Tag Archives: Bioethics in the News

Religious Coercion of Physicians: Whose Conscience Is It Anyway?

Posted on January 23, 2020 by

Neil Mahoney is 64 years old and has a terminal cancer with a predicted life expectancy of 4-16 months. He lives in Colorado, a state that approved an aid-in-dying law in 2016. His physician is Dr. Barbara Morris, 65, a geriatrician whom he has asked to provide him with the drugs needed to end his life. She has agreed to do just that. However, Dr. Morris works for the Centura Health Corporation, a Catholic-Adventist hospital system. Continue reading →

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We Need Healthier Schools, and Student Activists Are Stepping Up

Posted on November 14, 2019 by

California just passed two laws that advance health in schools in ways that might not seem intuitive: pushing middle school and high school start times to after 8am, and banning school districts from “lunch shaming” that treats students differently based on whether they have unpaid school lunch debt. These laws are part of a collection of diverse efforts to make U.S. schools healthier places. Continue reading →

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Biohacking: How a DIY Approach to Biology Can Shape Our Future

Posted on October 31, 2019 by

In 2017, Josiah Zayner live-streamed himself injecting a gene therapy construct designed to edit the DNA in his muscle cells to give him bigger muscles. This moment was noteworthy because the gene therapy construct had been created entirely by Zayner in his garage laboratory. Such work is called biohacking or DIY biology. Continue reading →

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Health Care and Social Justice: Just Take Two Aspirin for Your Tumor If You Cannot Afford Your Cancer Care

Posted on October 10, 2019 by

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb is the former Associate Dean of Curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns,” he complained that curricula in medical schools “are increasingly focused on social justice rather than treating illness.” He goes on to say, “A new wave of educational specialists is increasingly influencing medical education. They emphasize ‘social justice’ that is related to health care only tangentially.” Really? Only tangentially? Continue reading →

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Public Health Crisis Warrants Liberty Restrictions

Posted on September 26, 2019 by

This post is a part of our Bioethics in the News series By Parker Crutchfield, PhD Preventing Harm Suppose your colleague was diagnosed with tuberculosis on Friday but tried to come into work on the following Monday. You would be right to … Continue reading →

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Should we trust giant tech companies and entrepreneurs with reading our brains?

Posted on September 12, 2019 by

This post is a part of our Bioethics in the News series By Laura Cabrera, PhD The search for a brain device capable of capturing recordings from thousands of neurons has been a primary goal of the government-sponsored BRAIN initiative. … Continue reading →

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Philosophy, Mental Illness, and Mass Shootings

Posted on August 15, 2019 by

This post is a part of our Bioethics in the News series By Robyn Bluhm, PhD Over the past month, mass shootings have occurred in Gilroy, CA, in Chicago, in El Paso, and in Dayton. Most recently, the FBI has arrested … Continue reading →

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