Biomedical Regulations & Ethics
Viewpoint: Reporting COVID-19 data is not ‘rocket science’ – yet US response has been a spectacular failure
Tragically, the United States, unable to match other countries’ response, has tallied the most cases and deaths in the world ...
Race science? Can AI ‘predict’ criminality through facial analysis?
With “80 percent accuracy and with no racial bias,” the paper, A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using ...
What’s a life worth in dollars and cents? Should that influence who gets treated for expensive disease treatments?
Austin was three years old and Max was a newborn when their mother, Jenn McNary, learned they had a rare ...
Viewpoint: Human challenge trials – volunteers intentionally infected with COVID-19 – are ‘uninformative, unnecessary and unethical’
Deliberately infecting volunteers with SARS-CoV-2 to test the efficacy of vaccine candidates is unnecessary, uninformative, and unethical. … [O]ne prominent ...
Viewpoint: Just one COVID-19 vaccine is not enough to win the war. We need an army
Scientists have created more than 70 vaccine candidates so far. “If we end up with two, three, or four vaccines, ...
How widespread is the pandemic? Proposed global blood bank could provide missing answers
Michael Mina is out for blood—millions of samples, which a nascent effort dubbed the Global Immunological Observatory (GIO), would monitor ...
China demands DNA from millions of men and boys, raising questions about privacy and consent
[China’s police force has] swept across the country since late 2017 to collect enough samples to build a vast DNA ...
On the front lines fighting the coronavirus: I took a COVID-19 contact tracing course
In the Before Times, there were only about 2,200 contact tracers for the whole US, according to the Association of ...
Infographic: Animal origins or lab leak? Tracing coronavirus back to the source
Since the pandemic began, the question of where the coronavirus came from has been one of the biggest puzzles. It ...
75 reasons why vaccines are needed and deniers are dangerous
If you are reading this, chances are that you repeated an anti-vaccine myth or said you weren't vaccinating your children, ...
Population health vs personalized medicine? Coronavirus pandemic highlights the importance of multiple approaches
“If we are to advance health care in the United States, where is the dollar best spent? Is it spent ...
Podcast: The dark connection between cancer research and the eugenics movement
Exploring how the stories of the 'cancer ladies' - Maud Slye and Pauline Gross - intersect with the eugenics movement ...
Hospitals face chronic shortages of injectable opioids. The COVID-19 pandemic made things worse.
For years, hospitals chased supplies, sometimes resorting to inferior substitutes. The shortfall grew so dire in 2018 that a drugmaker ...
Quest for coronavirus vaccine is the new ‘space race’. Will bragging rights go to China or the US?
The same day in mid-March that the United States launched human testing of its first experimental coronavirus vaccine, scientists in ...
Social and health complications in children linked to aging parents. Should age restrictions on fertility treatments be raised?
For nearly 40 years, fertility treatment has grown ever more advanced and so entrenched that it’s not uncommon for couples ...
Regeneron’s COVID-19 antibody ‘cocktail’ therapy enters clinical trials—could be ready for emergency use in the fall
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. said [June 11 that] it is beginning to test in humans a potential coronavirus drug, the latest ...
US employers turning to pricey and unproven COVID-19 antibody testing
Across America, untold numbers of employers, employees and ordinary citizens are turning to a slew of sometimes pricey new COVID-19 ...
Is the FDA facing political pressure to rush through approval of untested COVID-19 vaccines to fit Trump’s political schedule?
President Donald Trump has promised that there will be a coronavirus vaccine before the year is out. But public health ...
SCOTUS ruling protecting gay and transgender rights reaffirms sea change in American attitudes, rebuffs Trump Administration policies
When Donald J. Trump was elected president, gay and lesbian leaders warned that their far-reaching victories under Barack Obama — ...
Why controlling COVID-19 outbreaks could make it harder to test a vaccine
The aim is a vaccine by January, and money is no object. On May 21, the US said it would ...
Illegal to eat ice cream on a cone? Bring your own cutlery to barbecues; No more locally-sourced olive oil in bottles, just plastic pouches: Europe’s ‘baffling’ COVID-19 regulations
Europe is lifting its lockdowns, but the new rules to battle the coronavirus are baffling Europeans as the continent goes ...
Viewpoint: Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis’ COVID-19 controversy illustrates the politicization of science
The critical questions the Stanford professor is raising about Covid-19 have gotten lost amid partisan bickering ...
Contact tracing promises to curb the spread of COVID-19 in New York–if privacy fears can be overcome
Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers will be asked to disclose personal information this month as part of the city’s ...
Ethical pros and cons of infecting healthy volunteers in quest for COVID-19 vaccine
Instead of vaccinating hundreds to thousands of people and waiting to see if they naturally catch the virus, scientists would ...
‘It’s been so chaotic’: US government ‘Operation Warp Speed’ may not be focusing on developing the most promising COVID-19 vaccines
When the news broke [June 3] that Operation Warp Speed had selected five experimental COVID-19 vaccines to fast-track through testing ...
‘A new way of life’: UK launches COVID-19 contact tracing system with voluntary self-isolation
A test-and-trace system to find and isolate people who come into contact with coronavirus will be launched in the U.K ...
Lancet medical journal retracts much-questioned COVID-19 ‘observational study’ that raised safety alarms about hydroxychloroquine
The Lancet, one of the world’s top medical journals, on [June 4] retracted an influential study that raised alarms about ...
Viewpoint: Lawyers win and science loses in Johnson & Johnson decision to halt US baby powder sales
Scientists say that talcum baby powder doesn't cause cancer. Trial lawyers say it does. As usual, the lawyers win. Scientists, ...
