The creation of humanlike intelligence in a nonbiological being would be the greatest achievement in human history. Many experts believe this will happen within decades. What role should, or could, regulatory bodies play?

The Court of Arbitration for Sport has decided that female athletes with atypically high levels of testosterone must take testosterone-lowering medication in order to compete in certain events. I'm troubled by the precedent this sets.

The new indie movie William explores the question, What would it be like if a Neanderthal were born and raised in a modern, industrialized society today?

It is a truism that good ethics begins with good facts. Here are some of the facts about the ethics and politics of heritable human genome editing from 2015 to 2019.

Last month, the journal Nature published a call for a global moratorium on heritable human genome editing. Despite criticism, notably from CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna, the moratorium is just what's needed now.

In late April, a suspect thought to be the Golden State Killer, a man who had eluded police for decades after committing a string of murders and rapes in Northern...

Little noticed in the United States but a big deal in France, President Emmanuel Macron announced in January that he is creating a bioethics commission to review the country’s policies...

Not since Rene Descartes gazed from his garret window in early 17th-century Paris and wondered whether those were men or hats and coats covering “automatic machines” he saw roaming the...

For the first few years after my husband Howard died, I talked to him often. These were not ghostly, paranormal encounters; I was just thinking out loud about my life...

The Precision Medicine Initiative plans to collect data and biological samples from one million or more individuals in the United States and engage in internationally collaborative research. That means that...

On August 5, the World News Daily Report published an article that has been circulating on my Facebook newsfeed every day since: “Hermaphrodite Impregnates Self, Gives Birth to Hermaphrodite Twins.”...

Is it reasonable to hope that concerns about “cultural harms” can be integrated into oversight mechanisms for technologies like gene editing? That question was raised anew for me by the...

In 2008, The President’s Council on Bioethics turned to Immanuel Kant and his deontological philosophy as a resource for deliberations on contemporary bioethical issues.  The report focused on Kant’s understanding...

In the past few weeks media outlets have been reporting on the release of Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine....

Three rules for driverless vehicles were announced by the German Transport Minister, Alexander Dobrindt, in a September 8th interview with Wirtschafts Woche.  In English translation the rules are: (1) “It...

The death in May of a technology expert driving a Tesla driverless car was surely a sad event for his family, but no less a shock for a company and...

As the school year winds down, it’s safe to assume that many college students used stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall to get through finals. While the students may have been motivated...

The idea that we can get better grades at school and advance our careers by taking drugs that improve concentration and other brain functions is at once controversial and tempting....

One objection to the development of cognitive enhancers is that they are likely to benefit mainly people who can afford to buy them, and that they would put everyone else...

In the early 2000s, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie Moffitt, and their colleagues published two papers (here and here), which suggested that we could finally begin to tell rather simple but evidence-based stories about...

  Genetic testing to identify the susceptibility of individuals to developing specific disorders or to confirm diagnoses is becoming increasingly common in clinical settings, where it raises a string of ethical...

Ethicists and others have been concerned that the disclosure of genetic information to patients might have negative consequences. The suspicion has been that negative effects, say, becoming depressed, are particularly...