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Research Ethics

Bioethics Forum Essay
doctors in operating room

ChatGPT Just Makes Stuff Up: A Conversation on a Controversial Topic

I am currently writing up the results of a retrospective chart review of patients’ consent or refusal for medical students to perform pelvic exams on them when they’re under anesthesia and sedated. I asked ChatGPT to summarize the ethical issues and tell me what sources it used to generate its response.
Read ChatGPT Just Makes Stuff Up: A Conversation on a Controversial Topic
Bioethics Forum Essay

Clicking ‘Accept’ Is Not Informed Consent

A recent Science article published the results of an experiment conducted on 20 million LinkedIn users over five years involving the “People You May Know” algorithm. None of these people knew they were part of an experiment, nor did they consent to participate.
Read Clicking ‘Accept’ Is Not Informed Consent
Bioethics Forum Essay

Research Ethics Meets the New Marketplace

A bill for $476 for inquiring about participating in a medical research study? This is no joke.
Read Research Ethics Meets the New Marketplace
Bioethics Forum Essay

Studying Covid Vaccines in the Youngest Kids

Children have suffered both physical and mental illness during the pandemic. Nearly 200 children in the United States have died. Acute mental health crises increased during the pandemic. Getting children immunized is the best way to get back to normal. We suggest an option that would permit children under 5 to be vaccinated without waiting until traditional prospective randomized trials can be completed.
Read Studying Covid Vaccines in the Youngest Kids
Bioethics Forum Essay

Human Embryo Research Beyond 14 Days? International Perspectives

In late May, an international organization eliminated a 40-year prohibition against human embryo research beyond 14 days. The legal and scientific consequences will vary around the world.
Read Human Embryo Research Beyond 14 Days? International Perspectives
COVID-19
A woman Sneezing

Could the Common Cold Help Stop Covid-19? We Need to Know–Now.

In an essay published in Scientific American, we call for immediate and intensive research into the possibility that exposure to one of the coronaviruses that cause the common cold could decrease the severity of Covid-19, and could be leveraged to expand what’s been called “pre-existing” immunity to the disease by deliberate transmission of common cold coronaviruses. Here, we expand on our proposal.
Read Could the Common Cold Help Stop Covid-19? We Need to Know–Now.
Bioethics Forum Essay

Fair Compensation for Rare Vaccine Harms

As multiple Covid vaccine candidates enter clinical trials and hopefully move closer to approval, one important unanswered question is how to compensate the rare cases of serious vaccine harm.
Read Fair Compensation for Rare Vaccine Harms
Bioethics Forum Essay

Accepting the Challenge: Covid Vaccine Challenge Trials Can Be Ethically Justified

The Covid-19 pandemic is unlikely to end until there is a safe, effective, and widely distributed vaccine. How soon can researchers achieve this goal? The answer largely depends on which strategies researchers are willing to adopt. One potential strategy is to conduct human challenge studies, in which researchers give an experimental vaccine to healthy volunteers and then test—or “challenge”—the vaccine by purposely exposing volunteers to the virus. Although a growing number of voices are calling on researchers to employ this strategy, the proposal is generating a heated debate about the ethics of such research.
Read Accepting the Challenge: Covid Vaccine Challenge Trials Can Be Ethically Justified
Bioethics Forum Essay
gloved hands injecting a vaccine into an exposed shoulder

Human Challenge Studies for Covid-19 Vaccine: Questions about Benefits and Risks

Experts in infectious disease and public health warn that the Covid-19 pandemic will be with us until there is an effective vaccine, possibly 12 to 18 months in the future. This situation has given rise to calls for human challenge studies, in which healthy volunteers are injected with an experimental vaccine and then infected with the disease to test the vaccine’s efficacy. Is this ethically justifiable?
Read Human Challenge Studies for Covid-19 Vaccine: Questions about Benefits and Risks
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