A Bioethos for Bodies: Respecting a Priceless Resource

The value that willed body donors provide to medical education is priceless. Their precious gift helps to teach anatomy, spatial relationships between morphological structures, anatomical variation, and professionalism to medical students in a way that plastic models, podcasts, and lectures cannot. They are also an important resource for medical research and a wide variety of postgraduate training opportunities. While many body donation programs throughout the world are nonprofit organizations, there are body donation companies in the United States that sell donors for-profit. These “body brokers” have accumulated large profits from this business. It is incongruous that others would profit from such a priceless, freely donated gift. To prevent this incongruity, it is proposed that the international anatomical community develop a normative culture (a bioethos) for body donation programs. This would involve the conscious and systematic development of ethical principles for the day-to-day policies and practices of institutions that collect and use human bodies. With the development of this bioethos, a cultural shift in how donors are treated would occur and, over time, this would become the normal practice. These principles would become fundamental and foundational for the procurement and use of priceless human tissues.     

The Use of Time by Academic and Related Staff

This paper reviews surveys of the use of time by academic staff between 1962 and 1994. It reports on the findings of a time diary survey in 1994 of the use of time by academic and academic-related staff at British'old'universities during working weeks in term-time and vacation. The results of the time diary survey are analysed according to respondents'sex, staff grade, type of week, age, type of work, and time when work took place. The results are compared with results of previous surveys, and trends through time are suggested. In conclusion, the paper considers the recent mass expansion of higher education, the effects of this in increasing the workload of university staff, and measures to ameliorate this situation.     

Themenheft: Datenintegration

Ohne Zusammenfassung