Open access publishing has major benefits to readers, library systems, and anyone who would forgo reading due to the subscription price or who would pay subscription fees. I am (or maybe was) a huge fan. In the 1990s open access arose as a non-profit, often university-based system. Around 2002, commercial publishers entered the market. Along…
Adapted and including significant excerpts from Zimmerman, A. “Our System for Reporting Child Abuse is Unethical” Hastings Center Forum, September 29, 2023. “Take Care of Maya” documents the tragic circumstances of powerful child abuse pediatrician Sally Smith and social worker Cathi Bedy, who, with doctors and the infrastructure of the Department of Children and Families…
Some articles in mainstream media and academics could be paraphrased as statements that begin “I am concerned about AI proliferation because. . .” Answers can be broadly grouped into two distinct categories: existential threats and grounded, proven and anticipated harms. Math is not going to “take over the world”. While that is an odd statement,…
The “rule of rescue” describes the imperative people feel to rescue those in imminent danger. That kneejerk reaction is distinct from the ethical imperative that is described as a duty to rescue. The firm territory of the moral duty to rescue involves rescue that puts the rescuer at little inconvenience or cost and does not…
Hospital and physician liability for saving the life of someone who wished not to be saved is an area of evolving law. While years ago, such cases were routinely dismissed, recent caselaw recognizes the cause of action under medical malpractice. Increasing public awareness of the importance of advance directives and movements like medical aid in…
I envision a broad bioethics, one that covers the relationships and interactions between science and society. Bioethics ranges from dilemmas arising in the relationship between doctors and people seeking care (often clinical ethics) to largescale societal moral dilemmas. The individual and societal issues are intertwined: each has implications for the other. Does a policy, personal…
Organizations and scholars frame the current food crisis as a global phenomenon due to a confluence of events and circumstances like droughts, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. As Samantha Power noted this week, “a decade of progress” has been “obliterated”. The number of people with unmet food needs is steeply increasing after a…
Reactions to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health are wide ranging, and many seem to reflect emotion and use charged language. I do not mean to downplay the tossing out of an established constitutional right, but a cooling off period may allow for more reasoned discussion. While in the past courts disagreed about where in the…
Diagnosis is a tricky word. Doctors diagnose some scientific truths: for example, a finding of a tumor and the accompanying pathology report describing cellular activity and genetic information, etc. Diagnosis is also the term used for many things for which science does not provide a distinct test – diagnosis depends in those cases on a…
One strategy for improving public trust in science, the COVID-19 vaccine and possibly future COVID-19 vaccines or vaccines for emerging virus should be improving trustworthiness at all levels. The way bioethics and public health approach public trust often leaves out the most crucial element: improving trustworthiness and maintaining trustworthy institutions. Doctors and other healthcare professionals…