By Michelle Meyer I am deeply saddened to report that bioethicist John D. Arras died on March 9, 2015. John was the Porterfield Professor of Bioethics and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, where he directed the undergraduate bioethics program, held an additional appointment at the School of Medicine’s Center for Biomedical Ethics and…
By Michelle Meyer The case I mentioned in my last post, Maine Department of Health and Human Services v. Kaci Hickox is no more. Hickox and public health officials agreed to stipulate to a final court order imposing on Hickox the terms that the court had imposed on her in an earlier, temporary order. Until…
By Michelle Meyer [Author’s Note: Addendum and updates (latest: 4 pm, 10/31) added below.] A physician shall… be honest in all professional interactions, and strive to report physicians… engaging in fraud or deception, to appropriate entities. —AMA Principles of Medical Ethics This is a troubling series of news reports about deception and defiance on the part of…
By Michelle Meyer Reuters broke the story on Friday, citing anonymous sources: The company is exploring creating online “support communities” that would connect Facebook users suffering from various ailments. . . . Recently, Facebook executives have come to realize that healthcare might work as a tool to increase engagement with the site. One catalyst: the…
By Michelle Meyer A WSJ reporter just tipped me off to this news release by Facebook regarding the changes it has made in its research practices in response to public outrage about its emotional contagion experiment, published in PNAS. I had a brief window of time in which to respond with my comments, so these…
Another stop on my fall Facebook/OKCupid tour: on October 10, I’ll be participating on a panel (previewed in the NYT here) on “Experimentation and Ethical Practice,” along with Harvard Law’s Jonathan Zittrain, Google chief economist Hal Varian, my fellow PersonalGenomes.org board member and start-up investor Ester Dyson, and my friend and Maryland Law prof Leslie…
By Michelle Meyer I’m participating in several public events this fall pertaining to research ethics and regulation, most of them arising out of my recent work (in Wired and in Nature and elsewhere) on how to think about corporations conducting behavioral testing (in collaboration with academic researchers or not) on users and their online environments…
By Michelle Meyer I have a long article in Slate (with Chris Chabris) on the importance of replicating science. We use a recent (and especially bitter) dispute over the failure to replicate a social psychology experiment as an occasion for discussing several things of much broader import, including: The facts that replication, despite being a cornerstone…
Michelle Meyer has a new piece in Nature – an open letter on the Facebook study signed by a group of bioethicists (including PFC’s Executive Director Holly Fernandez Lynch) in which she argues that a Facebook study that manipulated news feeds was not definitively unethical and offered valuable insight into social behavior. From the piece: “Some bioethicists have…
By Michelle Meyer By now, most of you have probably heard—perhaps via your Facebook feed itself—that for one week in January of 2012, Facebook altered the algorithms it uses to determine which status updates appeared in the News Feed of 689,003 randomly-selected users (about 1 of every 2500 Facebook users). The results of this study—conducted…
