- Hastings Center News
Johnston Discusses Ethical Concerns about Human Gene Editing
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Improving Patient Safety in the Operating Room
Read the PostHastings Center NewsHow 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.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Stem Cell Treatments: Assessing the Evidence
Read the PostHastings Center NewsShould 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 ...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Hastings President Gives Harvard Commencement Speech to Bioethics Graduates
Read the PostHastings Center NewsMildred 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...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Point-Counterpoint: Callahan and Venter on Genetic Progress
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Gregory Kaebnick on Responsible Use of Gene Drives
Read the PostHastings Center NewsA 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,...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
New Book by Hastings Cofounder Daniel Callahan
Read the PostHastings Center NewsIn 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...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Call to Revisit a “Line in the Sand” Limiting Human Embryo Research
Read the PostHastings Center NewsJosephine 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...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Hastings Project Addresses Profound Questions about Human Gene Editing
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThe 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Medical Privacy for Royalty and the Rest of Us
Read the PostBioethics Forum Essay“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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Unexpected Lessons from the Anatomy Lab
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWe 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Givers Beware: Medical Charities and Deceptive Fundraising
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayOn 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 ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Why Hospitals Should Go Greener
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Deepwater Horizon Explosion: Challenges for Bioethics
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayOn 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethically Impossible: New Educational Tools
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayBy 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
When Cutting Mental Health Spending Means Passing the Buck
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIt’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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethics and the Storm
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Choice Bazaar
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssaySome 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Your Brain in the Courtroom
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayOn 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Time to Change FDA’s Discriminatory Blood Donation Policy
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayA 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Health Care for Undocumented Immigrants: A Family Issue
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For a Survivor, it’s Not Easy Being Pink
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Presidential Bioethics Debate 2012
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWith 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Syria’s War Against Medicine
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Take Our Poll: The Facebook Effect on Organ Donation
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayBlair 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Conscientious Objection and Undocumented Migrants in Spain
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Ritual Circumcision: Ban Metzitzah b’peh
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayMale 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Flip-flop over Foreskin
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Can Social Media Increase Transplant Donation and Save Lives?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWhile 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Robot and Frank, and Maybe Me
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIf 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Low-T, High Profit?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAn 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
“End of Life,” Value Judgments, and Ending Lives
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIt 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Disability Discrimination: The Author Responds
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Research Bias Compromises Chimpanzee Protection Efforts
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Disability Discrimination: A Doctor’s View
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThis 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Disability Discrimination: Risky Business for “Consenting” Adults
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThis 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Disability Discrimination
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayA 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Health Care Reform: How to Fail
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Electronic Health Records: Balancing Progress and Privacy
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayRegardless 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Minimalist as Maximalist: Food Ethics and Workers’ Rights
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayMark 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Tough-Minded and the Tender-Minded
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssaySome 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Difficult Child of Medical Progress
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
“You Can Refuse This”
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Anthrax Vaccine Trials for Children: Precautionary or Premature?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayLast 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
“Doing Bioethics” in Pakistan
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Arizona’s Ultrasound Mandate, Abortion, and the War on Women
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayEager 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Nurse Practitioners: One Answer to the Nation’s Primary Care Shortage
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Medicine as a Weapon in Syria and Beyond
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayA 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Ethical Imperialism of Moral Science
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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,...Read the Post