Due to illness, we weren’t able to record a new episode this week, so instead here’s one from the Matters of Life and Death archive you might enjoy. So-called memecoins – new cryptocurrencies launched solely as tongue-in-cheek speculative online inve...
Elon Musk, the mercurial billionaire who owns Twitter, is increasingly wielding his enormous political power via his social media network, interfering in politics in America and far beyond. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook, has tried to...
Recent research by the abortion provider BPAS has uncovered a striking increase in the numbers of women who use fertility tracking apps as contraception, rather than the more traditional hormonal pill, coil or implant. And, perhaps most interestingly...
A recent Guardian article looked in depth at advances in neonatology – the care of extremely premature babies – and the complex ethical challenges now faced by parents and doctors alike. Modern medicine can now save the lives of babies born at just 2...
Advances in reproductive medicine in the past half century have meant it is entirely possible for as many as five different adults to be involved in the birth of one child (sperm and egg donors, a surrogate mother who carries the fetus, and the commi...
Since 2010 mental health problems among young people have exploded. At precisely the same time, smartphones and social media have become deeply embedded in the lives of children and teenagers. A growing body of evidence suggests these two things are...
A movement founded at the University of Oxford in 2009 has now captured the imagination – and the wallets – of some of the brightest and most successful across elite Western academic and business circles. Effective altruism, a 21st-century data-drive...
Every tap, swipe and click we make on our phones, tablets and laptops is being recorded by big tech firms. This is often called surveillance capitalism – a network of products and services we use every day which sucks up large quantities of data abou...
While we are away over the Christmas break, here’s a classic episode from the Matters of Life and Death vault. There has been a flood of highly significant if poorly reported developments in embryo research in recent years, all of which raise new and...
Many evangelical Christians remain uncomfortable about engaging with the Biblical narrative, in both Old and New Testaments, around evil, Satan, spiritual forces and demonic power. And even more so in trying to identify their malign hand behind moder...
This week’s episode picks up on our last conversation with paediatrician Julie Maxwell from 2023, and in particular the sweeping changes made to how gender-questioning children are treated in Britain in the last year. A weighty official report by an...
MPs in the House of Commons passed Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill last week. It will be several years before Britons are able to ask their doctors to help them kill themselves, but it is a totemic moment nonetheless – the first time Parliamen...
While most Protestant Christians have been at ease with using contraception for generations, there is a growing movement to re-examine the ethics of this, with more and more evangelicals asking if perhaps their Catholic brothers and sisters may have...
Christians normally explain away human-caused suffering by pointing to God giving us free will, and our sinful natures using that to harm ourselves and each other. But what about all the things entirely out of our control which cause so much sadness,...
Francis Collins is one of the leading scientists of his generation, a world-renowned geneticist who led the international project to map the human genome. Later he served under three presidents as the director of the National Institute of Health, whi...
