Was this experiment ethically problematic? Or was it a useful study involving common practices on Twitter?

The National Research Act was a landmark in research ethics oversight. But it needs to be updated for modern times, including research with biospecimens, AI, and xenotransplantation.

Dualists rejoice! That much-maligned ontology got a new lease on life recently with vividly contrasting cases involving Scarlett Johannsen’s voice and Elon Musk’s brain.

The more time passes, the more Nixon looks like a strange, unlikely political ally.

The sole virtue of Elon Musk’s report on X, formerly known as Twitter, of the first in-human brain implant by his company, Neuralink, is its brevity: “The first human received...

New inquiry examines ethics of 1960's experiments involving Punjabi immigrants in the United Kingdom and radioactive chapatis.

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.

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.

Like many other Ukrainians, I woke up on February 24 from the sounds of explosions. I had some difficult decisions to make. I treat cancer patients.

A bill for $476 for inquiring about participating in a medical research study? This is no joke.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Media reports indicate that seven individuals have received ZMapp to date, two of whom have died. The first recipients were two American health care workers from Liberia who were treated...

The state of global health is a major concern. Despite advances in medicine and medical care and massive growth of the global economy, health in the world is characterized by...

In December, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released a 200-page report, Moral Science: Protecting Participants in Human Subjects in Research. Continuing a decades-old tradition, the report treats...