David Magnus

In transplant medicine, the use of normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) in donation after circulatory determination of death raises ethical difficulties. NRP is objectionable because it restores the donor's circulation, thus invalidating a death declaration based on the permanent cessation of circulation. NRP's defenders respond with arguments that are tortuous and factually inaccurate and depend on introducing extraneous concepts into the law. However, results comparable to NRP's—more and higher‐quality organs and more efficient allocation—can be achieved by removing organs from deceased donors and using normothermic machine perfusion (NMP) to support the organs outside the body, without jeopardizing confidence in transplantation's legal and ethical foundations. Given the controversy that NRP generates and the convoluted justifications made for it, we recommend a prudential approach we call “ethical parsimony,” which holds that, in the choice between competing means of achieving a result, the ethically simpler one is to be preferred. This approach makes clear that policy‐makers should favor NMP over NRP.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform many aspects of scholarly publishing. Authors, peer reviewers, and editors might use AI in a variety of ways, and those uses might augment their existing work or might instead be intended to replace it. We are editors of bioethics and humanities journals who have been contemplating the implications of this ongoing transformation. We believe that generative AI may pose a threat to the goals that animate our work but could also be valuable for achieving those goals. In the interests of fostering a wider conversation about how generative AI may be used, we have developed a preliminary set of recommendations for its use in scholarly publishing. We hope that the recommendations and rationales set out here will help the scholarly community navigate toward a deeper understanding of the strengths, limits, and challenges of AI for responsible scholarly work.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform many aspects of scholarly publishing. Authors, peer reviewers, and editors might use AI in a variety of ways, and those uses might augment their existing work or might instead be intended to replace it. We are editors of bioethics and humanities journals who have been contemplating the implications of this ongoing transformation. We believe that generative AI may pose a threat to the goals that animate our work but could also be valuable for achieving those goals. In the interests of fostering a wider conversation about how generative AI may be used, we have developed a preliminary set of recommendations for its use in scholarly publishing. We hope that the recommendations and rationales set out here will help the scholarly community navigate toward a deeper understanding of the strengths, limits, and challenges of AI for responsible scholarly work.

Philosophers and historians of science have tended to denigrate the status and usefulness of the practice of natural history. The development of biology in this century is seen as the replacement of an older, descriptive and speculative method with a quantitative, experimental and well-founded science. This account embodies a philosophical view about the nature of science, which deems certain kinds of evidence and certain ways of producing knowledge appropriate. Natural history is seen as inadequate, providing insufficient support for establishing theory. ;I develop a case study which shows this account to be incorrect. The case study concerns the debate over the role of geographical isolation in speciation between 1905 and 1907. After some preliminary historical background to the debate, I present a detailed discussion of the arguments made by naturalist David Starr Jordan . The debate that ensued centered on the kinds of evidence one should use in doing science--fieldwork versus experiments. Thus, this case study offers excellent subject matter for understanding natural history. ;After examining the debate and its participants in some detail, we can see that at the heart of this debate is an epistemological issue over what virtues are central to science. In particular, while natural historians like Jordan were advocating an approach which emphasized the consilience of inductions--and hence a variety of kinds of evidence--a more experimentally oriented group of biologists were advocating the centrality of replication and hence argued that all non-experimental forms of evidence should be abandoned. Contrary to expectations, the naturalists had the better theory