HOME
Category: Reviews
July 01, 2010
Inside story: doctors and torture. Penumbra Productions, 1990. Director: Greg Lanning. English, 60 minutes.
April 01, 2010
In 2002, Mr Das "decided to take an academic holiday". His purpose was not to visit destinations frequented by tourists, howsoever enlightened they may be. Instead he travelled to the University of Chicago, where he and his wife spent the next two years. He delved into the rich collection of book...
April 01, 2010
This is a textbook on bioethics with contributions from major writers in the field. The editors are professors at the University of Washington and have carried out pioneering research in ethics. Part 1 of the book takes the reader through the history of bioethics, explaining its emergence as a di...
April 01, 2010
Sisir Sahana is a "stormist" from the metaphor of the storm that he uses in his second feature film venture, Matti o manush, with its anguished portrayal of ritualism that is mindlessly practiced even in the new century. Sahana holds a mirror to our middle-class hypocrisy that reduces the sacred ...
January 01, 2010
The words "randomised controlled trials" have taken on new meaning for me. In When experiments travel, Adriana Petryna reveals the experimental machinery manipulated by the globalising clinical trial industry in the quest for blockbuster drugs. She chronicles interviews of people who are not so m...
January 01, 2010
Fraud and misconduct have probably always existed in biomedical research and, as is evidenced by recent events, they are here to stay. Witness, for example, two recent cases, one in basic science from 2006, that of the Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-Suk, and the other from clinical medicin...
January 01, 2010
I was born for a very specific purpose. I wasn't the result of a cheap bottle of wine or a full moon or the heat of the moment. I was born because a scientist managed to hook up my mother's eggs and my father's sperm and come up with a specific combination of precious genetic material.
October 01, 2009
Noshir Hormasji Antia (February 8, 1922 to June 26, 2007) was a remarkable man. I met him once, when he came to Chennai for a seminar on the World Development Report Investing in Health. For several hours before the seminar, he kept me and a friend spellbound with his experiences and ide...
October 01, 2009
Set in the United States in World War II, Cider House Rules is an adaptation of John Irving’s book of the same title. The story revolves around Dr Wilbur Larch (Michael Caine) and his assistant, Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire). Dr Larch runs an orphanage which is seen as a place where you either got ...
July 01, 2009
Rapid changes in the organisation and delivery of modern medicine, coupled with the challenges of structuring health services to meet the needs of globalisation and massive population transfers, have made the morals of medicine and health services a burning issue today across all countries of the...