As a public health researcher interested in brain injuries in sports, I was searching for peer-reviewed literature that examined cultural pressures that cause athletes to minimize symptoms of potentially serious injuries when I came across a 1994 article entitled, “A Little Pain Never Hurt Anybody:...

The Hastings Center is announcing an exciting new direction for its journal on research ethics. Beginning with the January-February 2019 issue, the Center will launch Ethics & Human Research (E&HR), a revised and expanded journal that will replace IRB: Ethics & Human Research and will be ...

In 2012, I coauthored a case report about the successful use of dietary supplements in treating a case of male infertility in the American Family Physician. Before it was published, I was surprised to receive a communication asking me to disclose the fact that I had written a textbook on dietary supp...

Scientific journal publishing reached a low point in November, when the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology retracted a study by Gilles-Eric Séralini and colleagues at Caen University in France. The study, published in November 2012, assessed the effect of feeding rats corn genetically modified ...

Family Lose Right-to-Life Case at U.K.’s Highest Court.” “Judges ‘Right’ to Allow Man to Die.” “Widow Loses ‘Withdrawn Treatment’ Case.” These were the headlines on a recent Supreme Court decision in the U.K. about end-of-life decision-makin...

If the mutilated body of one of your research subjects is discovered in a blood-soaked bathroom, who should investigate the death?  If you want to be cleared of blame, it’s useful if the investigation is led by a colleague from your own department.  If you were being paid by a drug company to ...

Over the past month, a petition asking the governor of Minnesota to investigate a research scandal at the University of Minnesota has been steadily gathering momentum.  The scandal in question originated in 2004 with the suicide of Dan Markingson in an AstraZeneca-funded study of antipsychotics. T...

On a recent installment of This American Life, Ira Glass asks this pressing question. Why are rich and powerful people so often the world’s biggest crybabies? Exhibit A: the whining of Wall Street bankers and brokers, who have worked themselves into a frenzy of self-pity over the cosmically unfair ...