As family caregivers who are everywhere yet overlooked in aging societies worldwide, we ponder and discuss this question as bioethicists: “Who cast me in this role?”

Tens of thousands of parents have enrolled their newborns in whole genome sequencing research projects. Parents should know what they information from this research can and cannot tell them.

The budget bill adopted by the House of Representatives on May 22 is not so much a fiscal blueprint as a manifesto in policy retrenchment. Behind its rhetoric of “restraint”...

The framework below outlines three foundational ethical duties of health care institutions that can be enacted by leaders through policies, processes, and communication with their workforce: (1) the duty to plan for foreseeable situations with impact on patient care and institutional operations, (2) the duty to safeguard patient populations and the health care workforce, and (3) the duty of care, long understood as nonabandonment of patients.

AI Jesus is just one of many recent examples in which artificial intelligence systems have taken on roles that have always seemed to require human beings. One can worry what these creations will eventually do to us humans. What will be left for humans to do?

Predicting a patient's suicide risk is hard. Can AI do better than a clinician?

Given its concern with making health and health care more equitable and just, bioethics should pay attention to the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, best known as Project 2025....

I was honored (and honestly a bit surprised) to play a pivotal role in a recent federal milestone for patients’ rights. On April 1, the Department of Health and Human...

A recent NBC investigative series titled “Dealing the Dead" revealed that thousands of unclaimed bodies were used by the University of North Texas Health Science Center for scientific research and medical education, and to generate profit. These findings raise important ethical questions around the need for ongoing transparency and accountability concerning the use of the deceased in medical research and education.

Clinical ethicists should engage with the injustices of mass incarceration in the United States.

The suggestion that obesity is a preventable disease has been weighing heavily on my mind ever since I read a recent article in the Hastings Center Report. The article claims to focus on “ethical, policy, and public health concerns” related to anti-obesity medications, but there is a strong undercurrent of bias throughout. As an endocrinologist who specializes in medical weight management, my clinical experience informs my understanding that obesity is almost never entirely preventable, but bias against those with obesity certainly is.

Louisiana recently became the first U.S. state to permit judges to order surgical castration of sex offenders.

Was this experiment ethically problematic? Or was it a useful study involving common practices on Twitter?

Hugh Culber is talking to his abuela, asking why her mofongo always came out better than his even though he is using her recipe. She replies that it never came...

The sole virtue of Elon Musk’s report on X, formerly known as Twitter, of the first in-human brain implant by his company, Neuralink, is its brevity: “The first human received...

For the first time, this year’s Super Bowl will have an alternate telecast for children featuring beloved cartoon characters. But as public health researchers, we are alarmed by efforts to promote the full-body collisions of tackle football to young children with animated mascots, enhanced augmented reality, bright colors, 3D iconography, and other child-friendly symbols.

Vardit Ravitsky, Ph.D., President and CEO of the Hastings Center, will deliver the keynote address, “What Is a ‘Serious Genetic Condition’?,” at the eighth annual reproductive ethics conference at the...

Since before the pandemic we have been experiencing a breakdown in trust in science and health care. Explore the reasons for this crisis, with authors of a just-released Hastings Center special...

Just one month ago, my mom received an intravenous infusion of CAR T-cells, which have become mythical creatures in my imagination.

Medicine has been at the forefront of recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), from image recognition to generative AI. Watch leaders in AI, ethics, and health as they discuss the...

Hastings Center President Vardit Ravitsky will discuss “Constructing an Ethics Framework for AI in Biomedical Research,” or ethics at the intersection of artificial intelligence and health care, at the 2024 Rothenberg...

The system of mandatory reporting of child abuse is rife with ethical problems and can lead to unjustified custody loss.

. 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.

Join a discussion on The Future of Bioethics: Challenges, Visions and Opportunities with the new President of The Hastings Center, Vardit Ravitsky. Speaker: Vardit Ravitsky, Ph.D, President and CEO of The...

Fast-moving developments in artificial intelligence have far-reaching implications for caregivers, patients, and the entire healthcare system. Will the introduction of AI systems improve diagnosis, treatment, and research, bringing better and...

Ethics, AI, and Society Increased attention to the widespread applications of artificial intelligence—and large language models such as ChatGPT in particular—has raised questions about the integration of AI into caregiving...

Jonathan Moreno, PhD, the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania will deliver a special lecture at The Hastings Center at 1 pm on Wednesday, April...

On a cloudy April afternoon, in my home in western Pennsylvania, a headline catches my eye: A federal judge in Texas suspended FDA approval of mifepristone. This abortion-inducing drug has been on the market for more than 20 years. Although the decision is presented with a secular and legal façade, like other recent antiabortion court rulings and legislation, a solid religious motive is at play.

Hospitals' tactics for maximizing revenue may be legal, but they raise ethical concerns.

How long does it take to trust someone? Think twice before getting too close to your chatty friend ChatGPT.

There's a lot of excitement about the possibilities of sophisticated, conversational AI in medicine, but we are already seeing problematic examples of its use. The insight of ethicists is sorely needed.

A frank look at the ethics of breakthrough genetic technologies TRANSCRIPT A just-concluded summit looked at the state of human genome editing, where the scandal of China’s CRISPR babies was...

Hastings Center President Mildred Solomon to teach Master Class at West Point: “What is Bioethics and Why Does It Matter?”

What are the current and future potential uses of nonhuman primates in research? The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is examining this question.

More than 4 million people have fled from war and terror in Ukraine. They are among the 70 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. What is brazenly clear is not only the impotence of the existing international apparatus designed to protect them, but also its asymmetries.

Oregon, which legalized medical aid in dying (MAID) in 1997, has dropped the requirement that had limited MAID access to residents of the state. What are the ethical and social implications of this policy change?

Bestselling author Amy Bloom‘s world was altered forever when an MRI indicated that her husband Brian had Alzheimer’s disease. Together, led by Brian, Brian and Amy made the decision to travel to Switzerland to access an assisted dying process...

As I sit here in my office at the Slovak Medical University in Bratislava, my colleagues are experiencing great moral anguish because of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Simultaneously, we are also confronting the Omicron wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The war complicates and burdens health care here and in other border nations exponentially, and especially so in combination with the pandemic.

A bill for $476 for inquiring about participating in a medical research study? This is no joke.

The role of doctors, nurses and other clinicians is to treat patients without passing judgment and to fulfill their fiduciary duty. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has muddled these obligations.

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.

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.

As debates continue about the decisions people make about how to die, I wish to draw wider attention to the death of Paul Drier. There was little extraordinary about his death. He was a widower, had suffered from multiple health problems, and had been on kidney dialysis for 18 months. Considered to be too ill to qualify for a transplant, he decided to end dialysis. Two aspects of Mr. Drier’s death seem worth putting on record for bioethicists to remember.

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.

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?

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...

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...