March 7, 2019
(NPR) – Serna says death is usually sanitized, and we try to avoid even talking about it. As a hospital chaplain, he talks about mortality more than most people do. But today, Ash Wednesday, is one of the few days … Read More
March 5, 2019
(Reuters) – U.S. Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb said on Tuesday he plans to step down in a month, calling into question how the agency will handle critical issues such as e-cigarette use among teens and efforts to … Read More
March 5, 2019
(Vox) – The list of concerns about self-driving cars just got longer. In addition to worrying about how safe they are, how they’d handle tricky moral trade-offs on the road, and how they might make traffic worse, we also need … Read More
March 4, 2019
(New York Times) – As activists, researchers, and journalists voice concerns over the rise of artificial intelligence, warning against biased, deceptive and malicious applications, the companies building this technology are responding. From tech giants like Google and Microsoft to scrappy … Read More
February 27, 2019
(CNN) – Bill Jenkins had already started a promising career in public health in the mid-1960s when he learned about one of the darkest chapters in American medical history: the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Jenkins, an epidemiologist, played a significant role … Read More
February 18, 2019
(STAT News) – At the turn of the century, the once-promising idea of replacing a faulty gene with a corrective copy took a tragic turn. A 1999 clinical trial resulted in the death of an 18-year-old patient, dashing the ambitions … Read More
February 14, 2019
(Science) – The most widely discussed talk at the Indian Science Congress, a government-funded annual jamboree held in Jalandhar in January, wasn’t about space exploration or information technology, areas in which India has made rapid progress. Instead, the talk celebrated … Read More
February 7, 2019
(Hastings Center) – A preliminary investigation by Guangdong Province in China of He Jiankui, the scientist who created the world’s first gene-edited babies, found that “He had intentionally dodged supervision, raised funds and organized researchers on his own to carry … Read More
February 7, 2019
(Vox) – Samuel’s suit is likely doomed, and the idea sounds absurd, but it’s linked to a serious strain of philosophical thought, which challenges the idea that it’s good to make new people. Samuel is a believer in a philosophy … Read More
January 21, 2019
Christian Bioethics (vol. 24, no. 3, 2018) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “Christian Bioethics Loses Its Founding Editor” by Ana S Iltis and Mark J Cherry “Taking Our Meds Faithfully? Christian Engagements with Psychiatric Medication” by Warren … Read More
January 18, 2019
(Medical Xpress) – The marketing of direct-to-consumer “neurotechnologies” can be enticing: apps that diagnose a mental state, and brain devices that improve cognition or “read” one’s emotional state. However, many of these increasingly popular products aren’t fully supported by science … Read More
January 18, 2019
(NPR) – Each organ responds to transplant in a different way. “The liver will start pouring bile. The lungs start essentially breathing,” Mezrich says. “Maybe the most dramatic organ, of course, is the heart, because you put it in and … Read More
January 17, 2019
Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics (vol. 39, no. 5, 2018) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “Should Physicians Be Empathetic? Rethinking Clinical Empathy” by David Schwan “The Dramatic Essence of the Narrative Approach” by Oscar Vergara “Birth with Dignity from the … Read More
January 11, 2019
Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics (vol. 39, no. 4, 2018) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “The Discourse on Faith and Medicine: A Tale of Two Literatures” by Jeff Levin “Violence, Research, and Non-Identity in the Psychiatric Clinic” by Michelle Bach … Read More
January 9, 2019
(CNN) – He’s experiments, which are still clouded with the uncertainty of his claims and his whereabouts, open a Pandora’s box of questions around ethics in experiments with humans — even though these dilemmas aren’t new. Historic examples of human … Read More
December 26, 2018
(Wired) – For the past several years, giant tech companies have rapidly ramped up investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. They’ve competed intensely to hire more AI researchers and used that talent to rush out smarter virtual assistants and … Read More
December 14, 2018
(Knowable Magazine) – Donoghue himself went on to further develop the system to allow people to open and close a robotic hand, and to reach, grasp and drink from a bottle by using a multijointed robotic arm. Last year, he … Read More
December 3, 2018
(New York Times) – Many scientists in China say the drive to succeed is so strong that they adopt a “do first, debate later” approach. Wang Yue, a professor at the institute of medical humanities of Peking University, said many … Read More
November 28, 2018
(STAT News) – For someone who has caused a worldwide uproar over what many fellow scientists consider an ethical outrage, He Jiankui of China spent a remarkable amount of time discussing his work — which he claims led to the … Read More
November 27, 2018
(Science) – On Wednesday, the National Science Foundation (NSF) will welcome the first cohort of members appointed by President Donald Trump to its oversight body, the National Science Board. Most of the seven fit the mold of senior academic leaders, … Read More
November 9, 2018
(Vox) – President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama are famous for keeping the details of their personal life private. But the Obamas have just gone public with a very intimate and painful struggle: They had a miscarriage … Read More
November 2, 2018
(U.S. News & World Report) – It’s a generational shift that in many cases flatly rejects convention and tradition and embraces a new conception of the rite: Much like weddings have opted toward personalization of vows, locations and officiants, funerals … Read More
October 24, 2018
(Wired) – Two years on, those researchers have collected a heck of lot of data about people’s killing preferences: some 39.6 million judgement calls in 10 languages from millions of people in 233 different countries and territories, according to a … Read More
October 24, 2018
(Nature) – When a driver slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a pedestrian crossing the road illegally, she is making a moral decision that shifts risk from the pedestrian to the people in the car. Self-driving cars might soon … Read More
October 18, 2018
(Eurekalert) – The United States is an aging society, where one in five people will be 65 or older by 2035. While bioethics scholarship on aging has historically concerned itself with issues at the end of life and the medical … Read More
