By Dov Fox Naomi Cahn and June Carbone have a timely and thoughtful new op-ed in tomorrow’s L.A. Times that considers the evolving social and genetic dimensions of legal parenthood in the context of assisted reproduction. When many of the rules that govern sperm donation were enacted in the decade after Roe v. Wade, donors were presumed to be…
By Nicholson Price A few days ago, NIH announced an agreement with the family of Henrietta Lacks. When she was being treated for an aggressive tumor, cells were taken without her consent or knowledge and used to create the HeLa cell line, which is tremendously widespread in biomedical research today – the story is well-chronicled in…
By I. Glenn Cohen If you were watching television this week you may have seen this clip of a taste test for hamburger meat grown in a “test tube” in London discussed here. The meat was grown from stem cells from existing cows used to grow 20,000 strands of tissue. Costing more than $330,000 to…
By Arthur Caplan Art Caplan has a new opinion piece up at nbcnews.com on the longstanding controversy over the use of the cells of Henrietta Lacks, a poor African American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, for research that has generated billions of dollars through scientific research over more than six decades. This research…
By Nicholson Price Two weeks after the Supreme Court held isolated naturally occurring DNA unpatentable in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., there’s been quite a lot of commentary about the case’s implications for the biotech industry and medical science. I’ll just mention a few here, with the certainty that there will be…
By Arthur Caplan Bill of Health contributor Art Caplan weighed in on the Supreme Court’s decision in the Myriad case with an opinion piece at NBC: “The Supreme Court has finally done what should have been done years ago — declared that genes which naturally exist in all of us cannot be patented. For years…
This morning on WBUR, Eric Lander discussed the significance of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics that DNA cannot be patented. Lander, the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, filed an amicus brief in the case that was co-authored by Petrie-Flom Center Faculty Co-Director and Bill of Health editor I….
By The Petrie-Flom Center The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues recently published a “Request for Comments on Issues Related to Incidental Findings That Arise in the Clinical, Research, and Direct-To-Consumer Contexts.” In this publication, the Bioethics Commission requests public comment on “the ethical, legal, and social issues raised by incidental findings that…
By Michelle Meyer In my last post on Maryland v. King, I suggested that both proponents and opponents of King should find the philosophical case for a universal DNA database stronger than they might otherwise have thought. Obviously, moving in that direction — or even including mere suspects in a database — would raise legal…
By Michelle Meyer Disclaimer: I’m not a Fourth Amendment person. Rather, my interest in King is in its implications for policies for the use of DNA in the criminal justice system. I spent the better part of a year after my Ph.D and before beginning law school helping to research and edit a book on DNA…
