Josephine Johnston, The Hastings Center’s director of research, discussed the science of human gene editing, the policy activity it has triggered, and the moral and ethical concerns that it raises at a public talk at the Yale School of Medicine on September 8.

How can health care systems increase the effectiveness of patient safety checklists? Nancy Berlinger, a Hastings Center research scholar, and Elizabeth Dietz, a project manager and research assistant, examine this question in a new article in the AMA Journal of Ethics.

Should the Food and Drug Administration regulate some or all stem cell interventions? What standards of evidence should be used for making claims that stem cell interventions are safe and effective? The answers are not as straightforward as they may seem, write Hastings Center scholars Karen Maschke ...

Mildred Solomon, president of The Hastings Center, delivered the commencement address to Harvard Medical School’s first master’s in bioethics graduates in May. She advised the new bioethicists on how to meet the formidable challenges that they will face: how to offer reasoned judgments “about w...

What if any limits should there be on genetic research aimed at extending human longevity? Hastings Center cofounder Daniel Callahan and geneticist J. Craig Venter, parse the ethical quandaries in Aging Today.

A National Academy of Sciences committee released a major report on June 8 on the responsible use of gene drives, a rapidly developing field of research that holds promise for addressing persistent problems, such as eradicating Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases and conserving endangered species,...

In his new book, Daniel Callahan, cofounder and President Emeritus of The Hastings Center, takes on five global crises: climate change, food shortages, water shortages and quality, chronic illness and obesity. “I have not been able to find any global crises of similar magnitude in terms of death, m...

Josephine Johnston, director of research and a research scholar at The Hastings Center, has joined two co-authors in proposing a reexamination of an internationally recognized rule limiting in vitro research on human embryos to 14 days post-fertilization. Writing in the journal Nature, they respond t...

The Hastings Center has launched an international project that focuses on the social and ethical implications of using powerful gene editing methods on human germline cells (embryos, sperm, and eggs). Such methods would create permanent changes passed on from one generation to the next. These technol...

 “What’s happening with my son?” a woman on the other end of the phone asked me. I wasn’t sure what to say.  I was training to be a psychiatrist, and was treating him – a young man in his early 20s.  I had never met her, and sensed they had a strained relationship. But didn’t she, as...

We put on navy blue scrubs, plastic aprons, goggles, and gloves and walked into the anatomical dissection rooms for the first time.Three other first-year medical students and I gathered around our assigned table on either side of a black body bag. We unzipped the bag and then peeled away the whi...

 On a bright Sunday morning in New York’s Central Park, as October leaves bid a variegated farewell to green, nascent golds and auburns yielded for a few short hours to vibrant pink, the American Cancer Society held a fundraising walk for breast cancer.  The local TV news anchors were outfitted ...

Conventional wisdom: Making environmentally friendly changes is a luxury that most hospitals can’t afford. Evidence: Making environmentally friendly changes can save hospitals a lot of money – and save the U.S. health care system billions of dollars.

On November 15, the Department of Justice announced that BP Exploration and Production Inc. agreed to plead guilty to 11 counts of felony manslaughter, one count of felony obstruction of Congress, and violations of the Clean Water and Migratory Bird Treaty Acts, as a result of the explosion in the G...

 By now the story of Susan Reverby’s discovery of John Cutler’s papers is well known. In 2010, she revealed details of the Guatemala studies from the U. S. Public Health Service doctor’s files, triggering an avalanche of media attention.  President Obama apologized to the President of Guatem...

It’s no secret that community-based mental health and substance use treatment services are underfunded, but less widely known is the extent of the problem. Since 2009, the height of the Great Recession, state funding for these services has fallen by $4.35 billion. And yet the prevalence of behavio...

I teach a seminar on ethics in health care in the newly-launched Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) program at Yale.  My students include advanced practice registered nurses (nurse practitioners), senior administrators, and health policymakers.  Because the typical DNP student is a working profe...

Some years ago I wrote a book on abortion that espoused women’s right to choose abortion and was later cited in Roe v. Wade. That should have made me popular with feminists, but it did not and for one reason: I also argued that it was an ethical choice and that not all abortions would necessa...

On Monday, New America Foundation in Washington, DC held a thought-provoking event, My Brain Made Me Do It, which explored the role of neuroscience in understanding human behavior, particularly that of criminals, and the extent to which such research can or should be used in the criminal justi...

A recent flurry of articles in the mainstream media (The Atlantic,CNN, Huffington Post) reflects yet another wave of protest against the Food and Drug Administration’s blood donation policy, which prohibits men who have had sex with men (MSM), even once since 1977, from donating blood – ever...

In a presidential campaign riven with disagreement about nearly everything to do with health care, there is a notable area of bipartisan accord: both parties support improving children’s health and access to health care.

I am a breast cancer survivor and I am not a fan of the huge “pink” industry that has developed around breast cancer. We have ribbons, pins, and bands. We have races and walks. We even have our own month, October: National Breast Cancer Month. It’s, funded in part by AstraZeneca, the drug co...

With the first presidential debate beginning tonight and the race entering the final stretch, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are making their final policy pitches to the American public. While the economy and jobs will dominate much of the discussion, the candidates have significant differences on m...

On Monday, the Global Post published Inside Syria: One Hospital’s Story, which offers a glimpse into an emergency room in Aleppo, Syria, flooded with wounded Syrians.

Blair and Alfred Sadler reported here a few weeks ago on the effect of Facebook’s feature, introduced last spring, that enables users to link to their local organ donation registries and share their donor status. The Sadlers, who helped write the federal law on donation, were interested i...

For decades, all undocumented migrants in Spain have had access health care, but that changed drastically on September 1, when a new law went into effect that provides coverage to undocumented migrant adults only in cases of emergency, pregnancy, or delivery.

Male newborn circumcision has been much in the news of late. In Germany, the procedure was criminalized in the Cologne Regional Court, and on August 21 the firstmohel(Jewish traditional practitioner) was charged with the offense. In Denmark, the prime minister initiated an investigation into whe...

The American Academy of Pediatricians recently released a statement saying that the health benefits of circumcision outweighed the risks. This pronouncement contradicts the Academy’s earlier ruling, just thirteen years ago in 1999, which stated unequivocally that the health benefits of the pr...

While at the National Institutes of Health in 1967 and 1968, we were involved in the design and drafting of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, in partnership with the Commissioners on Uniform State Laws and with the support of several health care organizations. In drafting the model law, we had three m...

If movies are one window into the soul of America, “Robot and Frank” has some funny/sad things to say about our current approach to aging. Frank (Frank Langella, as charismatic as ever) is a retired cat burglar, losing his memory and generally deteriorating in his country home. Hunter, his con...

An unusually lengthy and undoubtedly expensive 90-second commercial for Androgel aired during men’s swimming and volleyball events in NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. The ad touts Androgel 1.62%, a more concentrated formulation of Abbott Laboratories’ testosterone treatment, and starts by a...

It may be more than just discrimination at work. As is to be expected, once people start reflecting on an essay as important and provocative as Bill Peace’s“Comfort Care as Denial of Personhood,”it seems there are ever more layers and aspects that beg exploration, discussion, and illumin...

I suspect most people with a disability fear even the most routine hospitalization. We do not fear any of the commonplace indignities those without a disability worry about when hospitalized. Our fear is primal–will our lives be considered devoid of value? This concern was addressed by Diane Col...

In December 2011, a landmark Institute of Medicine (IOM) report concluded that advances in science and medicine “have rendered chimpanzees largely unnecessary as research subjects.” Yet a recent search on the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database indicates that in just the la...

This is the third commentary about “Comfort Care as Denial of Personhood,” a powerful essay in the July-August Hastings Center Reportthat describes a chilling encounter between a physician and a seriously ill disabled patient.  The author, William J. Peace, who has been paralyze...

This is the second commentary about “Comfort Care as Denial of Personhood,” a powerful essay in the July-August Hastings Center Report that describes a chilling encounter between a physician and a seriously ill disabled patient.  The author, William J. Peace, who has been paraly...

A powerful essay in the July-August Hastings Center Report describes a chilling encounter between a physician and a seriously ill disabled patient.  The author, William J. Peace, who has been paralyzed from the waist down since 1978, was hospitalized two years ago with a large, grossly infected...

I write this in the last days of the run-up to the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act. If it comes down against the ACA in some important way, such as voiding the requirement that the uninsured must sign up for insurance or pay a penalty, that will be a major setback. If the ACA is uph...

Regardless of the fate of the Affordable Care Act, it has set in motion a drive toward greater use of information technology, particularly with regard to electronic health records (EHRs). These technologies promise to increase the transmission, sharing, and use of health data across the health car...

Mark Bittman, the New York Times food writer who created the no-fail “minimalist” recipes affixed to many a locavore refrigerator door, is an ethical maximalist.  In his 1994 book, Thick and Thin:Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Michael Walzer defines the “thick,” or maximalist, per...

Some people are addicted to crossword puzzles, others to new shoes, and still others to collecting baseball statistics. One of my addictions is that of comparing policy arguments in very different contexts. Of late, I have been looking at three issues, each of which despite their obvious differenc...

The most seemingly sensible diagnosis of our health care cost problem over the years has been to reduce or eliminate waste and inefficiency. Of late that interest has greatly accelerated. Commanding particular attention were an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Dona...

I recently landed in a New York City hospital due to complications from diverticulitis coupled with a severe allergic reaction to an antibiotic that I was taking to treat the condition. Fortunately, all turned out well and a month later I’m feeling fine. But I remain troubled by aspects of the e...

Last Thursday, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues met in Washington, DC to assess the ethics of a clinical trial on anthrax vaccines for children. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius asked the Commission to investigate the issue, after the Nati...

In my seven years as head of the Center of Biomedical Ethics and Culture (CBEC) at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT) in Karachi I am often asked by colleagues, “But you do bioethics. What’s religion got to do with it?” This unease with linking religion to bioethics al...

Eager to join the ongoing “war on women” and seize the opportunity to roll back women’s reproductive rights, Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed into law the Women’s Health and Safety Act, which, despite its name, is neither in the interests of women nor for their health and saf...

I was teaching a group of nursing students at a major New York City hospital a few months ago when one young student came to me, pale and perspiring. She had been feeling sick for at least five days, but had not yet sought medical care. After moving from Los Angeles last year, she was unable to fi...

A recent editorial in The Lancet issued a dire warning to the international medical community: medicine is a weapon of war in Syria. It is just the latest in a series of reportsfrom across the Middle East on how medical care and medical professionals and facilities are being used to inflict poli...

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 medical experimentation as the model for all research with human beings,...