Patricia A. King, JD, Professor Emerita of Georgetown Law, has been named the 2021 recipient of The Bioethics Founders’ Award, formerly the Henry Knowles Beecher Award. The award, given by The Hastings Center, recognizes individuals from around the world who have made substantial, sustained contri...

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The Hastings Center is pleased to welcome the inaugural Sadler Scholars, a select group of six doctoral students with research interests relevant to bioethics who are from racial and ethnic communities underrepresented in this field.

Preeminent science researcher and science policy expert Gilbert S. Omenn, MD, PhD., and national nonprofit leader Martha A. Darling have made a major gift supporting “trusted and trustworthy scientific innovation” at The Hastings Center, the pioneering ethics research center.

TRANSCRIPT: February 9, 2021

The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of 14 new Fellows.

Robert M. Veatch, a bioethics pioneer and the first research associate at The Hastings Center, died on November 9. An overarching theme was his commitment to human rights.

FOUR STEPS TO PROTECT COMMUNITIES FROM COVID-19 AND RESTORE THE ECONOMY

The procurement of human plasma as a potential therapy for Covid-19 is one of the latest examples of bioethics nationalism, defined by Jonathan Moreno in this blog as “distinct bioethics standards [which] are formally proclaimed as a matter of right by a sovereign state.” The race for a Covid cure pushes at the weak seams in the international liberal order in much the same way that Covid appears to be pushing at health care systems.

The Hastings Center is saddened by the death of Albert Jonsen, a leader in the field of bioethics, on October 21 at the age of 89. He was a Hastings Center fellow and a recipient of The Hastings Center’s 2017 Henry Knowles Beecher Award for lifetime achievement in bioethics.

Albert R. Jonsen, a pioneer of medicine and a founder of the field of medical ethics, died peacefully in his home on October 21 at 89. We first met in 1973, when I was a medical student and I was interested in medical ethics. He gave me the best career advice I have ever received. “Don’t do it,” he said. “Finish your medical training first. If you don’t have the same credentials as the doctors, and share their world, they won’t listen.”

With all of the tumult surrounding the coronavirus and the upcoming presidential election, few people likely noticed that three important figures in bioethics, medical history, and medical sociology recently died within a month of one another. But for those of us who work in these fields, the deaths...

The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the winner of the 2020 David Roscoe Award for an Early-Career Essay on Science, Ethics, and Society.

The Hastings Center and colleagues mourn the loss of Dan W. Brock, philosopher and bioethicist, on September 26, at the age  of 83. He was the Frances Glessner Lee Professor Emeritus of Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School and founding Director of the Harvard Program in Ethics and Health. He wa...

The Hastings Center is saddened by the death of Renée C. Fox on September 23 at the age of 92. A Hastings Center Fellow, she was Professor Emerita of sociology and Annenberg Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

Covid isn’t merely overshadowing the drug overdose crisis—it’s directly worsening it.

The global crisis created by the coronavirus pandemic and the rush to create and distribute a vaccine widely hoped to be a “silver bullet” that can facilitate a return to “normalcy” threatens to upend seven decades of assumptions about bioethical norms.

In many ways, black bioethics can be explained very simply as the exploration and interrogation of any event, ideal, technological advancement, person, or institution that directly or indirectly affects the health or well-being of black (loosely defined) individuals or the black population. Black bioethics is taking what we do in bioethics and specifically applying it to black people. But in other ways black bioethics is more than this; it is a rebellion against bioethics.

With some reluctance, I’ve come to the sad realization the COVID-19 pandemic has been a stress test for bioethics, a field of study that intersects medicine, law, the humanities and the social sciences. As both a physician and medical ethicist, I arrived at this conclusion after spending months at what was once the epicenter of the pandemic: New York City. I was overseeing a 24/7 bioethics consultation service.

In his recent JAMA article, Donald Berwick eloquently describes what he termed the “moral determinants of health,” by which he meant a strong sense of social solidarity in which people in the United States would “depend on each other for securing the basic circumstances of healthy lives,” reflecting a “moral law within.” Berwick’s work should serve as a call to action for bioethicists and clinical ethicists to consider what they can do to be forces of broad moral change in their institutions.

We have reached a very sad, painful moment in the United States. It feels like a cascade of calamities, one compounding the next. An infectious disease pandemic that we cannot yet cure has precipitated an economic crisis. An episode of police brutality against a black man has added the name George Floyd to a long list of victims of unfair policing practices in black communities. Bioethicists have not been doing enough in our professional capacities to actively denounce or address the persistent problems of structural racism. We invite our fellow bioethics colleagues to join us in candid, uncomfortable conversations about what we can and should be doing differently.

George Floyd could not breathe while his neck was trapped under the knee of a police officer for nearly nine minutes. Yet despite the impressive scholarship of bioethics on ventilation and other technologies that prolong human breathing capabilities, it is largely silent on the suffocating effects of racism. Bioethics must speak out against racial injustice.

It takes less time than ever to publish papers. But is quality sacrificed by doing bioethics at warp speed, especially during the Covid pandemic?

Covid-19 is making bioethics more relevant than ever. The ethical dilemmas raised by the pandemic are urgent and heart-wrenching. Who should get a ventilator if we do not have enough? How can we protect the most vulnerable from discrimination in the face of difficult triage decisions? How do we weigh individual liberty against the public interest of keeping people confined? While such questions are not new for bioethicists, the need to answer them urgently, globally, and in very concrete settings, creates unprecedented circumstances. Is this an opportunity for bioethics to learn some important lessons? What should post-Covid bioethics look like?

Dilemmas that clinicians face in the coronavirus pandemic–who gets the ventilator, the 80-year-old grandmother or the 20-year-old student?–are the bread and butter of mainstream bioethics. In medical school, my classmates and I memorized the four principles (beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and autonomy), which we were told would help us make hard clinical decisions in ethically ambiguous terrain. But Covid-19 shows that medical ethics means much more than what generally falls under bioethics. Medical ethics is deeply political, and to act ethically in medicine means engaging the larger context in which it operates.

It’s been painful to watch health leaders twist themselves into moral knots denying that recently created ventilator rationing guidance will differentially affect Blacks, Latinx, and other people of color. On television, in newspapers, and on listservs, when the predicted disproportionate impacts of these policies are raised, some bioethicists-often white, stonewall. Or repeat a policy’s assertions that race, ethnicity, disability, etc. are irrelevant to care decisions. Or default to the intent of the policymakers.

Joel Michael Reynolds, The Hastings Center’s Rice Family Fellow in Bioethics and Humanities and an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, is launching a new journal: The Journal of Philosophy of Disability.

The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of 12 new Fellows. Hastings Center Fellows are a group of more than 200 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed scholarship and public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, science, and techno...

Professionals and the public in China first learned of the jail sentence of He Jiankui from the report of Xinhua News Agency. No information, including any interpretation, was provided by the Court. But the reported words of the sentence are so ambiguous as to leave room for different interpretations. We believe that the public has the right to know more than Xinhua News Agency reported.

The Compassionate Use Advisory Committee, headed by Hastings Center Fellow Arthur Caplan, of NYU Langone, received the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the Food and Drug Administration’s Innovation Award. The committee was recognized for transforming how expanded access requests, also known as compassionate use requests, are granted by drug developers.

Are we ethically obliged to eat less meat? Bioethicists consider that question, and their role in addressing it.

The Collaborative for Palliative Care, in partnership with The Hastings Center, University of Rochester Finger Lakes Geriatrics Education Center (FLGEC), and Calvary Hospital, will host its annual conference this December 11th at Iona College, New Rochelle, N.Y., titled The Next Generation of Palliative Care: Integrating Palliative and Social Ethics of Care.”

Tremendous wealth beside abject poverty, a widening income gap, the vast disparity between the life prospects of a black child and a white child -- structural injustices are pervasive in our country and many places in the world. What does bioethics have to say about these problems? The Hastings Center has committed to intensifying it efforts to address structural injustices. Ideas for doing so emerged in a plenary session organized by Hastings at the annual meeting of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.

Bioethicists from the U.S., Canada, and other countries gathered two weeks ago in Pittsburgh for the annual meeting of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.  Here are five themes that emerged:

Ruth Faden, PhD, MPH, founder of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the Philip Franklin Wagley Professor of Bioethics, was named the recipient of The Hastings Center’s 2019 Henry Knowles Beecher Award for lifetime achievement in bioethics.

The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the winner of the inaugural David Roscoe Award for an Early-Career Essay on Science, Ethics, and Society.

In his last article, completed just before his death, Hastings Center cofounder Daniel Callahan outlined his vision for the future of bioethics. It is “based on the necessity of finding the best balance between the benefits and harms of progress.” he wrote. “I chose progress for a simple reaso...

New book edited by Hastings Center scholars explores fundamental questions about the nature and well-being of human beings at a time when a revolutionary new biotechnology could permanently change the human species.

Daniel Callahan's final interview was with an undergraduate eager to learn about bioethics. "I could tell that bioethics was far more than a job to him," she writes.

I will say it: Dan Callahan is the most important person in Bioethics. For his ideas; for his role in creating and nurturing The Hastings Center; and for his ability to spot, encourage, and motivate talent.

There is a strange but charming tradition in the world of classical music of citing musical pedigrees. It’s not unlike the familiar parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but carried out with far greater seriousness.

Daniel Callahan, a national voice for responsible health and science who pioneered the field of bioethics, died on July 16, three days before his 89th birthday. A prodigious author and one of the world’s preeminent bioethics scholars, Callahan cofounded The Hastings Center, the world’s first bio...

I have been leading a weekly ethics class for middle- and early-high school-aged youth. My preconceived assumptions about the abilities of adolescents to discuss bioethics issues have been dispelled by the depth and nuance of their insights.

What does it mean to live well on a warming planet? And as the climate changes, how might health care, education, and other sectors support, or obstruct, our ability to respond? The answers to these profound, and profoundly bioethical, questions will critically influence human well-being in this century and beyond. A group of scientists, educators, and bioethicists convened at The Hastings Center recently to consider these questions and begin an interdisciplinary conversation on how bioethics might address the challenges posed by climate change.

Hastings President, Mildred Solomon, applauds University of Pennsylvania bioethicists and other bioethics leaders for drafting a letter of historic importance, intended to assist lawyers representing immigrant children being abused and denied their basic human rights at the U.S. border. Act now and sign the letter by 2 pm, June 25.

How might bioethics help address the threats posed by climate change? A Hastings Center meeting scoped out the options.

As the opioid crisis reaches a fever pitch, public perception often lumps chronic pain patients and opioid abusers under the stigma-tainted umbrella of drug user. But the full picture of human interaction with pain, pain management, and addiction is far from black and white. In its most recent narrative symposium, Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics published personal stories from those living with chronic pain or opioid abuse disorder. Both groups comment on their need for medical treatment and ethical care.

The protections of GINA play a key role in the decision of many of my healthy patients to decide to undergo genetic testing. My criticism is that GINA is unfair to people who might suffer discrimination in health. insurance for non-genetic reasons.

As the American population ages and dementia is on the rise, The Hastings Center is embarking on pathbreaking research to explore foundational questions associated with the dementia trajectory and the concerns of persons facing this terminal condition. This new research is made possible by a major g...

Hastings Center president Mildred Solomon delivered the 2019 Wiese Lecture in Ethics and Medical Humanities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston on May 2. Her talk, titled “Responsible Science Amidst Civic Discord: Can Bioethics Help?” focused on the need for examining values and engaging...

Decades of research into the genetics of autism have revealed a complex relationship. Not only is there no single gene for autism, numerous genetic changes can underlie the condition. With this intricate genetic story has come an increasingly nuanced picture of how people with autism and their famil...

Hastings Center president Mildred Solomon and the board of directors are saddened by the passing of Stanley S. Bergen, Jr., a member of the Center’s board of directors from 1985 to 2004; he was board chair for the last six years of his term. He died peacefully at home in Maine on April 24.

Breeders have worked for centuries to produce animals, such as greyhounds or racehorses, with traits for peak sport performance. Today, gene editing technologies such as CRISPR could accomplish in one generation what used to take decades: the creation of faster, stronger, or more resilient sports ani...

This year, The Hastings Center will celebrate its 50th anniversary. The Center was first located on the second floor of my house in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., with some overflow paperwork stored at the home of my neighborhood friend and cofounder, Willard Gaylin.

A preliminary investigation by Guangdong Province in China of He Jiankui, the scientist who created the world’s first gene-edited babies, found that “He had intentionally dodged supervision, raised funds and organized researchers on his own to carry out the human embryo gene-editing intended for ...

The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of 18 new Fellows. Hastings Center Fellows are a group of individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed scholarship and/or public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, life sciences research, and th...

The introduction of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) as a means of preventing HIV infections in those at high risk marked a significant step in the fight against the virus. PrEP involves taking the HIV medicine Truvada or a generic version daily. It is now gradually becoming available across the world...

In their single-minded venture of “producing” (shengchan, in their own word) the world’s first gene-edited babies, He Jiankui and his associates have posed numerous and daunting ethical challenges to China and the world. They can be mapped or identified through these four categories:

The Hastings Center’s staff and board of directors are profoundly saddened by the passing on January 3 of their friend, colleague, and trustee, Richard Payne. A neurologist, Dr. Payne was also an international expert in palliative care and pain management and care near the end of life. He advanced ...

The National Rifle Association recently condemned doctors who are against gun violence, telling us to stay in our lane. Reducing preventable deaths is the main lane for doctors.

When the world’s first research on editing the genes of human embryos by Chinese scientists  was published in an international journal in 2015, a report in the New York Times characterised the key issue involved as “a scientific ethical divide between China and West.” Earlier this year, an art...

In response to news of the world’s first babies born in China from gene-edited embryos, Sam Sternberg, a CRISPR/Cas9 researcher at Columbia University, spoke for many when he said “I’ve long suspected that scientists, somewhere, would rush to claim the ‘prize’ of being first to apply CRISPR...

Several DNA tests claim to predict how well particular psychiatric medications are likely to work for individual patients with depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. And 23andMe just received approval to market the first direct-to-consumer pharmacogenomics report, which detects 33 variants ...

Artificial intelligence and robotics are beginning to transform nearly every sector and facet of modern life. While the benefits and expected benefits could be vast, there are also concerns about privacy, accountability, transparency, biases, safety,  and other issues. How can we reap the benefits o...

What do many transgender persons, farmworkers, homeless persons, people with disabilities, and many other persons in the United States have in common? One answer: they/we live and work in spaces lacking safe, accessible, and adequate toilet facilities. Think about that for a minute. Think about how y...

What do we really care about in sport, and how does the reckless use of biomedical enhancements undermine those values?

Today’s young people will inevitably grapple with decisions about emerging biotechnologies, such as whether new gene editing technologies should be used to choose the traits of their children or enhance their intelligence. The Hastings Center’s inaugural bioethics workshop for high school teacher...

Dan W. Brock has been named the recipient of The Hastings Center’s 2018 Henry Knowles Beecher Award.

I suspected the two alibi witnesses were lying. The accused in the case, Alexei Melnikov, coached long distance walkers and runners for ARAF, the All-Russia Athletic Federation. Lilya Shobukova and her husband testified that they handed over 150,000 Euros in blackmail money to Melnikov in Moscow in J...

It has long been an ethical line not to be crossed: genetically enhancing humans – making us faster, smarter, or even kinder – in a way that is passed down to future generations. But that line maybe fading. Today, there is active discussion around the world about whether we should make heritable ...

Hastings Center cofounder and President Emeritus Daniel Callahan was awarded the 2018 Edmund Pellegrino Medal for Healthcare Ethics. The award, given annually by Samford University’s Center for Faith and Health, honors individuals recognized nationally as leaders for their contributions to health c...

Join us to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein with a panel discussion that will explore the novel from the perspectives of bioethics, literary criticism, and science fiction. Speakers include Victor Lavalle, associate professor of writing at Columbia University and author o...

How should we think about the ethics of everyday interpersonal relationships focused on giving and receiving care? When home is also a care setting, how can family members and other caregivers best provide care to older adults? What protections are needed for migrant workers who provide care in the h...

Nearly 11 million Americans use long-term care for help with daily tasks such as bathing and preparing meals, and yet few have private long-term care insurance. Thus, most of the cost of this care, which averages $140,000 a year, falls on family members and Medicaid. The scope of the problem and what...

I founded a bioethics club at my high school in the beginning of my sophomore year. From a very young age, I always considered it important to do the “right thing.” However, as I grew older and was confronted with more complex situations, I realized that the “right thing” is not always obviou...

It is legal and common for physicians to prescribe drugs for uses other than those for which they are approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But in a letter in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, Hastings Center research scholar Karen J. Maschke points to the important role ...

Hastings Center research scholar Carolyn P. Neuhaus participated in a panel discussion on Martha’s Vineyard on July 12 to discuss a proposal to release genetically modified mice to curb the spread of Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses. A Netflix film crew recorded the event, which featured...

Twice upon a time, there was a girl who died. The death certificate that New Jersey issued to 17-year-old Jahi McMath on June 22 was the second one issued for her. California issued McMath’s first death certificate in December 2013.  McMath had been admitted to Children’s Hospital Oakland on...

The idea that there’s a normal human body has traditionally been “the glue that renders any given modern concept of health, illness, or disease coherent,” writes Joel Michael Reynolds, the Rice Family Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities, in the journal of Philosophy, Ethics, Humanities, and ...

What are the right and wrong ways to speak about disability? Joel Michael Reynolds The Hastings Center’s Rice Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities, was an invited speaker on a science ethics panel at the 2018 Communication Science National Workshop in Boston, where he helped b...

The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine released Physician- Assisted Death: Scanning the Landscape, proceedings from a two-day workshop convened by the National Academies in February to take a comprehensive look at the current landscape of physician-assisted death in the United S...

It’s a little-known and rarely discussed fact of medical practice that doctors value the ability to love our patients. If the thought of doctors loving patients makes you queasy, be reassured. I’m not talking about romantic love but the visceral sense of goodwill and impulse to service that draws...

Two distinguished bioethics scholars and Fellows of The Hastings Center died recently: H. Tristram Englehardt Jr. and Baruch Brody. They were among the early leaders of the new field of bioethics developing in the 1970s.

The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was a mother separated from her child by a state policy of terror. During the 1930s, she and other mothers would gather outside a Leningrad prison, desperate for information. One day, after 17 months of “waiting in prison queues,” another woman whispered to her, �...

Genomics, new forms of assisted reproduction, neuroscience—these and other technologies give us transformative powers that we are just starting to realize. Nearly every report or commission that seeks to inform the responsible use of such biotechnologies ends with the same recommendation: we must i...

Research Scholar Nancy Berlinger is doing original research at The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center on the shores of Lake Como, Italy, as part of a selective academic writing residency. The Bellagio Center supports senior level policy-makers, nonprofit leaders, and others whose work promotes hu...

At a time when facts are distorted, disregarded, and ignored in policy making and political discourse, the need in Washington for seekers and defenders of truth has perhaps never been greater. I discussed the state of affairs with Representative Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois who prides himsel...

Where do we draw the line between safe and dangerous applications of CRISPR, the gene editing technology that allows us to make permanent, even heritable, changes to the genetic code? How should scientists approach public engagement before field testing genetically modified crops in and around commun...

Technologies are transforming the planet and its inhabitants, human and nonhuman, calling out for assessment and wise decision-making. Yet trust in science is eroding and polarization deeply threatens our ability to solve collective problems, especially ones emerging in science and health policy R...

Eric Kandel, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine who has done groundbreaking work on the molecular mechanisms of memory, spoke at The Hastings Center on May 22 about the differences between normal age-related memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as the possibility that ...

Are you, as caregivers in a twenty-first century health system, helping your patients and families to make fully informed decisions about the treatments they want and that are likely to be in their best interest?  Or, like so many clinicians working in modern health care systems today, are your pati...

The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of 11 new Fellows. Hastings Center Fellows are a group of individuals of outstanding accomplishment, whose work has informed scholarship and/or public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, life sciences research, and th...

When is it acceptable for health care professionals to refuse to provide a treatment because it violates their conscience? The implications of recent developments in federal and state governments that increase protections for conscientious objection were the focus of a panel discussion in New York Ci...

Defining Death: Organ Transplantation and the 50-Year Legacy of the Harvard Report on Brain Death, the 2018 Harvard Medical School’s Annual Bioethics Conference, took place from April 11 to 13 in Boston. An annual event of the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics, this year’s confe...

That was one of the many questions explored at a public event at the New York Academy of Sciences on May 21, cosponsored by The Hastings Center, the Aspen Brain Institute and the New York Academy of Sciences. “The Enhanced Human: Risks and Opportunities” examined existing and emerging enhancemen...

If all athletes had access to the same performance-enhancing drugs, wouldn’t that make competitions fair? If the purpose of sport is to maximize performance, shouldn’t we welcome technologies that do that? Mildred Z. Solomon, president of The Hastings Center, spoke with President Emeritus Thomas ...

Little noticed in the United States but a big deal in France, President Emmanuel Macron announced in January that he is creating a bioethics commission to review the country’s policies on a wide range of subjects, including human reproduction, euthanasia, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. ...

Not since Rene Descartes gazed from his garret window in early 17th-century Paris and wondered whether those were men or hats and coats covering “automatic machines” he saw roaming the streets has the issue of personal identity and your cranium been of such import. Descartes feared a world that h...

Nominations have been extended to January 22, 2018 for The Hastings Center Cunniff-Dixon Physician Awards, which recognize physicians in the United States who give exemplary care to patients nearing the end of life. The awards commend doctors  who provide outstanding care at the bedside, serve as mo...

How can secondary school science teachers help their students think critically about the social and ethical implications of recent advances in gene editing?  The Hastings Center is inviting these teachers to apply for a three-day workshop next summer, which will focus on issues raised by CRISPR/cas9...

Artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces could revolutionize the treatment of paralysis, schizophrenia, and more. But these neurotechnologies must respect and preserve people’s privacy, identity, agency, and equality, states an article in the journal Nature, whose authors include H...

Daniel Callahan, cofounder and president emeritus of The Hastings Center, organized a daylong meeting to explore urgent issues in global health and discuss ways that bioethics can help address them. The meeting, which took place at the Center on November 1, focused on the stark disparities in access ...

Albert Jonsen and Edward Frank Shotter have been named the recipients of The Hastings Center’s 2017 Henry Knowles Beecher Award for lifetime achievement in bioethics.

Is it appropriate for physicians to help patients end their lives? In the current issue of Southern Medical Journal, Hastings Center cofounder Daniel Callahan and Lydia S. Dugdale, an associate professor at Yale School of Medicine, argue that this practice threatens the public good.

Following recent advances in gene editing technologies, including the first recorded use of CRISPR/Cas9 in human embryos in the United States, The Hastings Center cosponsored an international conference, “Genome Editing: Biomedical and Ethical Perspectives,” which took place in Belgrade, Serbia f...

My  colleague Susan Reverby surely got this right: It is time to consider anew what to do about Dr. J. Marion Sims, that is, what to do about the New York City statue that commemorates him, and accordingly, about the medicine, history, and bioethics that have remembered and/or revered him. The works...

Natalie Kofler, a postdoctoral research scientist at Yale University, visited The Hastings Center earlier this summer to explore the ethical questions surrounding the use of gene editing technologies in the environment. Kofler shared insights from the Editing Nature summit, which brought together a m...

The Hastings Center is saddened by the death of John Robertson, a Hastings Center Fellow, on July 5. Robertson, 74, was the Vinson & Elkins Chair at the University of Texas School of Law at Austin.

Populism has been influencing public discourse and election outcomes in several countries recently. The degree to which populism has a sway on elections varies with the electoral system in each country but the impact is likely to be substantial regardless of electoral outcomes.

In a recent  article in the Hastings Center Report two leading bioethicists, Mildred Solomon and Bruce Jennings, called on fellow bioethicists to “come to the aid of civil liberties and political rights,” and to use their scholarship to “clarify how . . .  individual well-being is...

In their paper “Bioethics and Populism: How Should Our Field Respond?” Mildred Solomon and Bruce Jennings have sparked an important debate about the role of bioethics in our current political climate. They warn of the risk to constitutional democracy posed by the rise of authoritarian populist re...

Franklin Miller’s recent post in Bioethics Forum responded to our essay, “Bioethics and Populism: How Should Our Field Respond?”  in the current issue of the Hastings Center Report. There, we suggested that rising global authoritarian populism presents opportunities for (and, one might even s...

In the wake of the Trump administration and populist movements abroad, Mildred Solomon and Bruce Jennings published a provocative essay, “Bioethics and Populism: How Should our Field Respond?” in the March-April issue of the Hastings Center Report. Their call for the field of bioethics to respond...

The Hastings Center welcomes applications to its visiting scholars program, open to students, scholars, and professionals working on independent bioethics research. We offer self-catering accommodations for stays of one week or more.  Subsidies are available. Applications are reviewed on a rolling b...

The smoke and the Sturm und Drang haven’t cleared from the greatest upset since Harry Truman defeated Tom Dewey in 1948 but it’s still possible to read some tea leaves about the role of bioethics in the new administration. To start at the top, one feature of bioethics that has set it apart from o...

Academic bioethics has never been popular with Republicans. Libertarians dislike academic bioethics because it seems too elitist and anti-free market.  Religious thinkers worry it is technocratic, soulless and crassly utilitarian. Now with Trumpism add a populist disdain for expertise, experts and t...

The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of eight new Fellows. Hastings Center Fellows are a group of individuals of outstanding accomplishment, whose work has informed scholarship and/or public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, life sciences research and ...

Leon R. Kass has been named the recipient of The Hastings Center’s 2016 Henry Knowles Beecher Award.

In an 11-hour emergency session on March 23, the North Carolina General Assembly passed the first statewide “bathroom bill” in the nation. The law, known as HB 2, or the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, requires that a person’s biological sex corresponds with the gendered public rest...

The question is as old as the field of bioethics: why does ethics too often not see problems coming and is then forced to play catch-up? Note that I use the phrase “ethics too often,” implying that the difficulty lies with the discipline of ethics itself, not with those who try to understand and...

No names will be named in this essay. Which I guess makes it philosophy.

It’s hard to say what is most horrifying in Carl Elliott’s report in the current issue of Mother Jones of a young man who died caught up in a pharma study run out of the University of Minnesota. That a man considered mentally ill enough to be facing involuntary commitment was considered well enou...

Our Bioethics Forum essay from a little over a month ago has already spawned three further essays. So we’ve asked the editors to indulge us in this single reply and update.

There’s a common misperception that, now that the Johns Hopkins psychologist John Money is gone, so are all the ethical problems with the way people with genital anomalies are treated. Not so.

Using the power of one’s wallet to effect social change: that’s got to be one of the best-loved steps in the beautiful dance we call American democracy. And so leaders in the LBGT activist community have called for a boycott of businesses owned by individuals who contributed to California’s Pro...

An article in this week’s New York Times revealed new evidence of a disturbingly high risk of dementia among National Football League players. Conducted at the University of Michigan and commissioned by the NFL itself, a not-yet-published study reportedly finds that “players ages 30 through 49 sh...

Ah, Beijing, where men are men and women are… women until proven otherwise. As reported in the New York Times, “Organizers of the Beijing Olympics have set up a sex-determination laboratory to evaluate ‘suspect’ female athletes.” According to the Times, “only athletes whose gender has bee...

Why did portraying a married, working, loving, family-oriented, and religious couple with a disabled child bring out consistently negative reactions among the public toward allowing this family access to government-subsidized health care for their children? The answer may lie in a study by the Nation...

A dwarf walks into a bar.

For years, the abortion of fetuses likely to have disabilities has been called “selective abortion,” but, for reasons made clear in Hilde Lindemann’s thoughtful Bioethics Forumreflection on the matter, the practice might better be called “selective parenting.” It fundamentally reflects, aft...

Ever since HIPAA went into effect and I’ve been signing that form over and over at my doctors’ offices, attesting to my knowledge of the law, I’ve been feeling I should turn the tables and make my doctors and their staffs sign some form assuring me they know the limits of that law. The latest s...

Gay marriage is morally unacceptable – here’s why: Supporters of gay marriage undermine the rights of homosexuals because they provoke increased homophobic reactions and political mobilization in an already homophobic society. Sure, gay marriages in themselves harm no one and homophobic reacti...

In a just-published New York Magazine piece, “The Science of Gaydar,” writer David France looks at the growing scientific evidence for innate differences between gay and straight people. France ends by gazing towards the future, and asks the question, “What if prenatal tests were able to show a...

Deborah Costandine and I met in June of 2004, but she didn’t send me the autopsy report of her baby for another year and a half. So I didn’t start looking for more information about what had happened to her until January of 2006. That’s when Deb wrote to say she was wanted some help, so that’...

There’s a scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian that always reminds me of academia. It goes like this: The year is 32 A.D. and Brian, an unwitting doppelganger of Christ, is about to be crucified by the Romans. Judith, Brian’s lover and fellow member of the anti-Roman People’s...