Illness Representations and Coping Strategies in Patients Treated with Deep Brain Stimulation for Parkinson's Disease.

There is a debate on possible alterations of self-identity following deep brain stimulation for neurological disorders including Parkinson's disease. Among the psychological variables likely to undergo changes throughout such a medical procedure, illness representations and coping strategies have not been the target of much research to this day. In order to remedy this, we investigated the dynamics of illness representations and coping strategies in an 18-month longitudinal study involving 45 patients undergoing deep brain stimulation for idiopathic Parkinson's disease.

[Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in the era of predictive medicine].

High speed sequencing is revolutionizing the various genetic tests and in particular preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), opening the doors to an increasingly efficient predictive medicine. PGD itself is not new, and the various legistations have been dealing with it for some twenty years. National ethics committees, for their part, have widely debated antenatal tests in the context of medically assisted procreation.

The metaphysical lessons of synthetic biology and neuroscience.

In this paper, I examine some important metaphysical lessons that are often presented as derived from two new scientific disciplines: synthetic biology and neuroscience. I analyse four of them: the nature of life, the existence of a soul (the mind-body problem), personhood, and free will. Many caveats are in order, and each 'advance' or each case should be assessed for itself.

[The gift of human body's products: philosophical and ethical aspects].

In continental Europe, there is a very strong moral condemnation against putting parts or products of the human body on sale-and, consequently, against putting sperms and oocytes on sale. Only a gift is morally permissible. The situation is different in Anglo-Saxon countries.

Human dignity as a component of a long-lasting and widespread conceptual construct.

For some decades, the concept of human dignity has been widely discussed in bioethical literature. Some authors think that this concept is central to questions of respect for human beings, whereas others are very critical of it. It should be noted that, in these debates, dignity is one component of a long-lasting and widespread conceptual construct used to support a stance on the ethical question of the moral status of an action or being.

Defeating the argument from hubris.

Biotechnologies - synthetic biology in particular - are sometimes blamed for playing God or manifesting hubris, that is, for evincing the vicious attitude of transcending the limits of human agency. In trying to create living organisms, we would adopt an attitude that is immoral for human beings. In this article, I want to show that this blame is unwarranted.

Differential sensitivity of atrial and ventricular K(ATP) channels to metabolic inhibition.

Objective: The aim is to compare the activation of ATP-sensitive potassium channels (K(ATP) channels) in intact and metabolically impaired atrial and ventricular myocytes.

Methods: The K(ATP) channel current is measured by whole cell and gramicidin-perforated patch clamp recordings in 164 cultured neonate rat cardiomyocytes.

Results: In whole cell recordings with 84 micromol/l ADP in pipette, spontaneous activity is significantly higher in atrium than ventricle, and EC(50) for the K(ATP) channel opener diazoxide is 0.