examination of all ...

Healthcare professionals often face clinical and ethical challenges when charged with making decisions related to provision or lack of provision of artificial nutrition and hydration. The intent of this review is to supply a framework of clinical practices, ethical principles, legal precedents, and professional guidelines that will impart information and ...

Infertility treatment is a speciality that has attracted considerable attention both from the public and bioethicists. The focus of this attention has mainly been on the dramatic dilemmas created by theses technologies. Relatively little is known, however, about how clinicians approach and resolve ethical issues on an everyday basis. The ...

This paper uses the case of solo doctors to explore whether working in relative isolation from one's peers may be detrimental to ethical decision-making. Drawing upon the relevance of communication and interaction for ethical decision-making in the ethical theories of Habermas, Mead and Gadamer, it is argued that doctors benefit ...

An implicit goal of many interventions intended to enhance integrity is to minimize peoples' exposure to unethical events. The intent of the present effort was to examine if exposure to unethical practices in the course of one's work is related to ethical decision-making. Accordingly, 248 doctoral students in the biological, ...

The discussion in Drs. Sanchez Escobedo and Hollingworth's paper independently confirms virtually all our observations regarding the psychometric and interpretive deficiencies of the Mexican norms for very high-stakes decisions, such as that involved in an Atkins hearing. Test publishers have an ethical obligation to caution potential users against the premature ...

Differences across fields and experience levels are frequently considered in discussions of ethical decision-making and ethical behavior. In the present study, doctoral students in the health, biological, and social sciences completed measures of ethical decision-making. The effects of field and level of experience with respect to ethical decision-making, metacognitive reasoning ...

This article calls nursing to engage in the study of religions and identifies six considerations that arise in religious studies and the ways in which religious faith is expressed. It argues that whole-person care cannot be realized, neither can there be a complete understanding of bioethics theory and decision making, ...

Several situations of great ethical implications are encountered by physicians in daily urological practice. Informed consent for interventions, selection of patients for operative demonstrations and educational workshops, enrollment of patients in clinical trials, and the use of technology are some issues that call for stringent application of ethical principles in ...

This article is a comparative study of the law dealing with substitute decision making for incapable patients in end-of-life situations across Canadian provinces. In recent years, this issue has received growing consideration from judicial authorities in Canada and abroad. The article discusses the most significant decisions in Canada, with reference ...

OBJECTIVE: Moral distress in the rehabilitation setting was examined in a follow-up survey. The survey had 3 goals: (1) to systematically and anonymously gather data about the ethical issues that employees struggle with in their daily work; (2) to raise the visibility of the hospital-based ethics program and resources available ...

BACKGROUND: The different levels of knowledge and understanding of attitudes to and use by physicians of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) Guidelines for ethical relationships between physicians and the pharmaceutical industry are unknown. The aim of this study was to explore how physician Fellows of the RACP relate ...

Many conservation biologists believe the best ethical basis for conserving natural entities is their claimed intrinsic value, not their instrumental value for humans. But there is significant confusion about what intrinsic value is and how it could govern conservation decision making. After examining what intrinsic value is supposed to be, ...

On a traditional interpretation of the substituted judgement standard (SJS) a person who makes treatment decisions on behalf of a non-competent patient (e.g. concerning euthanasia) ought to decide as the patient would have decided had she been competent. I propose an alternative interpretation of SJS in which the surrogate is ...

Ethical decision making is vulnerable to the forces of automaticity. People behave differently in the face of a potential loss versus a potential gain, even when the two situations are transparently identical. Across three experiments, decision makers engaged in more unethical behavior if a decision was presented in a loss ...

In British Columbia (BC) foresters registered with the Association of BC Forest Professionals (ABCFP) have been given the exclusive right to practise professional forestry. As with all professions there is an expectation that Registered Professional Foresters (RPFs) conduct their activities in an ethical manner and are therefore obligated to act ...

On a traditional interpretation of the substituted judgement standard (SJS) a person who makes treatment decisions on behalf of a non-competent patient (e.g. concerning euthanasia) ought to decide as the patient would have decided had she been competent. I propose an alternative interpretation of SJS in which the surrogate is ...

A critical and potentially polarizing decision in treating infidelity is whether facilitating partner disclosure or accommodating nondisclosure is most beneficial following private disclosure of infidelity to the therapist. Given couple distress and volatility following disclosure, understandably some therapists judge accommodating an infidelity secret both efficient and compassionate. Employing Western ethics ...

The use of artificial insemination (AI) with fresh semen has resulted in many benefits for the management of dog breeding, but there are disadvantages that can sometimes be overlooked. Furthermore, poorer quality semen arising as a result of cryopreservation necessitates uterine insemination, which raises the potential for surgical insemination. A ...