The Commitment to Science

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-117
Author(s):  
Rosamond Rhodes

The association of medicine with science is at the core of the profession’s expertise. This chapter explains that doctors are duty-bound to base their diagnoses and treatment decisions on scientific evidence because patients rely on that commitment when seeking treatment and advice. Thus, the commitment to science is a core duty of medical ethics. The chapter argues that doctors should be committed to advancing biomedical knowledge and supporting medicine’s research agenda. In that light, the chapter opposes two widely accepted views. One is the World Medical Association’s position that physicians should focus exclusively on the good of their individual patient. The other is the US Common Rule’s distinction between clinical innovation and research, which has the effect of driving a wedge between medical ethics and research ethics. The chapter also addresses challenging issues of how human subject research should be conducted, research oversight, consent, vulnerable subjects, and placebo studies.

2019 ◽  
Vol 77 (9) ◽  
pp. 646-661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula R Trumbo

AbstractThe 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Advisory Committee has set recommendations to limit added sugars. This action was based on the association between dietary pattern quality scores and chronic disease risk, the results of meta-analyses conducted for the World Health Organization, and data from modeling of dietary patterns for establishing the US Department of Agriculture’s Healthy US-Style Eating Patterns. Recommendations provided by the 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans were used by the US Food and Drug Administration to establish, for the first time, the mandatory declaration of added sugars and a Daily Value of added sugars for the Nutrition Facts label. This review provides an overview of the scientific evidence considered by the World Health Organization, the 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and the US Food and Drug Administration for setting recent polices and regulations on added sugars and highlights important issues and inconsistencies in the evaluations and interpretations of the evidence.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Filippo FONTANELLI

In the World Trade Organization (WTO), the US approach to science-based risks and trade restrictions prevailed over that of the European Union (EU). The EU, dissatisfied with the margin of action available when “relevant scientific evidence is insufficient”, largely kept intact its internal practice on marketing and importing genetically modified (GM) crops and GM-containing products. The goal of this article is to ascertain whether these regulatory preferences of the US and the EU translate into their post-Biotech external trade efforts. US and EU preferential trade agreements are scanned for rules on trade in biotechnology goods or the use of precautionary elements in regulation. It transpires that neither bloc systematically tries (or manages) to bend trade agreements to accommodate its defensive or offensive trade interests in this field. Among the possible reasons for this apparent inertia are the US confidence in the WTO baseline and the EU preference for a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to its trade-restrictive policy in this area.


2015 ◽  
pp. 30-53
Author(s):  
V. Popov

This paper examines the trajectory of growth in the Global South. Before the 1500s all countries were roughly at the same level of development, but from the 1500s Western countries started to grow faster than the rest of the world and PPP GDP per capita by 1950 in the US, the richest Western nation, was nearly 5 times higher than the world average and 2 times higher than in Western Europe. Since 1950 this ratio stabilized - not only Western Europe and Japan improved their relative standing in per capita income versus the US, but also East Asia, South Asia and some developing countries in other regions started to bridge the gap with the West. After nearly half of the millennium of growing economic divergence, the world seems to have entered the era of convergence. The factors behind these trends are analyzed; implications for the future and possible scenarios are considered.


2012 ◽  
pp. 132-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Uzun

The article deals with the features of the Russian policy of agriculture support in comparison with the EU and the US policies. Comparative analysis is held considering the scales and levels of collective agriculture support, sources of supporting means, levels and mechanisms of support of agricultural production manufacturers, its consumers, agrarian infrastructure establishments, manufacturers and consumers of each of the principal types of agriculture production. The author makes an attempt to estimate the consequences of Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization based on a hypothesis that this will result in unification of the manufacturers and consumers’ protection levels in Russia with the countries that have long been WTO members.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arathy Puthillam

That American and European participants are overrepresented in psychological studies has been previously established. In addition, researchers also often tend to be similarly homogenous. This continues to be alarming, especially given that this research is being used to inform policies across the world. In the face of a global pandemic where behavioral scientists propose solutions, we ask who is conducting research and on what samples. Forty papers on COVID-19 published in PsyArxiV were analyzed; the nationalities of the authors and the samples they recruited were assessed. Findings suggest that an overwhelming majority of the samples recruited were from the US and the authors were based in US and German institutions. Next, men constituted a large proportion of primary and sole authors. The implications of these findings are discussed.


Author(s):  
Masoud Keighobadi ◽  
Maryam Nakhaei ◽  
Ali Sharifpour ◽  
Ali Akbar Khasseh ◽  
Sepideh Safanavaei ◽  
...  

Background: This study was designed to analyze the global research on Lophomonas spp. using bibliometric techniques. Methods: A bibliometric research was carried out using the Scopus database. The analysis unit was the research articles conducted on Lophomonas spp. Results: Totally, 56 articles about Lophomonas spp. were indexed in the Scopus throughout 1933-2019 ( 87 years ) with the following information: (A) The first article was published in 1933; (B) 21 different countries contributed in studies related to Lophomonas spp.; (C) China ranked first with 16 publications about Lophomonas spp.; and (D) “Brugerolle, G” and “Beams, H.W.” from France and the US participated in 4 articles respectively, as the highest number of publications in the Lophomonas spp. network. Discussion: After 87 years, Lophomonas still remains unknown for many researchers and physicians around the world. Further studies with high quality and international collaboration are urgently needed to determine different epidemiological aspects and the real burden of the mysterious parasite worldwide.


Author(s):  
Avinash Paliwal

The Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha in March 2001 outraged India (and the world). It killed any scope for conciliation with the Taliban. In this context, the US decision to take military action in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks was welcomed by many in India. However, Washington’s decision to undertake such action without UN approval (which came only in December 2001) sparked another round of debate between the partisans and the conciliators. As this chapter shows, the former were enthusiastic about supporting the US in its global war on terror, but the latter advocated caution given Washington’s willingness to partner with Islamabad. Despite the global trend to ‘fight terrorism’, the conciliators were successful in steering India away from getting involved in Afghanistan militarily.


Author(s):  
Yves Doz ◽  
Keeley Wilson

In less than three decades, Nokia emerged from Finland to lead the mobile phone revolution. It grew to have one of the most recognizable and valuable brands in the world and then fell into decline, leading to the sale of its mobile phone business to Microsoft. This book explores and analyzes that journey and distills observations and lessons for anyone keen to understand what drove Nokia’s amazing success and sudden downfall. It is tempting to lay the blame for Nokia’s demise at the doors of Apple, Google, and Samsung, but this would be to ignore one very important fact: Nokia had begun to collapse from within well before any of these companies entered the mobile communications market, and this makes Nokia’s story all the more interesting. Observing from the position of privileged outsiders (with access to Nokia’s senior managers over the last twenty years and a more recent, concerted research agenda), this book describes and analyzes the various stages in Nokia’s journey. This is an inside story: one of leaders making strategic and organizational decisions, of their behavior and interactions, and of how they succeeded and failed to inspire and engage their employees. Perhaps most intriguingly, it is a story that opens the proverbial “black box” of why and how things actually happen at the top of organizations. Why did things fall apart? To what extent were avoidable mistakes made? Did the world around Nokia change too fast for it to adapt? Did Nokia’s success contain the seeds of its failure?


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

This chapter examines evidence principally from the US that the Great Influenza provoked profiteering by landlords, undertakers, vendors of fruit, pharmacists, and doctors, but shows that such complaints were rare and confined mostly to large cities on the East Coast. It then investigates anti-social advice and repressive decrees on the part of municipalities, backed by advice from the US Surgeon General and prominent physicians attacking ‘spitters, coughers, and sneezers’, which included state and municipal ordinances against kissing and even ‘big talkers’. It then surveys legislation on compulsory and recommended mask wearing. Yet this chapter finds no protest or collective violence against the diseased victims or any other ‘others’ suspected of disseminating the virus. Despite physicians’ and lawmakers’ encouragement of anti-social behaviour, mass volunteerism and abnegation instead unfolded to an extent never before witnessed in the world history of disease.


Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.


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