The television show The Good Doctor has always focused on issues of diversity and inclusion in medicine from its storylines to its casting. This week’s episode “Irresponsible Salad Bar Practices” asked an important question: Is medical practice inherently racist?

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

Earlier this month, The Seattle Times published an op-ed by Samuel Browd, medical director of Seattle Children’s Sport Concussion Program, on the risks of brain injury in youth sports. Dr. Browd acknowledged troubling research on the dangers of repetitive brain trauma, but also emphasized that mil...

The advent of social media technology has opened many new avenues of research in population health, demographics, psychology, and the social sciences. It is crucial to consider whether researchers conducting observational research using social media need to obtain consent from their research subjects...

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 �...

The Hastings Center is working with the World Conference of Science Journalists to organize a pre-conference symposium, “New Genetic Technologies: Ethical Debates and Global Science Policy.” The 10th World Conference of Science Journalists, which will take place in San Francisco on October 26 ...

The Hastings Center teamed up with the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) to create three sessions on gene editing for its annual meeting in Orlando on April 20. In addition, Hastings Center research scholar Nancy Berlinger was a panelist on a session concerning health care for refugees an...

When the Tribeca Film Festival canceled its controversial screening of Vaxxed, a “documentary” (with scare-quotes) alleging a Centers for Disease Control cover-up of the debunked vaccine-autism link, it vindicated what scientists have collectively been saying for years: There’s nothing t...

The first time the Dr. Oz show called me, I was simply too tired to deal. The story of Caster Semenya — the track athlete whose sex had been called into question — had hit the international news the week before, and since then, as an expert on atypical sex, I had done 25 media interviews....

Last week, the journal Human Nature published via open access an article I wrote following a year of historical research. That article, “Darkness’s Descent on the American Anthropological Association: A Cautionary Tale,” traces how, in 2000 to 2002, leaders in the American Anthropological Assoc...

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...

I’ve got an idea I’m just dying to pitch to the FDA.