Search results for ""Author Robert H. Blank""
Georgetown University Press Brain Policy: How the New Neuroscience Will Change Our Lives and Our Politics
This title covers neural grafting, virtual reality, gene therapy, psychotropic drugs. As startling new treatments emerge for disorders of the brain, new concerns are arising along with them. In the first book to examine the implications of the full range of revolutionary interventions now possible in the human brain, Robert H. Blank warns that while these new techniques may promise medical wonders, they also raise profound political questions. Our rapidly unfolding knowledge about the brain and the accompanying applications have three main policy dimensions: funding research initiatives, controlling individual use, and assessing social consequences. But underlying these aspects, Blank argues, are more disturbing issues that pose fundamental challenges to our conceptions of equality, autonomy, freedom, responsibility, and human nature itself. "Brain Policy" makes the key facts from the technical literature readily accessible to social scientists and general readers and points out the implications for our society. Blank first explains the structure and function of the nervous system and current theories of brain operation; he then assesses the uses and potential abuses of various intervention techniques. He identifies the public policy issues raised by discoveries in the neurosciences and calls for intensified scrutiny of the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies. Warning that the risks and dangers of the dramatic developments in neuroscience are potentially large, Blank offers a means of understanding these scientific advances and the philosophical and political issues they entail. This book will be of interest to social scientists, policy analysts, policy makers, bioethicists, scientists who want to see the bigger picture, and the informed reader with an interest in the implications of neuroscience for themselves and society.
£54.90
Columbia University Press Regulating Reproduction
Legal and ethical battles surrounding human genetics and reproduction are being waged throughout the world. "Regulating Reproduction" explores these issues with regard to policy, particularly in the United States. Blank describes current regulatory efforts by individual states, professional associations, and other countries and concludes that the present, decentralized policy process results in inequitable, contradictory, and inadequate policies.
£27.00
Columbia University Press Emerging Issues in Biomedical Policy: An Annual Review: Setting Allocation Priorities
Volume 1 discusses the problems inherent in allocating limited biomedical technologies: whose needs take precedence, what individual rights and responsibilities are involved, and when societal good justifies restricting individual good. Volume Two focuses on two substantive areas of biomedical policy beset by conflicts. Physicians, patients, and public officials are locked in new battles over whether and when life-extending technologies should be used or withdrawn. Meanwhile, researchers, government officials, and patients struggle to determine who will receive experimental medical treatment, and what procedures should be instituted to protect the recipients.
£31.50
Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd Governing Home Care: A Cross-National Comparison
Care of the elderly in their own homes has increasingly come into the focus of contemporary welfare policies and raises important questions about the governance of welfare in general. By taking a comparative and thematic approach, this interesting and timely book offers a comprehensive analysis of the principal issues surrounding the governance of home care.The analysis presented systematically maps out governing arrangements in relation to formal and informal care services, informal care, care workers and users of care across nine countries. The authors explore the ways in which country specific contexts shape governing arrangements and bring together insights from social care and public policy literature, two different yet complementary theoretical perspectives.Combining social care and public policy, Governing Home Care will be of great interest to scholars and postgraduate students and researchers of comparative social and public policy, as well as gender studies with particular interest in health policy, welfare state policies, family studies, and the sociology of caring and ageing.
£99.00
Emerald Publishing Limited Politics and the Life Sciences
This book examines the development of biopolitics as an academic perspective within political science. It reviews the work of the leading proponents of this perspective and presents a comprehensive view of biopolitics as a framework to structure political inquiry. The book's chapters present a range of analysis, critique and recommendations for the current study of biopolitics. Coverage includes; the implications of biopolitics for political theory and the need to re-evaluate basic assumptions of the prevailing political science paradigm; an analysis of the methodological concerns of adopting a more biology-based approach to political science; the current state of knowledge of the genetic and neurological bases of mass and elite behavior; and biopolicy issues and the proper role of the life sciences in informing our understanding of them. The concluding chapter restates the case for a paradigm shift toward an interactive model, arguing that, rather than lead to biological determinism as denounced by some, this inclusive paradigm allows us to counteract deterministic protestations more effectively than by continuing to ignore or minimize biological influences.
£113.32