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- Upcoming Event: What’s Actually Wrong with Sports Doping?
Posted on April 10, 2019
What’s actually wrong with doping—if all athletes had access to the same performance-enhancing drugs, wouldn’t that make competitions fair? If the purpose of sport is to maximize performance, shouldn’t we welcome technologies that do that? How should the values that give our lives meaning shape how, and whether, we use biomedical “enhancements”? These are among… Read more
- Is it Ethical to Genetically Edit Sports Animals?
Posted on March 12, 2019
Breeders have worked for centuries to produce animals, such as greyhounds or racehorses, with traits for peak sport performance. Today, gene editing technologies such as CRISPR could accomplish in one generation what used to take decades: the creation of faster, stronger, or more resilient sports animals. Some animal sports enthusiasts believe that gene editing could… Read more
- ‘Designer Babies’ (You Say That Like It’s a Bad Thing)
Posted on March 5, 2019
Advances in preimplantation genetic diagnosis, genetic testing, and genome editing have renewed discussion about the ethics of “designer babies,” or children selected or engineered to have certain preferred traits, like superior intelligence or tall stature. But the same techniques used to create these “enhanced” children could help prospective parents avoid passing down debilitating genetic conditions,… Read more
- Should Patients Be Considered Consumers? Hastings Scholars Say, No.
Posted on March 4, 2019
There is broad support for building health care systems that are patient centered, seen as a means of improving health outcomes and as morally worthy in itself. But the concept of patient-centered care has increasingly merged with the concept of patients as consumers, which “is conceptually confused and potentially harmful,” write Michael K. Gusmano, a… Read more
- Apply Now: Early-Career Scholar Essay Award
Posted on February 20, 2019
Artificial intelligence, Crispr gene editing, and other powerful new technologies have profound implications for society. They will likely bring both potential benefits and safety concerns and have other ethical and social ramifications. How can we reap the benefits, while minimizing harms? What kind of society do we want to build with our new powers? What… Read more
- New Hastings Fellows Elected
Posted on January 30, 2019
The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of 18 new Fellows. Hastings Center Fellows are a group of individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed scholarship and/or public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, life sciences research, and the environment. Robert Cook-Deegan, MD, is a professor in the School for… Read more