TRANSCRIPT: February 9, 2021

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?

There is little doubt about the urgent need for Covid-19 treatment. But premature publication of definitive recommendations based on inappropriate conclusions grounded in scant, hastily-acquired data serve only at best to confuse and at worst mislead at a time when tensions are high and need for help is great.

The bioethics and legal communities must come together to find ways to move with the same ease of the scientific research community--to transcend the geopolitical borders and jurisdictional concerns that make international regulation so difficult.

The Kings County Medical Society in New York recently hosted a brunch with New York State legislators. One of the guests was Richard Gottfried, chair of the New York State Assembly Health Committee, who is cosponsoring A2694, a bill legalizing medical aid in dying (MAID). As a medical oncologist with 30 years’ experience treating seriously ill patients, I have concerns about it, and I expressed them to Gottfried.

Decades of research into the genetics of autism have revealed a complex relationship. Not only is there no single gene for autism, numerous genetic changes can underlie the condition. With this intricate genetic story has come an increasingly nuanced picture of how people with autism and their famil...

The creation of humanlike intelligence in a nonbiological being would be the greatest achievement in human history. Many experts believe this will happen within decades. What role should, or could, regulatory bodies play?

It was unethical for a fertility doctor to use his own sperm to inseminate patients without their consent. But what are the legal harms to the women? To their children?

A major international project at The Hastings Center released policy recommendations for the development of artificial intelligence and robotics to help reap the benefits and productivity gains and minimize the risks and undesirable social consequences.

Human infection challenge studies, which deliberately expose healthy volunteers to disease-causing infectious agents under carefully controlled conditions, offer a valuable method of biomedical research aimed at efficient initial efficacy testing of vaccine candidates, among other possible uses. They...

Hastings Center research scholar Gregory Kaebnick participated in a multidisciplinary workshop at the University of Montana in Missoula on May 25 – 26 to examine the potential for using genome editing to conserve plants and animals that are threatened with extinction. The meeting addressed scie...

Braingenethics Update, a free monthly newsletter, aggregates recent scientific literature, commentary, and news on questions raised by findings on the genetics of complex human behaviors. It is produced by the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and The Hastings Center as part of a...

On December 13th, President Obama signed the 21st Century Cures Act, a bipartisan, multidimensional health research and development bill.  The act allocates $4.8 billion to the National Institutes of Health and $500 million to the Food and Drug Administration over the next 10 years for research and ...

Over the past several years, I have served on a couple of panels considering the clinical and ethical challenges posed by pandemic flu. Our concern was the threat posed by the avian variety brewing in China; not once did we discuss an alternative viral vector. Nonetheless, in light of the current fe...