The practice of informed consent in clinical medicine is broken. Globally, the process varies widely, and even in the United States informed consent looks little like the formal, legal, autonomy-based process presented in textbooks, journal articles, and academic lectures.

The global scientific community has been unanimous in condemning Chinese scientist He Jiankui, who announced last week that he used the gene-editing technology called CRISPR to make permanent, heritable changes to the genes of two baby girls who were born this month in China. Criticism has focused on...

The advent of social media technology has opened many new avenues of research in population health, demographics, psychology, and the social sciences. It is crucial to consider whether researchers conducting observational research using social media need to obtain consent from their research subjects...

“It felt selfish to put my baby at serious risk by pursuing a vaginal birth,” writes Kristen Terlizzi in a collection of essays published recently in Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics. You can read Terlizzi’s full story here.

The Precision Medicine Initiative plans to collect data and biological samples from one million or more individuals in the United States and engage in internationally collaborative research. That means that genetic and other information about these people could be shared with researchers around the w...