In a 1988 essay on pandemics, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg wrote, “We have no guarantee that the natural evolutionary competition of viruses with the human species will always find ourselves the winner.”

For millions of health-conscious Americans, digital technology has been a boon, providing increasingly sophisticated fitness trackers. Researchers speak excitedly about a new frontier of “continuous health monitoring,” with the potential to detect diseases and aliments in their incipient stages. It also raises a host of disturbing questions about health surveillance. Will these devices really empower us? Will they compromise us as autonomous individuals?

In a new essay in the Hastings Center Report, we argue it is not. Yet the practice is prohibited.

States and school boards around the country are engaged in a debate about whether to require middle and high school students to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19. The debate is not so much about whether to mandate. It's when to do so.

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

I'd be happy to go along with a ban on elective abortion after 15 weeks if, but only if, certain conditions accompanied it.

Last month, Bloomberg reported on what seems to be the first child born following a new kind of genome-wide screening. Four embryos were screened, and the embryo selected for implantation was the one given the best genetic odds of avoiding heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and schizophrenia in adulthood. The news has been met with some concerns about the degree of control we may now have over future generations.

Faced with mandatory Covid vaccination, students and employees have appealed to religion as grounds for exemption. This latest conscience war within our culture wars presents a minefield of legal and philosophical complexities for states and health care systems.

In her new book, Kathryn Paige Harden is full of hope that insights from genetics will become powerful tools for advancing a left-leaning political agenda. Her hope rests on the argument that if people understand the extent to which their socioeconomic status is influenced by their luck in the genet...

Even though the circus exists in the same world as theater and movies, it has been largely exempt from public criticism, apart from accusations of animal cruelty. But under the broad rubric of “contemporary circus,” this familiar entertainment genre is distancing itself from its past and creating a new and vibrant art form. And underlying this transformation is an ethical commitment to social justice, inclusion, and equity.

The pandemic has laid bare the significant shortcomings of a health system rooted in an unsustainable financial model that exploits the physical and emotional labor of its nurses.

The devastation of Hurricane Ida and the global threats of climate change are not on the fringe of bioethics. They call to mind the language of priority-setting typical of bioethics discourse. Who lives and who dies? What can be accomplished with prevention and more levees? And if more are built, how do we set priorities with limited resources?