Representing, Disseminating, and Debating Controversial Bioethical Issues in Literature and Popularised Discourse

The issue starts with Giuseppe De Riso’s analysis of the ‘medical epistemology’ employed by Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children, his first novel and a masterpiece in postcolonial literature. Rushdie’s clinical concerns rely on a metanarrative confounding of invention and reality which cunningly interrogates how cultural and biological knowledge is transmitted in contemporary world, and expresses the author’s artistic preoccupations for the ethical implications of such spreading. The subsequent essays are divided in for sections. The first one, “Beyond limits: ethical dilemmas”, is introduced by Giuliana Garzone, who deals with the ethical implications of cloning, one of the most heated subjects in the public debate on bioethics. More specifically, she looks at the discursive procedures employed in a corpus of worldwide news articles illustrating the implications of the successful cloning of two macaque monkeys in 2018, as well as their attempt at favouring public’s acceptance of such a controversial event in light of rising concerns. This is especially relevant if one considers that the frequent inaccuracies contained in those articles denounces a deontic issue in the way the news was reported by professional journalists. Kim Grego follows suit with an essay considering the dissemination of scientific information about cryonics services, meant to preserve bodies after death and bring them back to life at a later time in the expectation that technology may one day allow so. Grego argues that such technology is ambiguously marketed as if it were not bioethically relevant, and on an often negotiable notion of death which may result in misled choices about life or death by consumers. Drawing on the methodological framework of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis, Jekaterina Nikitina looks at the selective, yet careful, representation of gene-editing in British tabloids and broadsheets in 2017 and 2018, both from a linguistic and discursive point of view, through news reports which could influence public opinion. Dermot Heaney adopts a Computer-Assisted Discourse Studies approach to compare the evaluation strategies present in a corpus of hearings about the doping investigations which occurred during 2016 and 2017, after it was revealed that such practice was indeed very common in British sport, with a corpus of online media coverage. Heaney manages thus to attest the close relationship between politicians and the press and recognises the debt of political committees to media exposure as far as incidence in public life is concerned. Maria Cristina Paganoni closes this section with a contribution to the sensitive debate about the impact of facial recognition technology and related software noting the contrast between the fervent narrative of technological progress adopted by the AI industry, and the more cautious approach of news media on the more questionable aspects of the ethical implications of the man-machine configurations involved in facial recognition technology. Annalisa Zanola opens the second section, “(Bio)ethics in health/medical practice”, taking an approach both diachronic and synchronic to informed consent to scrutinise how it is valued by patients in terms of satisfaction and anxiety. In finding way to assure that informed consent is clearly understood by patients, as it lies at the crossroads of lay, scientific and legal discourses, Zanola suggests that researchers should be aware of the laws which actually enforce the ethical implications of informed consent in any given context. The ideological implications behind the notions of norm and disease is the object of interest of Francesca Santulli who, describing moving in the area of Disorders of Neurodevelopment, points out the difficulties of adopting a model capable of identifying ‘normal’ behaviour in light of each person’s specificities. Roxanne Barbara Doerr has recourse to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in order to investigate the vagueness of the medical ethics expressed through the dissemination of information by medical professionals belonging to the military community, as well as the bioethical contradictions and struggles lying therein. The special interest towards this category derives from its subjects’ ambiguous and unstable positioning on the line between their Hippocratic vocation to take care of others and the oppressive practice of military culture. In addition to CDA, Karen Dwyer also draws on Foucauldian Discourse Analysis to analyse how debates about medical cannabis have influenced the drug use and perception, as well as medical cannabis policy. This may reveal a possible way to incorporate Discourse Analysis into Biomedical and Medical Science Education and help students gain a deeper understanding of bioethical issues. Walter Giordano and Cinzia Giglioni provide the two contributions which make up the third section of the present issue, “Bioethics, health and the market”. Giordano focuses on a corpus of over seventy commercials advertising several drugs authorized by the Food and Drug Administration in the USA to analyse discourses influencing the knowledge of diseases, access to information to drugs and the interaction between patient and physician. There emerges a reduction of the physician’s responsibility, a part of which is loaded onto the shoulders of patients. As a consequence, they are expected to have a more active role in getting informed on their condition, the appropriate drug to treat it and its side effects. Instead, Giglioni deals with the press releases which the pharmaceutical company Mylan has issued to counter the strong criticism it had to face in 2016 for hiking the price of one its most sold drugs. In highlighting the link which financially solid companies create with abstract values correlated to bioethical ethics, Giglioni is able to highlight bolstering as the main communicative strategy used in their annual reports as an apologetic strategy to improve the public perception of the company. “Bioethics and the environment” is the title of the fourth and concluding section of the issue. In it, Paola Catenaccio explores the concealment of the argumentative, self-legitimising strategies employed by major players in the agro-biotech sector in order to justify their operations and technologie. Such strategies rely not on hiding problems, but on the benefits and advantages for human environment, thus making it more difficult for critical opponents to raise uncomfortable questions. Finally, Dissemination strategies are also central in Emanuela Brambilla’s dissertation on three tune guides issued in Australia, Italy and the USA by Greenpeace with the aim of influencing the behaviour of tuna consumers. A close inspection of such guides allows Brambilla to reveal that the necessity to face global bioethical crisis is used in the creation of narratives which, by targeting specific national audiences, manage to arise local action, thus effectively overshadowing the unethical practices of certain tuna brands.