The American chestnut is basically defunct, unless science can rescue it. Genetic manipulation may be the answer.

Given the well-known environmental and health risks of oil and gas drilling, oil and gas giants that enter developing nations routinely offset these risks with charitable investments. Are these investments sufficient? Do the funds go where they are needed? Answering this question raises ethical issues that need greater attention.

In the nearly three months since the United States Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, doctors have reported increased in demand for sterilization by female patients. This interest in permanent contraception li...

It’s back-to-school season in the United States, the third one during the Covid pandemic, but the first in which all schoolchildren are eligible for Covid vaccines. Yet fewer than a third of children ages 5 to 11 are fully vaccinated, while the percentage of those under 5 who have started–let alone completed–vaccination is in the low single digits. Why? The answers are complicated.

What constitutes a medical emergency for a pregnant patient? ER clinicians in states with abortion bans need to know.

Billionaire Mark Cuban and physician Alex Oshmyansky recently launched the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company (MCCPDC), an online pharmacy that sells generic prescription medicines at significantly lower prices than other sources. But the acclaim for the pharmacy may eclipse attention to the longstanding structural problems of the pharmaceutical industry and MCCPDC’s role in it.

Over the last two years, China has updated some regulations on human genetic engineering and assisted reproduction and established a national committee to guide and supervise bioethics nationwide. But there are legal gaps in some of the regulations and tension between competing values: the desire to encourage new research and to potentially inhibit it by imposing stricter ethics regulations.

In rural Virginia, where I live, there is strong support for the right to own and carry guns. For more than a decade, I have shared public health, mental health, and other scientific findings with the leadership of a statewide Second Amendment rights advocacy group, especially regarding the leading number of deaths by firearms: suicide. We do not agree on what firearms laws and policies might be or do to prevent suicides, but we have sustained our conversations and respectfully learned from each other’s point of view. Such conversations are hard to have.

Health care and society will strive to find ways to undercut crude bans inconsistent with perceived medical need and professional duty.

What are the current and future potential uses of nonhuman primates in research? The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is examining this question.