Torture is a crude and ancient method of extracting information and confessions from prisoners. Its use is still widespread throughout the world, but its techniques have become increasingly sophisticated. Today, information and confessions are commonly extracted from political prisoners with few signs of physical trauma. For instance, Israel's General Security Service has come to employ vigorous shaking as one such means of interrogation within the Occupied Territories of the Gaza and West Bank. This procedure may sound innocuous, but there are good reasons to believe that vigorous shaking can induce whiplash-related injuries. Such evidence is found in the child abuse and motor vehicle accident literature. Although global intellect may appear unaffected, more subtle emotional and cognitive dysfunction can create lasting impairment. This article concludes that vigorous shaking of political prisoners is a dangerous and potentially lethal mode of interrogation that should be discontinued by Israel's General Security Forces and avoided by all governments.

I would like to thank all of the scholars who wrote commentaries on my essay “The Human Genome Diversity Project: Ethical Problems and Solutions.” I welcome the criticism and have learned a great deal from such thoughtful analysis and commentary. Since I am replying to comments about my paper, I am in the unique position of having the last word (at least temporarily!). Since I now have the opportunity to learn from criticism, I reserve the right to modify my position or change my views.

These reflections attempt to revive the IMPPISH perspective; otherwise known as the interaction, mentalist, populational, process, intelligence, self selection, and hypertrophy approach. Despite the clever acronym, the IMPPISH perspective struggles to stay on life support. This essay takes a fresh look at the IMPPISH approach, and breaks down each tenet into three parts: its theoretical proposition, relevance to the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences, and research implications for biopolitics.

Proponents of xenotransplantation hope that it will provide organs to fill the gap between the demand for and supply of organs for transplant. The scientific obstacles to transplanting animal organs into humans are daunting, as are the moral, political, and policy issues. Among them are concerns about animal rights and welfare, patient acceptance and informed consent, and broader public health issues, such as the cost-efficient deployment of scarce resources and the risk of disease in third parties. The latter is, in my view, the most immediately urgent issue. Pigs, the current animal of choice, carry many bacterial and viral pathogens, and it is currently impossible to assess the risk of disease to human populations. Because of this risk, a moratorium on xenotransplantation is necessary to protect public health; it is also questionable whether the technology, if successful, would be the most cost-effective way to promote health.

Despite extraordinary improvements in medicine, health care worldwide continues to exhibit indefensible contradictions and extreme inequalities. “Health-for-all” campaigns, and development programs targeting welfare and social security have addressed these problems with limited success, but bioethicists, who by this point in the globalization era might have been expected to be addressing these problems urgently and persistently, have had little to say. We ask if bioethics, stalled at a crossroads, is prepared to alter course. We review the bioethics experience in Turkey as a case study, considering especially globalization and Turkey's application to join the European Union.

We model mates' interdependent parental investment decisions as a game of Chicken. An individual is better off (in terms of reproductive success) deserting one's offspring to start a new union if one's mate stays to raise the offspring, but better off not deserting if one's mate would in turn desert the offspring. Modelling the parental investment decisions as a game of Chicken leads to four hypotheses: An individual is more likely to desert if (1) the mate is more committed to the offspring, (2) the mate has more resources to invest in children, (3) the former mate is currently unmarried, and (4) the children are older (in sharp contrast to the prediction by both Trivers [1972] and Dawkins and Carlisle [1976]). Data from the 1992 U.S. Current Population Survey provide at least partial support for all hypotheses except Hypothesis 2. In particular, the data analysis strongly supports our prediction that individuals are more likely to desert older children than younger children even when time since separation is controlled for, and rejects the earlier prediction by Trivers (1972) and Dawkins and Carlisle (1976).