The day has arrived that genetic tests for educational outcomes are available to the public. Today parents and students alike can send off a sample of blood or saliva and receive a ‘genetic report’ for a range of characteristics relevant to education, including intelligence, math ability, reading ability, and educational attainment. DTC availability is compounded by a growing “precision education” initiative, which proposes the application of DNA tests in schools to tailor educational curricula to children’s genomic profiles. Here I argue that these happenings are a strong signal of the geneticization of education; the process by which educational abilities and outcomes come to be examined, understood, explained, and treated as primarily genetic characteristics. I clarify what it means to geneticize education, highlight the nature and limitations of the underlying science, explore both real and potential downstream bioethical implications, and make proposals for mitigating negative impacts.

The high infant mortality rate of illegitimate children in Dualist Hungary urged politicians to create a modern state child welfare system for the protection of abandoned children whose upbringing became a national matter. Their main concern was providing adequate nutrition for infants and increase their chances of survival. The article examines how demographical concerns and national-political ideals influenced the evolution of the child welfare system in multi-ethnic Transylvania, first as part of the dual monarchy and after the First World War as a province of Romania. The Hungarian state children’s asylums offered a variety of nursing programs for abandoned infants, where the foster-care system often resulted in their Magyarization at a later age. During the First World War, the new objective was the protection of infants together with mothers and the promotion of breastfeeding in order to ensure the viability of the Hungarian nation. National arguments were used in both time periods to support infant protection initiatives. In interwar Transylvania, the urban-rural ethnic distribution influenced the development of infant protection facilities: all state investments were channeled toward the “authentic” Romanian countryside, while in the “foreign” urban environment ethnic minorities focused on their own institutions.

En este artículo se analizan las circunstancias históricas en las cuales cambiaron, tanto el discurso médico como la atención que se daba a las personas con lepra en Puerto Rico. Se toma como punto de partida la invasión estadounidense de 1898 y su proyecto de transformación de la salud pública de la isla. Como parte de estos cambios se identifica un nuevo modelo de atención para los contagiados, basado en la idea del aislamiento. De esta manera, las autoridades sanitarias se distanciaban de la teoría de la herencia, la que se había manejado con anterioridad a esa fecha. Se argumenta que ese aislamiento fue expresión de la política colonialista del momento. Se quiere mostrar que la rigurosidad del nuevo modelo de atención transformó la vida de aquellos enfermos, los cuales pasaron de convivir con sus familias, a recluirse en un islote. Este proceso de transformación fue iniciado particularmente por los médicos del Marine Hospital Service.

In 2015, we published an article entitled “The Medicalization of Love,” in which we argued that both good and bad consequences could be expected to follow from love’s medicalization, depending on how the process unfolded. A flurry of commentaries followed; here we offer some preliminary thoughts in reply to the more substantial of the criticisms that were raised. We focus in particular on the nature of love itself as well as the role it plays (or should play) in our lives; we also touch on a number of practical issues concerning the likely effects of any plausible “real-life” love drugs and conclude with a call for careful regulation.

This is a critique of Earp, Sandberg and Savulescu’s argument in support of a possible future neuromodulation of love and love-related relationships. I argue that, contrary to what is suggested by Earp, Sandberg and Savulescu, we do have good reason to be concerned about that possibility as well as about the medicalization of love that its pursuit would bring about.

Would a “medicalization” of love be a “good” or “bad” form of medicalization? In discussing this question, Earp, Sandberg, and Savulescu primarily focus on the potential positive and negative consequences of turning love into a medical issue. But it can also be asked whether there is something intrinsically regrettable about medicalizing love. It is argued here that the medicalization of love can be seen as an “evaluative category mistake”: it treats a core human value (love) as if it were mainly a means to other ends (viz. physical health and hedonic well-being). It is also argued that Earp et al’s closing argument (that a scientific perspective on love actually adds more value to love) can be seen as involving another evaluative category mistake: it treats an object of desire and practical interest (namely, love) as if it mainly were an object of scientific contemplation and theoretical interest. It is concluded that, to relate love to health and well-being in a more satisfying way, we should construe the latter two in broader ways, whereby love is itself a component or element of human flourishing.

Pharmaceuticals or other emerging technologies could be used to enhance (or diminish) feelings of lust, attraction, and attachment in adult romantic partnerships. Although such interventions could conceivably be used to promote individual (and couple) well-being, their widespread development and/or adoption might lead to the ‘medicalization’ of human love and heartache—for some, a source of a serious concern. In this essay, we argue that the medicalization of love need not necessarily be problematic, on balance, but could plausibly be expected to have either good or bad consequences depending upon how it unfolds. By anticipating some of the specific ways in which these technologies could yield unwanted outcomes, bioethicists and others can help to direct the course of love’s medicalization—should it happen to occur—more toward the ‘good’ side than the ‘bad.’

There has been much recent debate and controversy over the apparent expansion of the use of certain psychiatric classifications, and the treatment of those so diagnosed, in particular their treatment with psychiatric drugs. Some have suggested that this arises from ‘disease mongering’ by a pharmaceutical industry keen to sell its products. Others have implied that psychiatrists are the key agents, acting as ‘moral entrepreneurs’ claiming that society is ignoring an area of suffering that they are best placed to understand and treat. Others have suggested that the expansion is part of a social and cultural malaise, in which individuals increasingly define problems of living as disorders in need of treatment. This article reviews the evidence of the expanding scope of psychiatric diagnosis, focusing on depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and personality disorder. It examines a number of arguments that seek to account for this expansion and suggests that we need a more complex approach to understand the growth of these diagnoses, not only addressing marketing of drugs by pharmaceutical industry and the role of doctors, but also examining the pressures and incentives that lead to the ascription of such diagnoses and their treatment with drugs.

Objectives: To investigate doctors' and nurses' attitudes toward 14 potential prioritization criteria.

Methods: This study was performed by using the random paired scenario method. The respondents received a questionnaire with 12 pairs of scenarios, imaginary patient cases, each of which contained two to three different prioritization criteria (e.g., child, old patient, poor patient). Respondents were asked which one of each scenario pair they would choose if only one patient could be treated. The scenarios were randomly put into 30 different questionnaire sets. There was a random selection of 241 doctors and 151 nurses in Finland, with response rates of 60.3% and 50.3%, respectively.

Results: Doctors prioritized young patients, severe disease, expensive treatments and posteriorized (negatively prioritized) demented or institutionalized patients, and patients having a self-caused disease. Children were strongly prioritized, even over serious diseases. Expensive treatments appeared to be favored by doctors, and this result cannot be explained by severity of disease. Nurses' attitudes were similar to those of doctors.

Conclusions: Children were strongly prioritized. Elderly persons were posteriorized if they had dementia or were living in institutions. Patients having a self-caused disease are posteriorized, more often by nurses than by doctors.