Interesting Conference

While surfing in preparation for an upcoming trip this summer, I just stumbled across this announcement for the SCIENCE, LAW, & ETHICS conference (MAY 29 - JUNE 2, 2005), a UNESCO-affiliated event being hosted by Haifa University. (Haifa U., you may recall from Ethan's and David Bernstein's posting, is currently the object of an odious boycott from the profs union in the UK.  The boycott is not only dumb, but stupid also!  After all, Haifa is by most reports the most ethnically integrated city and university in Israel. )

Anyway, the focus of the Haifa conference appears to be how to think about medical ethics; one day focuses on research conducted during the Holocaust and the implications of its use; a second day looks at issues of a similar sort that arose in the sixty years since the end of WWII, and the last day of the conference examines bio-ethics issues looming over the future.  Fascinating. 

I have a feeling my scholarship is going to take a turn in this vague direction at some point, in large part because I'm concerned about the inescapable effects that neuroscience is going to have on criminal law issues.  Jim Holt's piece in the Sunday NYT furnishes a rough sketch of what that temporal landscape may look like.