Editors: I. Glenn Cohen, Norman Daniels, Nir EyalPublisher: Oxford University PressPublication Date: February 2015 Identified Versus Statistical Lives: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2015) is an edited volume that addresses the identified lives effect, which describes the fact that people demonstrate a stronger inclination to assist persons and groups identified as at high risk…
By Zain Khalid October 10th marked the first anniversary of California’s Senate Bill 43 (SB 43), a major revision of the landmark Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967, a de-institutionalization era law designed to “end the inappropriate, indefinite, and involuntary commitment of persons with mental health disorders.” The law loosened eligibility standards for civil commitment by expanding…
By James Toomey If you are supposed to make a legally binding decision on behalf of someone incapacitated by dementia, chances are the law will tell you to apply the “substituted judgment” standard—you will be asked to make the decision the person for whom you are deciding would have made, if they had capacity. But…
By James Toomey Imagine that you were to develop dementia and someone else had to make medical decisions on your behalf. How would you want them to decide? Then suppose that you had to make medical decisions on behalf of another person with dementia. Would you think about decision-making in the same way? A new…
Interviewed by William Leonard Pickard Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is Founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, a leading clinical stage biotechnology company developing next-generation artificial intelligence and robotics platforms for drug discovery, with headquarters in Cambridge, MA and facilities around the world. He has invented critical technologies for the creation of novel molecular structures, and pioneered the…
Interviewed by William Leonard Pickard George Church, PhD, is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. His research efforts include the first direct genome sequencing method, collaborating…
by Francis X. Shen, Susan M. Wolf, and Frances Lawrenz The advent of highly portable MRI will transform brain research, but urgently requires ethical and legal guidance. Rather than participants traveling to the MRI scanner, now the scanner can travel to them. This advance could enable research with remote and marginalized communities that have not…
By Hannah Rahim In January 2024, Pope Francis called for a universal ban on surrogacy as a threat to global peace and human dignity, claiming that the practice is a “grave violation” of the mother and child’s dignity and based on the “exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.” Surrogacy raises complex ethical and…
The existing organ allocation system has marginalized individuals diagnosed with psychotic or affective disorders.
The rise in polygenic embryo screening is ushering in a new era of human control over reproduction.
