As the world reels from the Covid-19 pandemic, two things have become very clear: the health impacts of the disease are devastating, but the aggressive social distancing policies currently being used to flatten the curve also have serious costs. As a result, the question of when and how to reopen the nation is on everyone’s mind. Do we open quickly in an effort to kick-start the economy? Or do we remain under lockdown as long as possible to stop the spread of the virus?

I mostly agree with Lawrence Gostin’s paean to outgoing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the Hastings Center Report. Like Gostin, I see Bloomberg as a public health innovator...

The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of the 2023 fellows. Hastings Center fellows are a group of more than 200 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has...

Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Nature, Human Nature, and Biotechnology Moral views about nature—claims that nature or a natural state of affairs has value—are important in contemporary...

The use of animals in medical research has been a hotly contested moral issue for years. In 2010, the European Union banned virtually all research on great apes (gorillas, bonobos,...

The Ethics of Infection Challenges in Primates Anne Barnhill, Steven Joffe, and Franklin G. Miller During the recent Ebola outbreak, scientific developments involving infection challenge experiments on nonhuman primates (NHPs)...

(Garrison, NY) The American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics prohibits physicians from prescribing treatments that they consider to be placebos unless the patients know this and agree to take them...

Hastings Center Fellows are an elected 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...