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 a