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?

Do the recipients of organ transplants have a right to know if the organs they are about to receive were part of a research study? If so, are the recipients...

Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Clinical Trials Clinical trials are specifically designed to test the safety and efficacy of interventions in humans and are preceded by laboratory...

Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Research in Resource-Poor Countries As health problems and disease threats cross borders on a global scale, wealthy countries are increasingly funding and...

Distinguished University Professor Emerita, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

March 1, 2023 – The Hastings Center’s Board of Directors announced the inaugural cohort of trustees emeriti, former directors whose service, expertise, leadership, and support have helped position Hastings as the world’s...

Anita L. Allen, JD, PhD, the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law, and Farhat Moazam, MD, PhD,...

“Bioethics” has been defined in several different ways. Most broadly, it is the interdisciplinary study of ethical, legal, and social issues arising in the life sciences and health care. Though...

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.

Why I Give… Ann Margaret Mayer, Ed.M., M.L.S. Ann Margaret Mayer was a curious and creative lifelong learner who loved science and history—as well as world travel, gardening, knitting, and...

President Emeritus Thomas H. Murray Board Chairs Emeriti Harold EdgarJulius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology, Emeritus – Columbia Law School, Professor of Law, Emeritus, Columbia Law School, Founding...