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.

In an age of new biotechnologies, from gene editing to neural enhancement, is there a tension in the idea that humans have special value because they’re somehow different or exceptional in nature? Dwelling on the idea that there’s something extraordinary about being human – and ignoring our kinship with life on our planet – is becoming a problem, says Melanie Challenger, an award-winning British writer and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics who has been a visiting scholar at The Hastings Center in November.

Neither one of us expected to be talking about Hannah Arendt at the Vatican. We had been invited to give talks at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on the scientific and ethical challenges posed by personalized medicine. Walking across the cobblestones of St. Peter’s Square we began to discuss how society regulates biomedical research. Are institutional review boards capable of dealing with innovations like personalized medicine? Are they too bound by regulations? Can they ask larger questions of meaning when simply following the rules won't suffice? And most worrisome, has their bureaucratic function caused them to mistake regulatory compliance for ethical reflection?

I started writing this on my way back to New York from the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, held in Hong Kong November 27 to 29, where the breaking news of the alleged world’s first birth of genetically edited babies loomed large. The surprising news both reinforced and undercut...

And what does “humanize” even mean? Those are among the questions being explored in a new Hastings Center project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, on the ethical oversight of research with human-animal chimeras, laboratory animals that contain human cells.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, a new Hastings Center project will examine the rationale and challenges of public deliberation on the release of genetically modified insects, mammals, and other organisms into the environment.

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...

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...

Frankenstein, published 200 years ago this month, asked what it means to be human. In the age of CRISPR and artificial intelligence, that question endures. On Public Radio International’s “Science Friday,” Hastings Center director of research Josephine Johnston participated in a dis...

Climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the advancement of gene editing and other transformative biotechnologies pose enormous global challenges. How can we promote responsible science, good governance, and opportunities for public engagement at time when anti-intellectualism on the rise and socie...

Possibly as many as half of the coral reefs that existed 100 years ago have been destroyed, sometimes by removing them, covering them up, or blowing them up, but mostly just because of climate change, which is gradually heating the water and making it more acidic. The solution everyone who cares abou...

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...

Hastings Center research scholar Gregory Kaebnick participated in a multidisciplinary workshop at the University of Montana in Missoula on May 25 – 26 to examine the potential for using genome editing to conserve plants and animals that are threatened with extinction. The meeting addressed scie...

What do scientists and engineers owe to their creations? What responsibility do they bear for harms that their creations cause? How does being responsible for our creations change us? These are the central questions in an essay by Josephine Johnston, The Hastings Center’s director of research, in �...

Artificial intelligence, gene editing, synthetic biology – these are among the new technologies discussed at Governance of Emerging Technology 2017, organized by Arizona State University College of Law and cosponsored by The Hastings Center, which took place in Phoenix on May 17 – 19. Hastings Ce...

Hastings Center president Mildred Solomon  delivered a keynote address at the Future of Medicine conference, a national health care conference celebrating the convergence of technology, bioethics, population health, and preventive medicine. The event, presented by Centura Health in Denver on May 11 ...

Seated on a stage with a museum model of a dodo and a pair of mammoth tusks, a panel of experts debated what is exciting and what is frightening about scientific efforts to bring back extinct species — particularly those lost because of human activity.

This used to be a purely academic question: If you could know, years before you had symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, that you were likely to develop it–and there was no treatment or cure–would you want this information? Now it is a real dilemma because there are brain scans and other biomark...

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...

Gregory Kaebnick recently suggested in Bioethics Forum that apparent differences between induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells and embryos created by somatic cell nuclear transfer may not be all that relevant from a moral point of view. As Kaebnick explains, both techniques involve the reprogramming o...

Embryo banking is not an idea whose time has come. But at some point it might be, so a little ethical hyperventilating about the prospect is useful.