This book looks at both the past and the future of the debate over whether there are moral limits to scientific progress and what life will look like in the genetic age.

Sheed & Ward, in partnership with Commonweal magazine, presents the second of two volumes in the groundbreaking series, American Catholics in the Public Square, a project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Essays by scholars, journalists, lawyers, business and labor leaders, church administrators and lobbyists, novelists, activists, policy makers and politicians address the most critical issues facing the Catholic Church in the United States. Volume 2, American Catholics, American Cultur...

Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human storyFewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than jus...

For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am I doin...

The promise of a regenerative medicine -- the regrowth of lost limbs and organs, new hope for patients with Alzheimer's or multiple sclerosis, the "cellular fountain of youth" -- sounds like science fiction, but it's real and on the cutting edge of medicine. Veteran medical journalist Karen van Kamped looks at this new technology through the stories of the scientists who are creating it and the ethical and legal questions with which they must deal. Many companies and universities in Canada...

A New York Times Book Review Notable BookFrom noted feminist and longtime columnist for The Nation, award-winning author Katha Pollitt's Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights presents a powerful argument for abortion as a moral right and social good. As the Supreme Court is set to overturn the landmark decision that legalized abortion nationwide, this urgent, controversial book reframes abortion as a common part of a woman's reproductive...

What does it mean to carry out "good work"? What strategies allow people to maintain moral and ethical standards at a time when market forces have unprecedented power and work life is being radically altered by technological innovation? These questions lie at the heart of this eagerly awaited new book. Focusing on genetics and journalism-two fields that generate and manipulate information and thus affect our lives in myriad ways-the authors show how in their quest to build meaningful caree...

R. C. Lewontin is a prominent scientist—a geneticist who teaches at Harvard—yet he believes that we have placed science on a pedestal, treating it as an objective body of knowledge that transcends all other ways of knowing and all other endeavours.Lewontin writes in this collection of essays, which began their life as CBC Radio's Massey Lectures Series for 1990: "Scientists do not begin life as scientists, after all, but as social beings immersed in a family, a state, a productive ...

A Harvard-trained obstetrician-gynecologist, prominent blogger, and author of the classic How Your Baby Is Born delivers a timely, important, and sure to be headline-making expose that shines a light on the natural parenting movement and the multimillion-dollar industry behind it.The natural parenting movement praises the virtues of birth without medical interference, staunchly advocates breastfeeding for all mothers, and hails attachment parenting. Once the exclusive province of t...

Genetic science is about to radically alter our lives. Sooner than you can imagine, human beings will be capable of diagnosing their own illnesses, designating the sex of their children, even designing the food they eat -- all as easily as using a cell phone. Now is the time for every one of us to take control of our DNA, and one man is uniquely qualified to show us how: Glenn McGee, bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, pioneer in the study of "home genetics," and the acknowledge...

Killing the Black Body remains a rallying cry for education, awareness, and action on extending reproductive justice to all women. It is as crucial as ever, even two decades after its original publication.**"A must-read for all those who claim to care about racial and gender justice in America." —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim CrowIn 1997, this groundbreaking book made a powerful entrance into the national conv...

Biology and politics have converged today across much of the industrialized world. Debates about genetically modified organisms, cloning, stem cells, animal patenting, and new reproductive technologies crowd media headlines and policy agendas. Less noticed, but no less important, are the rifts that have appeared among leading Western nations about the right way to govern innovation in genetics and biotechnology. These significant differences in law and policy, and in ethical analysis, may ...