Klinerice5017

© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2020. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.On 26 February 2020, the German Constitutional Court rejected a law from 2015 that prohibited any form of 'business-like' assisted suicide as unconstitutional. The landmark ruling of the highest federal court emphasised the high priority given to the rights of autonomy and free personal development, both of which constitute the principle of human dignity, the first principle of the German constitution. The ruling echoes particularities of post-war Germany's end-of-life debate focusing on patient self-determination while rejecting any discussion of active assistance to die through a lethal injection administered by a doctor. This brief report discusses the ruling in the light of the broader sociopolitical and historical context of the German end-of-life debate. © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2020. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.Hundreds of millions of rare biospecimens are stored in laboratories and biobanks around the world. Cediranib concentration Often, the researchers who possess these specimens do not plan to use them, while other researchers limit the scope of their work because they cannot acquire biospecimens that meet their needs. This situation raises an important and underexplored question how should scientists allocate biospecimens that they do not intend to use? We argue that allocators should aim to maximise the social value of the research enterprise when allocating scarce biospecimens. We provide an ethical framework for assessing the social value of proposed research projects and describe how the framework could be implemented. © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2020. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to revolutionise the practice of medicine. Recent advancements in the field of deep learning have demonstrated success in variety of clinical tasks detecting diabetic retinopathy from images, predicting hospital readmissions, aiding in the discovery of new drugs, etc. AI's progress in medicine, however, has led to concerns regarding the potential effects of this technology on relationships of trust in clinical practice. In this paper, I will argue that there is merit to these concerns, since AI systems can be relied on, and are capable of reliability, but cannot be trusted, and are not capable of trustworthiness. Insofar as patients are required to rely on AI systems for their medical decision-making, there is potential for this to produce a deficit of trust in relationships in clinical practice. © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2020. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.The authority of bioethics as a field of inquiry and of bioethicists as scholars with a distinctive expertise is being questioned on various fronts. Sarah Franklin's 2019 Nature commentary 'Ethical research - the long and bumpy road from shirked to shared' is the latest example . In this paper, we respond to these challenges by focusing on two key issues. First, we discuss the theory and practice of bioethics. We argue that both of these endeavours are fundamental components of this field of inquiry and that bioethics cannot be reduced to the contribution that it makes to the production of biopolicy, as Franklin suggests. Second, we contend that bioethicists have distinctive skills and knowledge that place them at an epistemic advantage in discussing normative questions. Hence, we reject views that deny the specific contribution that bioethicists can bring to assessing the ethics and governance of science and technology. We conclude by arguing that-despite formal and substantive differences between disciplines-philosophers, social scientists and other scholars should join forces and engage in critical friendships rather than turf wars to move towards the just governance of science and technology. © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2020. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.BACKGROUND Data processing of health research databases often requires a Data Protection Impact Assessment to evaluate the severity of the risk and the appropriateness of measures taken to comply with the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We aimed to define and apply a comprehensive method for the evaluation of privacy, data governance and ethics among research networks involved in the EU Project Bridge Health. METHODS Computerised survey among associated partners of main EU Consortia, using a targeted instrument designed by the principal investigator and progressively refined in collaboration with an international advisory panel. Descriptive measures using the percentage of adoption of privacy, data governance and ethical principles as main endpoints were used for the analysis and interpretation of the results. RESULTS A total of 15 centres provided relevant information on the processing of sensitive data from 10 European countries. Major areas of concern were noted for data linkage (median, range of adoption 45%, 30%-80%), access and accuracy of personal data (50%, 0%-100%) and anonymisation procedures (56%, 11%-100%). A high variability was noted in the application of privacy principles. CONCLUSIONS A comprehensive methodology of Privacy and Ethics Impact and Performance Assessment was successfully applied at international level. The method can help implementing the GDPR and expanding the scope of Data Protection Impact Assessment, so that the public benefit of the secondary use of health data could be well balanced with the respect of personal privacy. © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2020. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.To avoid potential abuse and respect patient autonomy, physicians have a moral obligation to obtain informed consent before performing any significant medical intervention. To give informed consent, a patient must be competent, understand her condition, options and their expected risks and benefits and must freely and expressly consent to one of those options. Shlomo Cohen challenges this conception of informed consent by constructing cases based on Edmund Gettier's classic counterexamples to traditional theories of knowledge. In this paper, I argue Cohen-style cases are not genuine threats to the concept of informed consent, however they provide an interesting challenge to theories of conscientious objection. © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2020. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.