Families Matter: Ethically, Legally, and Clinically March 18 – 20, 2015 Harvard Medical School Joseph B. Martin Conference Center 77 Avenue Louis Pasteur Boston, MA 02115 A full agenda is available on our website. We often talk, in bioethics, about individual autonomy. Yet our most challenging ethical, legal and clinical controversies in health care often center around…
By Timo Minssen The current Ebola outbreak already attracted much attention on “Bill of Health” resulting in some excellent blogs on a horrible topic. While it is evident that the current health crisis requires both immediate responses and more sustainable changes in health care policy, research and regulation, medicines regulators are collaborating internationally to find innovative…
By Timo Minssen I have just been informed that a new call for proposals for the 2016 Brocher Foundation residencies has been launched. I can warmly recommend this splendid opportunity to any researcher or group of researchers in the fields of Bioethics, Medical Anthropology, Health Economics, Health Policy, Health Law, Philosophy of Medicine and Health, Medical Humanities, Social Science Perspectives on Health, Medical Ethics,…
By: Michelle Mello, JD, PhDStanford Law School and Stanford University School of Medicine On November 4, Californians will vote on Proposition 46, a ballot initiative to adjust the $250,000 state’s noneconomic damages cap in medical malpractice cases for inflation, raising it to $1.1 million virtually overnight. It’s a long overdue move – California has one of the…
By Arielle Lusardi As state medical marijuana laws proliferate throughout the country, companies are trying to secure their own piece of the action. In July 2014, a San Francisco-based start-up company, called Eaze, launched a mobile application that facilitates the delivery of medical marijuana in California.
By Holly Jones How can the federal government ensure consumer safety in an industry that distributes a substance the federal government classifies as an illegal drug? The federal government effectively banned the use of marijuana nationwide with the Controlled Substance Act of 1970, classifying marijuana as a Schedule I substance according. Regardless of this federal…
By Timo Minssen In Part II of this blog on legal issues relating to the revival of phage therapy I discussed the US Supreme Court’s decisions in Myriad and Prometheus, which might present major obstacles to the patentability of phage-related technology (a more detailed analysis of the Myriad and Prometheus decisions is available here). Yet,…
By Timo Minssen Three days ago I commented on a couple of legal issues raised in the recent Nature report “Phage therapy gets revitalized” by Sara Reardon. One challenge concerns the reluctance of pharma companies to broadly invest in the development of phage therapies. As pointed out in the report, this does of course very…
By Timo Minssen Last week I blogged about recent publications concerning the global battle against anti-microbial resistance (AMR). I did not mention a recent paper published in the June 2014 issue of Nature, which describes how European and U.S. researchers and authorities are increasingly considering clinical research in unconventional areas to fight AMR. The news-report…
By Timo Minssen One of my previous blogs discussed the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). I concluded that antimicrobial resistance is a growing and complex threat involving multifaceted legal, socio-economic and scientific aspects. This requires sustained and coordinated action on both global and local levels. A recent medical review on drug resistant tuberculosis supports…
