"Sir Stuart Hampshire, a philosopher whose moral awareness was heightened by the practical demands of wartime work as an interrogator, is dead at 89." See his obituary in The Guardian.

"Having 20 pounds of fat removed by liposuction makes people look better but provides none of the protection from heart disease and diabetes that would result from losing the same amount of weight through diet and exercise, researchers are reporting." See "Liposuction Doesn't Offer Health Benefit, Study Finds," in The New York Times.

"Our greatest efforts at physical control frequently come to naught: causing us to twitch, tremble, blush, weep, lose consciousness despite our strongest will to do otherwise. Organs, glands, and intestines go about their solemn work, requiring micturition, flatulation, defecation, ejaculation, belching, burping, yawning, and hiccuping--while in the engine room (as one would like to think of the mind) one is earnestly trying to determine, say, why there have been no major poets born after 1900. I recently read about Hermann Jellinek, a revolutionary about to be executed by hanging in Vienna during the revolution of 1848, who remarked: 'My spirit is calm. I hope my body will not play tricks with me.' Alas, it probably did, since at the point of hanging, I have read, all sphincteral control is lost." Joseph Epstein reviews Roy Porter's Flesh in the Age of Reason.

"Today's children are emotionally stunted individuals whose every whim has been indulged to create a generation that has lost the capacity to appreciate the feelings and needs of other people. All around us, he says, are whining, nagging, complaining youngsters who are being brought up in the lap of economic luxury but without the moral input of parents, who are either unavailable or far too lax. The result, according to Shaw, is an epidemic of joyless, selfish individuals moving through life without empathy or a sense of duty to others." See The Guardian's Joanna Moorehead on child psychiatrist Robert Shaw in "Have we created a generation of joyless, selfish monsters?"

What does female circumcision in Africa have to do with Armin Meiwes, the German cannibal? Tom Morton explains in "Why Do Men Barbecue Other Men?", his discussion of the work of University of Chicago anthropologist Richard Schweder.

"Indeed, there are at least two Bill Joys. Start with Joy the computer scientist -- or computer architect, as he often describes himself -- a Silicon Valley deity, generally regarded as one of the most gifted engineers ever to have negotiated freeway traffic. Much of the present-day Internet is built upon the Unix code Joy wrote in the 1970's when he was a grad student at Berkeley; after that, his signature inventions shaped the Java programming language and the Sun computer servers that power a good portion of the Web. This Bill Joy recently flirted with the idea of taking a job at Google and continues to entertain pitches from friends and strangers eager to have him join their start-ups..."

"The other Bill Joy, however, would very much like to prevent the inevitable from happening. Four years ago in an article he wrote for Wired magazine, Joy declared that the headlong race in biotechnology and nanotechnology might prove catastrophic. In the time since, he has continued to explore and advance this concern. Joy says he thinks the probability of a ''civilization-changing event'' is most likely in the double digits, perhaps as high as 50 percent. He doesn't merely ascribe these odds to terrorism; he suggests a pandemic disease might arise from a sudden accident or as a consequence of cutting-edge research. For disquieting evidence, he points out that a couple of years ago scientists assembled polio in a lab. That in late 2002 J. Craig Venter, the founder of Celera Genomics, announced plans to create organisms from scratch. That only a few months ago scientists were tinkering with deadly strains of bird flu in less-than-top-security labs. That the genomic sequence for the plague is now on the Web for anyone to see or make use of."

Jon Gertner profiles Bill Joy in "Proceed With Caution."

"This week brought big news in the mood disorder business. First, the New York Times previewed a study, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, that found Prozac to be remarkably effective in treating adolescent depression. Then New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced that he had filed suit against GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceuticals giant. The charge is that the company manipulated or suppressed research data, to make its drug Paxil appear safe and effective in treating depression in children and teenagers, when it is neither.

Which are we to believe? Should doctors prescribe medication for depressed adolescents or hold off?

One answer is that we just don't know—precisely because drug companies manage the information about antidepressants, promulgating positive studies and suppressing evidence of harm or failure."

Read Peter Kramer's article in Slate, "Should Teenagers Take Drugs?"

James Hughes of the World Transhumanist Association writes, "Last year, bioethicist Carl Elliott, our friend and critic, published the book Better Than Well, a fascinating critique of human enhancement medicine as a capitalist plot perpetuated on gullible American psyches. Apparently, says Elliott, pining for life extension is as pointless as pining for whiter teeth or tighter abs."

"Elliott's book helped us to coin a new slogan and mission statement that answers Houghton's question succinctly. After all, when they call you a queer it's not an insult, it's a flag to fly. So our first decision in Oxford was to adopt this slogan: "Better than well!" And this mission statement: "The WTA advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. We support the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy better bodies, better minds and better lives." Read "Battle Plan to Be More than Well: Transhumanism is finally getting in gear" on Betterhumans.com.

"New York Times readers with troubled kids must be very confused today. Yesterday, a front page story claimed that antidepressants worked wonders on children. Then, 24 hours later, the paper of record gave similar front page treatment to news that New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer had sued GlaxoSmithKline for failing to reveal clinical trial data showing its antidepressant didn't work in kids."

"Why the discordant messages? The first story reported the early results from a government-funded clinical trial showing that Prozac was better than talk therapy or a placebo. An objective source? Hardly. The trial was conducted by Dr. Graham Emslie, a Texas-based psychiatrist who is one of the nation's leading advocates of medicating depressed children. Emslie's corporate client list reads like a who's who of the drug industry and includes Eli Lilly, maker of Prozac. Alas, the Times never told its readers this fact." See "Spitzer on Drugs" by Merrill Goozner of the Center for Science in the Public Interest at Gooznews.

A front-page story in the New York Times announces that Eliot Spitzer, the New York State attorney general, is suing GlaxoSmithKline, accusing the company of fraud in concealing negative information about its popular antidepressant medicine Paxil. "The civil lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, contends that GlaxoSmithKline engaged in persistent fraud by failing to tell doctors that some studies of Paxil showed that the drug did not work in adolescents and might even lead to suicidal thoughts. Far from warning doctors, the suit contends, the company encouraged them to prescribe the drug for youngsters." See "New York State Official Sues Drug Maker Over Test Data."

A related story in the Times examines the question of unpublished research studies conducted by the pharmaceutical industry. "These days, most drug trials are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. And for more than a decade, a growing number of medical experts have been urging drug makers to release more trial data and to create uniform means of disclosing results through central registries, so that policy makers and doctors can easily learn the results. Those advocates argue that such central databases are necessary because drug companies, as well as medical journals and researchers, tend to spotlight only trials that show positive results." See "Two Studies, Two Results, and a Debate Over a Drug."

"Although J.M. Barrie made use of the Llewelyn Davies boys when writing (and frequently revising) Peter Pan, the origins of “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” lay in his own childhood in Scotland. When his older brother died in a skating accident on the eve of his fourteenth birthday, their grieving mother found solace in the notion that by dying so young her son would remain a boy for ever. This was an idea that had become common currency by the turn of the century. The astonishing popularity of novels set in public schools, mostly written by sentimental alumni, had inculcated the belief that boyhood was a perfect, enviable, but tragically fleeting, state... 'To die will be an awfully big adventure', Peter Pan declares at the end of Act Three, when he is stranded on a rock in the middle of a lagoon, the water rising about him." Peter Parker reviews Andrew Birkin's J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys in the Times Literary Supplement.