Robin Cook Research Articles

Robin Cook, Tony Blair and New Labour's Competing Visions of Europe

Robin Cook, Tony Blair and New Labour's Competing Visions of Europe

Appreciation for Robin Cook

Appreciation for Robin Cook

Guidelines for Essential Trauma Care

This is a small, compact book designed for trauma system development in low and middle income countries. The book is modeled after the optimal criteria developed by the American College of Surgeons. It is a nice little book, a gem in the rough, but not perfect. In the first paragraph of Section 2, the authors emphasize the importance of prevention. Unfortunately, most trauma is due to bad behavior, which makes it problematic in developing cohesive prevention programs. The authors also state, ‘‘The improved survival and functional outcome among injured patients in developed countries comes from high-cost equipment and technology.’’ This might be true of such technology as computed tomography scans, which has dramatically changed the ability to diagnose and treat appropriate injuries. The greatest advances in developed countries, however, have been the development of systems, including commitment and training of general surgeons to be the primary caregivers for major injury. The same could be achieved in low and middle income countries if the education and training of surgeons were to be a primary priority. To avoid some of the problems that have occurred recently in developed countries, the general surgeon could be trained to do emergency orthopedics and neurosurgery. In Section 2, the authors also deal with essential health services and whether there is evidence that organization of trauma services leads to better outcomes. Such evidence is available for developed countries, and one of the authors of these guidelines has contributed evidence that it also works in low and middle income countries. The authors acknowledge that prehospital care is extremely important, but it is not addressed in this book. It would be easy to add a small section in forthcoming editions. The major strength of these guidelines is the resource matrix concept and the designation of priorities. The matrix consists of the central resources, desirable resources, possibly required resources, and irrelevant resources. This allows for flexibility and utility when developing a trauma system in almost any country. In the section on respiratory distress, the authors do not discuss the possibility of using oxygen generators instead of oxygen tanks. This has been used with some success in military operations and is relatively inexperience. One of the shortcomings of the book is that the authors still include the pulse rate in the assessment and management of shock. Cannon, during World War I (corroborated by a study measuring blood volumes during World War II), showed that tachycardia has no role in diagnosing the depth of shock, although the quality of the pulse is useful. In the table on circulation and shock, the authors list colloids as desirable. The Cochrane report does not support this, and because colloids are more expensive, it seems to this reviewer that crystalloid and blood should be emphasized. In the section on the management of head injury, the authors have unfortunately disregarded evidence from developing countries where intracranial mass lesions are successfully managed by general surgeons with the same outcome as neurosurgeons. I think this would be important to stress in such a book based on the scarcity of neurosurgeons and the long distances to tertiary centers. Under neck injury, one of the resources should be the recognition of ‘‘hard signs.’’ This practice is inexpensive, and is easily learned. Under management of chest injuries, the authors state that most chest injuries, whether blunt or penetrating, are managed without surgical intervention. This is no longer a truism, particularly in some developing countries, where high-velocity rifle injuries are becoming the norm. Guidelines are not a substitute for recognizing wound ballistics. A table such as that designed by Robin Cook for the International Red Cross could be useful. In the section on diagnosis and monitoring, the authors have not included one of the simpler tests that may be useful in diagnosis and management of patients following injury: the dipstick to measure urine specific gravity and presence of blood. In summary, the guidelines for essential trauma care comprise an excellent start for health planners in low and middle income countries. The matrix system is simple, utilitarian, and pragmatic. Hopefully, in future editions they will correct some of the minor faults. World J. Surg. 29, 662 (2005) DOI: 10.1007/s00268-005-1097-3

A Defence of Multiculturalism

The New Labour government sought in its first term to emphasise the plural and dynamic character of British society by speaking of ‘Cool Britannia’, of ‘rebranding Britain’, of Britain as a ‘young country’ (Tony Blair), a mongrel nation (Gordon Brown) and a chicken tikka masala eating nation (Robin Cook). There was a turning-point for the idea of multiculturalism in Britain in 2001, however, when in rapid succession over a few months David Blunkett became the Home Secretary, there were riots in some Northern cities and the attacks of 9/11 took place. These events, especially the riots and the global ‘arrival’ of a certain kind of armed, messianic jihadism which, some feel, too many Muslims in Britain (secretly) support have led to not just to a governmental reversal, but to a new wave of criticism of multiculturalism from the centre-left, including from some of its erstwhile supporters. Of course, there have been left-wing critics of multiculturalism from the beginning, from way back in the 1970s when it was ridiculed as ‘saris, somosas and steelbands’ by anti-racists, not to mention those who thought it was a distraction from class struggle or even a scam on the part of global capitalism. But I am talking about a new form of criticism, one which comes from the pluralistic centre-left. These are people who do not see everything in two-racial or two-class terms, and have in the past been sympathetic to the rainbow coalitional politics of identity, and the realignment and redefinition of progressive forces. Examples of savage attacks on multiculturalism from those who have long-standing anti-racist credentials

Tony Blair, Iraq and the Special Relationship

SINCE 1945, IN A VAIN ATTEMPT to retain great power status, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London has encouraged British prime ministers, of whatever party, to nurture a special with the United States. Some, like Tony Blair, also claim to serve as a bridge between the United States and Europe.(1) An effective bridging policy implies that Britain should never have to choose between the United States and Europe. In 2002-2003, however, by supporting George Bush's campaign against Iraq, Tony Blair chose allegiance to Washington at the expense of relations with Britain's major European allies, a decision that was deeply unpopular in Britain as Blair made the case for war and became more so as conditions in Iraq deteriorated throughout 2003.(2)Part 1 of this article traces Blair's relations with Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush since he became prime minister in May 1997, with a particular focus on policy toward Iraq and the decision to go to war in March 2003. Part 2 examines Blair's case for war--the imminent threat to Britain from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction--which most Britons, including several members of Blair's own Cabinet, found unconvincing. Part 3 assesses the costs to Britain of participating in Bush's war, not so much the obvious costs with respect to loss of life but the opportunities lost to participate fully in the multilateral campaign against terrorism and to contribute to a settlement in the Middle East, as well as the costs of complicity in the bumbling incompetence of post-war planning in Iraq.1: BLAIR'S SPECIAL RELATIONS WITH CLINTON AND BUSHFrom 1997 to 2000 Tony Blair forged a close working relationship with President Clinton but was also proactive in European affairs, even to the point of proposing a defence identity for the EU in 1998. Indeed, in this period, despite Blair's decision in June 1997 not to join the euro immediately, other European leaders found francophone Blair the most articulate and pro-EU British prime minister they had ever known, although some did resent his arrogance.(3) Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were soulmates of the centre-left with respect to market economic and social welfare reform. They also held similar views on the Balkans, an issue on which the Clinton and Major governments had been at odds. Nevertheless Blair and Robin Cook, Blair's first foreign secretary, were more proactive on intervening to curb the excesses of Slobodan Milo[Symbol Not Transcribed]sevi[Symbol Not Transcribed] and in co-operating with the International Criminal Tribunal on Former Yugoslavia than the Clinton administration. Blair was more inclined than Clinton to use force if he felt there was an ethical justification to do so.(4) In 1999 Blair was impatient with Clinton's dithering over when and how to deal with human rights abuses in Kosovo. Once NATO had decided to use force against Serbia, Blair pressed Clinton for a commitment to put US troops on the ground, but failed.(5) Perhaps the only American who appreciated Blair's enthusiasm for ground troops was General Wesley Clark, supreme allied commander in Europe, who told Blair in April 1999 that he could not guarantee a NATO victory over Milo[Symbol Not Transcribed]sevi[Symbol Not Transcribed] with air power alone.(6) In his second term (1997-2001), President Clinton, much weakened, had to deal not only with a Republican-controlled House and Senate but also with a new right-wing pressure group, the Project for the New American Century, under the chairmanship of William Kristol. This group included several neo-conservatives (including Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton) who would later serve in the administration of George W. Bush. Out of office they lobbied effectively for regime change in Iraq and a permanent US military presence in the Gulf region. One result was the Iraq Liberation Act, passed in 1998, which committed the United States to regime change in Iraq and also required the Clinton administration to finance several Iraqi opposition groups. …

Seizure

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessSeizureMark H. Backlund, M.D.Mark H. BacklundSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Dec 2003https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.54.12.1665-aAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail With the debate over stem cell research and latter-day abortion politics at its core, Robin Cook's newest medical thriller draws out a plausible—okay, possible—scenario to immediately demonstrate the many facets of this new frontier.At center stage are Daniel Lowell, M.D., Ph.D., stem cell researcher and would-be entrepreneur, and southern senator Ashley Butler, crafty right-leaning Democrat, adept at power politics but threatened by his newly diagnosed Parkinson's disease. Lowell's dream of wealth and celebrity are likewise threatened by Butler's efforts to ban his therapeutic cloning technology. The intersection of these two threats creates an opportunity for these two characters to meet their colossal needs, assuming their respective ethics and "traditional values" can become temporarily indisposed, each with ample justification.Ambivalently adjoined to the Faustian pact that emerges are two Cassandras: Lowell's scientific and personal partner, Stephanie D'Agostino, Ph.D., and Butler's political assistant, Carol Manning. D'Agostino's discomfort mounts along with the ethical compromises Lowell feels compelled to make, and the actions of these characters give readers the feeling of watching the lead actors in a horror movie deciding to "check out the basement." Sometimes all you can do is shake your head.Manning finds her concern for her long-time employer's health blunted by her own burgeoning political ambitions for Butler's senate seat. How hard should she try to save his life?This novel contains endless turns to twist the plot. "Investment" money is provided by D'Agostino's brother's mob connections, who don't like to lose and who apply the heat. There is the whimsical grandiosity of Butler's requirement that his defective substantia nigra be repaired with DNA purportedly from the staining of the all but unreachable Shroud of Turin with Christ's blood. And the dangerously crass Wingate Fertility Clinic, resurrected from another Cook novel, Shock, plays the pivotal role in Butler's therapeutic cloning procedure.Cook does a credible job of going a layer or two below the surface psychologically, although readers may find themselves wishing that D'Agostino would focus less on Lowell's sexist slips and more on the enormous hubris that drives his ambition and paralyzes her objections. Psychotherapists may cringe at the miscommunications, especially in the D'Agostino family, but it's hard not to relish Cook's exposé of power, greed, and narcissism.As usual, Cook gets the science just right. We comfortably learn about both the science and the politics of therapeutic versus reproductive cloning as well as more than you could ever imagine about the Shroud of Turin and about the Catholic bishops and priests who preserve it. As a medical thriller, Seizure has the successful elements of suspense and rapidly shifting twists of plot and turns of fortune. The "don't go through that door" plot tricks become almost predictable, but what's a thriller for if you can't occasionally see it coming? With mobsters and mitosis, egos and ethics, politics, polemics, and miracles, Master Cook has again stirred up a stew of a cautionary tale.Dr. Backlund lives in Anacortes, Washington.by Robin Cook; New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2003, 464 pages, $24.95 FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 54Issue 12 December 2003Pages 1665-a-1666 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 December 2003 Published in print 1 December 2003

Ethics and Foreign Policy. Edited by Karen E. Smith and Margot Light. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 240p. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper

Ethics and Foreign Policy had its beginning in a conference in 1998 whose theme was ethics and foreign policy. The organizers seem to have been inspired, or perhaps provoked, by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's promise that Britain under the Labour government would have “an ethical dimension” in its foreign policy. The contributors recall Cook's promise, almost always in disappointed tones, 22 times in the 220 pages that follow.

“Get New Lawyers!”

In James Rubin's account of the Kosovo war, he describes an exchange between Secretary Albright and Robin Cook (the British Foreign Secretary). Cook was explaining that it is difficult for Britain to commit to the war without UN Security Council approval because the legal advice he had received was that such action would be illegal under international law. Albright's response was, simply, get new lawyers. Rubin credits Blair with a push that swung the British to finally agree that a UN Security Council resolution was legally required. Robin Cook later stated in Parliament and that the war was legal. Interestingly, Blair did not. This article does not look at whether or not such an exchange took place; rather look at the ethical issues that such a situation would generate. The article suggests what the ethical obligations of the key legal players in such institutional dramas should be—including governments seeking advice, the lawyers giving it, the ministers reporting it and the opposition in Parliament. The article sets out the particular responsibilities of the lawyers and officials of a Westminster system. It also sets out some of the institutional mechanisms for making it more likely that those obligations are fulfilled—as always through the interaction of obligations by different players that make it more risky for any player to breach his or her ethical obligations. Analogous duties would be faced by the relevant actors in other systems.

Anatomy exhibit shows charm of grotesque.

BETHESDA, MD—A body floats waisthigh, sliced into dozens of transparent cross-sections to reveal inner geography plane by plane, skull to toe. Painted onto thick plastic sheets hanging parallel, the hovering figure ripples to life with a breeze or a touch, compressing and expanding in waves. To craft “Suspended Self Portrait,” the first piece encountered at the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) new exhibit on the art of anatomy, artist Carolyn Henne climbed into a tub of plaster, molded herself, and sliced the resulting figure 89 times. She filled the sections with painted bone, muscle, fat, organ tissue, and skin, as appropriate, drawing on information from the library’s Visible Human project. The effect is somewhat startling. It recalled for some ghoulish scenes from Robin Cook’s novel Coma, in which devious physicians fill morgues with unconscious patients suspended from wires, their feet or heads raised and lowered as needed to supply blood to organs slated for harvesting. The harvest for “Dream Anatomy”— the title of the exhibit running through July2003—ismoresublime, culled from the library’s vast, largely unviewed collectionofmedical art.WhenNLMDirector Donald Lindbergh, PhD, arrived in 1984, advisors told him that the library, known for its subterranean stacks and onlinesearchengines,wasneglecting the visual half of the medical canon. Thus began a series of projects to advance the art of medicine, including a number of online and in situ exhibits. The library’s latest effort is perhaps its most ambitious, drawing on half a millennium of renderings. (Works from the exhibit can be viewed online at http://www.nlm.nih .gov/exhibition/dreamanatomy/.) At a recent seminar to celebrate the exhibit’s opening, curator Michael Sappol, PhD, a historian at the NLM, explained the concept to an auditorium of anatomy aficionados: “People stumble over the title and ask, ‘What’s so dreamy about anatomy?’ I say that it’s hard to find an anatomical illustration that doesn’t speak to us in dreamlike ways.”

Introduction: Contagion and Culture

1Duke University 2Stony Brook University 3The Catholic University of America

The Rise and Fall of the 'Ethical Dimension': Presentation and Practice in New Labour's Foreign Policy

This article explores why the New Labour government in Britain stopped using the former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's notion of an 'ethical dimension' to present its foreign policy to the public. The article begins by tracing the rise of the 'ethical dimension' in New Labour's foreign policy pronouncements. It then surveys some of the debates about the party's foreign policy record, investigating how far its explicit appeal to ethics merely overlies traditional British foreign policy practices. The final section discusses three possible explanations for New Labour's decision to abandon the language of an 'ethical dimension'. It is argued that this decision suggests two important lessons for the future relationship of ethics to foreign policy. While explicit ethical standards provide important benchmarks for activists and public intellectuals, they can also serve to highlight the failures of an administration at the expense of more positive developments. Consequently, jettisoning the language of an 'ethical dimension' may actually encourage a more sophisticated public debate that moves beyond the facile and misleading belief that foreign policies are either 'ethical' or 'unethical'.

Putting Principle into Practice: The Role of Human Rights in Foreign Policy

This commentary by Robin Cook reflects upon what was accomplished during his four years as Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs after the new Labour government in 1997 placed the promotion and protection of human rights at the heart of its foreign policy. The paper emphasises this partnership by introducing a programme of exchanges and secondments between human rights NGOs and the Foreign Office, focusing on the pursuit of human rights in both principle and practice. While discussing the role of the British government the author provides an overview of many of the most important examples of attempts at ethical foreign policy over the last five years. It is argued that that national interest is promoted, not hindered, by a commitment to human rights and suggests new rules for when the UN can intervene to keep peace within states rather than among states.

On Morality, Self‐interest and Foreign Policy

A Change Of Government In Britain Does Not Necessarily Imply a change in foreign policy, but when Robin Cook entered the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in May 1997 it was with the ambition of bringing about a break with the past. The FCO was endowed for the first time with a ‘Mission Statement’, in which spreading the values of human rights, civil liberties and democracy (‘mutual respect’) was described as a benefit to be secured through foreign policy; the new Foreign Secretary elaborated this ambition at the launch of the Mission Statement, asserting: The Labour Government does not accept that political values can be left behind when we check in our passports to travel on diplomatic business. Our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension and must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves. We will put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy.

"Not a virus, but an upgrade": the ethics of epidemic evolution in Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio.

Literature and Medicine 20.1 (2001) 71-93 [Access article in PDF] "Not a Virus, but an Upgrade": The Ethics of Epidemic Evolution in Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio Lisa Lynch Three-quarters of the way into Greg Bear's 1999 novel Darwin's Radio, the novel's protagonist, Kaye Lang, sees Dustin Hoffman on television as she flips channels in a motel room. The grim, exhausted Lang is momentarily transfixed by Hoffman, who reprises his role as an army researcher in the 1993 film Outbreak. Striding through an empty film studio (as if he were trying to return to the site of the film itself), the actor urges the public to remain calm in the face of a viral epidemic: You might remember I played a scientist fighting a deadly disease in a movie called Outbreak. I've been talking to the scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they're working as hard as they can, every day, to fight SHEVA and stop our children from dying. 1 Hoffman's television spot is a desperate measure, a public service announcement paid for by the U.S. government in an effort to combat mounting civil unrest. A newly emergent endogenous retrovirus called Scattered Human Endogenous Retro Virus Activation (SHEVA) is spreading unchecked around the country, causing miscarriages and odd facial deformities. Riots have broken out, infected pregnant women have been murdered, and scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have failed utterly in their attempt to halt the epidemic. Self-exiled in her motel room, Lang reflects painfully on this failure; she herself has just quit the CDC's SHEVA Taskforce after trying one last time to make them understand what SHEVA really is. She and a few other [End Page 71] enlightened souls have discovered there is a link between SHEVA and human evolution, and Lang has chosen to let the "disease" run its course in her own body. Darwin's Radio begins as if it were yet another in the recent proliferation of American medical thrillers about epidemic outbreak: disease breaks out, a pattern of contagion and mortality emerges, and government doctors and scientists race to prevent disaster. But gradually Bear subverts the conventions of these contemporary medical thrillers, transforming Darwin's Radio into a work of speculative fiction that has more in common with Octavia Butler's Clay's Ark than with the novels of Robin Cook or Richard Preston. As evidence mounts that the disease in Darwin's Radio is in fact something utterly unexpected, a disease that cannot be contained by the efforts of science and government, the expected heroes of the novel--doctors and government officials committed to fighting SHEVA--also, surprisingly, become its villains. Bear uses these twin plot twists to critique the ideological and structural conservatism that is a determining generic feature of the medical thrillers the novel initially resembles. Beyond genre critique, Darwin's Radio is also engaged in social critique; the novel's portrayal of medical misunderstanding and state repression serves as an allusive commentary on contemporary issues in medical ethics, including medical privacy, abortion rights, industry-government alliances, and medical testing. Darwin's Radio thus has a great deal to say about the future and present state of medicine, both the actual institutions of medicine and the images of these institutions in American popular culture. However, the novel cannot be read simply in terms of what it might suggest about medical practices and their representations. This is because when the novel shifts generic gears, it also shifts focus; the narrative's concern with SHEVA as a disease phenomenon gives way to a sociobiological celebration of human development through genetic change. By the end of Darwin's Radio, the SHEVA epidemic does not merely serve to illuminate a series of crises in medicine and society; the virus is itself, Bear suggests, the only possible solution to these crises. Darwin's Radio asserts that Homo sapiens has reached an evolutionary milestone, and...

Study on Concepts of Ethical Behavior Expressed in the Novels of Dr. Robin Cook

Study on Concepts of Ethical Behavior Expressed in the Novels of Dr. Robin Cook

Ebola goes pop: the filovirus from literature into film.

Semmler examines Virus and Outbreak, two contemporary films about the Ebola virus. The essay carefully establishes the connections between the films and Robin Cook's novel Outbreak and Richard Preston's nonfictional book The Hot Zone. Semmler's essay looks at food, war, and jungle imagery in the two movies as a way to begin questioning the scientific accuracy of the films and to help establish her argument that the virus has taken the place of the nuclear bomb as a threat of destruction. The readings of the movies allow Semmler to suggest some of the ethical ramifications of the role of Western capitalism and Western medicine in these outbreaks of viral fever.

Ethics man?

New Labour's intentions are good but realpolitik and the domestic economy may prove greater obstacles than Robin Cook would have us believe

The Least of These: Exploitation in Anne Rice's Mayfair Trilogy

Anne Rice's Mayfair trilogy, The Witching Hour, Lasher, and Taltos, presents the reader with a tale of a dynasty of witches from the origin of the family in Donnelaith, Scotland, to the present, or thirteenth, generation in the Garden District of New Orleans. The story of this dynasty, however, is intricately interwoven with those of another species of being, The Taltos, and the organization that has studied both for centuries, the Talamasca. The mystery of their various interconnections forms the heart of the tale of the Mayfair witches; as the reader learns of the historical relationships between them, the hostility of the human race at large toward both Taltos and Mayfairs also becomes clear. Within the Taltos/Mayfair/Talamasca knot, each group pursues its own agenda. Whether the wish be to exploit others or to exterminate them, ruthlessness sets the tone. A dominant sub-theme of the intertwined histories and bloodlines is thus the exploitation of helpless beings in the name of self-interest. Whenever an explanation is offered, the perpetrator always feels justified in the name of survival, the elimination of evil, or even curiosity, but in every case Rice is on the side of the victim. In The Witching Hour, the young Rowan is shocked and repelled by the desire of one of her mentors, Dr. Lemle, to exploit fetuses for scientific and financial ends; she rejects the research opportunity offered to her by Lemle one Christmas Eve in medical school, running from his lab full of fetal creatures. Because of him, she refuses to become a researcher. The question of the use of fetal tissue for research is central to the novel, for the temptation offered by the Devil is a Faustian one that could only appeal to a research scientist, and that could only be of value to a person with the healing power of Rowan. She ran as she did from Lemle not only because of her horror at his indifference toward the humanity of the fetuses in his lab, but also to remove herself from an occasion of sin-the lure of experimentation with the malleable fetal cells. If one could disregard the human identity of these creatures, if they could be seen as lab animals or better yet, as sources of organic raw material, like plants that can yield slips for grafting, or simply living tissue that can be used to patch people up without a fear of their rejecting the graft, much as a patient's own skin can be used, what possibilities could there not be? The fact that many of the advances we have already seen have been precisely in areas of interest to neurosurgeons, like grafts in the brain to treat Parkinson's, Hodgkins' and Alzheimer's, makes the temptation strong and real to Rowan. This, Rice divines correctly, is the mad scientist's dream of the 21 st century, far more enticing and even more realistic than anything a Dr. Frankenstein could attempt. Simultaneously we are aware, as is Rowan, that the temptation will include the desire and ability to go beyond waiting for abortees with the appropriate tissue match and expand to include fetus farming akin to the maintenance of deceased corpses for transplants in Robin Cook's novel Coma; indeed, this is what Lemle has set up in his lab, and he insists that he is not alone, that the same thing is being done everywhere out of simple expediency. Once the principle of using fetal tissue is established, there is in fact no upper limit to the age at which a fetus would be eligible. Pancreas cells, for example, for transplant into adults with diabetes, are most successfully used when taken from fetuses of 10 to 20 weeks gestation, or up to 5 months. Since most abortions are obtained within the first 90 days, the convenience of maintaining a live tissue source is obvious. Would these come exclusively from brain-dead neonates, or might a doctor, like the one in Coma, be tempted to arrange the availability of retarded or otherwise imperfect newborns? The temptations, aid to the ill in the short run, research advances and profits that can be plowed back into medicine in the long run, are clear cut and undeniable. …

"How dare you sport thus with life?": Frankensteinian fictions as case studies in scientific ethics.

Fictional scenarios involving "hard" science offer what are in effect case studies of scientific ethics. From his analysis of Shelley's novel, biologist Leonard Isaacs constructed a model of a "Frankenstein scenario," applicable to the dilemmas posed by the advancement of science in our time, as well as to fiction about science by such contemporary writers as Robin Cook and Michael Crichton. The special contribution of fiction to the study of ethics is that it both reflects and evaluates reality's infinite permutations. In reflecting and judging, the fictional scenarios engage our moral imagination and compel us to confront our personal ethos in relation to the evolving ethos of science.

Opposition plans for care grants outlined.

Shadow Health Minister Robin Cook pledged that an incoming Labour Government would provide ringfenced money to enable care in the community to be properly funded. But he said it was now too late to bring implementation forward from 1993, even if there were an election in November.