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Space programs will soon allow us to search for life in situ on Mars and to return samples for analysis. A major focal point is to search for evidence of present or past life in these samples, evidence that, if found, would have far-reaching consequences for both science and religion. A search strategy will consider the entire gamut of life on our own planet, using that information to frame a search that would recognize life even if it were fundamentally different from that we know on Earth. We discuss here how the lessons learned from the study of life on Earth can be used to allow us to develop a general strategy for the search for life in the Universe.
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OBJECTIVE: How people make decisions regarding medical technologies and procedures are affected by how they 'frame' those decisions. Medical frames are characterized by a reliance on statistics regarding outcomes and risk to mother and surviving embryos, emphasize the influence of medical authorities, and are driven by a desire to minimize medical risks. Moral frames, on the other hand, are driven more by a desire to minimize the disruption to antiabortion and antireduction moral precepts, and weight heavily the advice of religious leaders. These frames contest with one another. Our objective is to examine the biographical determinants of frame dominance in this contest as it applies to multigestation pregnancies where selective reduction is being considered as a pregnancy-management strategy. METHODS: For a sample of 55 multigestation women considering multifetal reduction as a pregnancy-management strategy, we develop a distinction between medical and moral frames. Semistructured interviews generated qualitative data that were independently coded by two researchers. These variables were then analyzed using dummy variable regression analysis. RESULTS: Conceptualizing these frames as anchoring opposite ends of a continuum, we show that 40% of the variance in frame dominance can be accounted for by three factors: how involved patients are in religious institutions that have antiabortion norms, whether they have medico-scientific careers, and how pro-reduction their advice has been from fertility specialists and obstetricians prior to coming to the clinic. CONCLUSIONS: The implication of these results for practice include recognizing the wide variation in patient's perceptions of their situations and how these perceptual frames alter how women confront risk-benefit statistics and being flexible in one's approach to counseling patients. This approach can further serve as a model for similar reproductive-health dilemmas.
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The Hastings Center was founded in 1969 to study ethical problems in medicine and biology. The Center arose from a confluence of three social currents: the increased public scrutiny of medicine and its practices, the concern about the moral problems being generated by technological developments, and the desire of one its founders (Callahan) to make use of his philosophical training in a more applied way. The early years of the Center were devoted to raising money, developing an early agenda of issues, and identifying a cadre of people around the country interested in the issues. Various stresses and strains in the Center and the field are identified, and some final reflections are offered on the nature and value of the contributions made by bioethics as an academic field.
The response of Barbara Pfeffer Billauer to my article "If I Am Only My Genes, What Am I? Genetic Essentialism and a Jewish Response" highlights the conflict between a sociological understanding of religion and the resistance to such analysis from within a faith tradition. Ms. Billauer makes three main points; the first strangely credits to me, and then attacks, an argument the article takes great pains to refute, but does so to emphasize the faith's prescient guidance in matters scientific. The second attempts to rebut my critical analysis of the tensions inhernet in Jewish views of the body with an insistence that Judaism so perfectly balances the relation between the sacred and profane that there is not now, and never was, the slightest tension between corporeality and divinity in the Jewish corpus. The third uses my article as vehicle for her to expound on an interesting but tangential formulation of three Jewish terms. In all, the need to defend her interpretation of Judaism's solutions to the problems the article raises results in un-self-critical and ahistorical theorizing, making the utility of her arguments in a discussion of the sociology of religion unsatisfactory.
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In 1744, the 56-yr.-old scientist Emanuel Swedenborg underwent a transformative event that could be characterized as convulsive. He subsequently became a visionary and spent the remaining 28 years of his life exploring the spirit world and describing his experiences in an extensive corpus of writings. Retrospective analysis of his visions and trance states indicates signs and symptoms consistent with a vascular anomaly in the posterior area of the left cerebral hemisphere and associated effects due to partial seizures with complex symptomatology. Swedenborg's writings have formed the basis of a church that remains active to this day. His visionary experiences can be interpreted as an instance of neuropsychological symptomatology, under the shaping influence of a powerful intellect, contributing to the formation of an historically significant religious movement. The term neuropathography is proposed for a new genre of neuropsychological case study in which the emphasis on brain-related symptomatology is balanced by attention to autobiographical and broad cultural factors.
In 2004 Latifian and Bashash presented Iranian students with questionnaires assessing (a) their epistemological beliefs regarding religion and science as sources of value and truth and (b) their acceptance of a scenario arguing for relative ethics. Acceptance was related to epistemological beliefs in a condition where the scenario was attributed to Freud but not in a condition where it was attributed to Tabatabaee, a highly authoritative theologian. This commentary questions the authors' explanation, particularly their assumption that the participants' reliance on epistemological beliefs would indicate a more critical attitude towards the scenario in the Freud condition than in the Tabatabaee condition.
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