. A report last week in the New York Times of a pig heart transplant performed at the University of Maryland Medical Center exemplifies a common myopic view of xenotransplantation research.

A bill filed in the Massachusetts House of Representatives would allow prisoners who choose to donate organs or bone marrow for transplantation to be eligible for reduced sentences. Is such a policy ethical?

In a recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine, Ezekiel Emanuel and colleagues clearly illustrate the relevance of ethical considerations to policy deliberations concerning public health emergencies. But do ethicists belong at the table?

President Biden recently declared that the Covid-19 “pandemic is over.”  Some public health experts agreed with this assessment; others disagreed.  What cannot be disputed is that nearly 12,000 Americans have...

A remarkable experiment raises anew questions about whether brain-death is really death.

In recent years, court cases and scholarly articles have increasingly highlighted discrepancies between the legal definition of death in the United States and the medical diagnostic standards for determining brain death. It has become clear to many that the 40-year-old Uniform Determination of Death Act, the legal standard, should be updated.

The C.D.C.'s latest policy guidance that people who have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus virus no longer need to wear face masks indoors gets the science right, but policymaking wrong.

A Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech has received emergency authorization in the United States and has been authorized in the countries, and a vaccine by Moderna is likely to be authorized soon. In spite of this good news, at least for the first couple of years, Covid-19 vaccines will be a scarce resource. Because low-income countries are likely to lose out in the scramble to get access to them, there have been calls for global solidarity. While equitable allocation of vaccines around the world would be ideal, it is unrealistic as a near-term goal.

Multiple candidate vaccines for coronavirus are being evaluated scientifically in a process of unprecedented speed, and thousands of individuals around the world have volunteered to participate in placebo-controlled phase III field trials. If, or when, one of these candidate vaccines is proved to be safe and effective and receives an emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, will it continue to be ethical to enroll participants in other coronavirus trials that randomize half of them to a placebo?

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...

Franklin G. Miller, PhD, is professor of Medical Ethics in Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. He was a member of the senior faculty in the Department of Bioethics, National...

“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...

To address recent lawsuits that question whether the persistent of hormonal functions is consistent with death by neurologic criteria (such as the case of Jahi McMath), we proposed specific mention in a UDDA that loss of hormonal functions is not required for declaration of death by neurologic criteria.