News by Subject Policy & Ethics

A new paper by Eli Y. Adashi, Rohit Rajan, and I. Glenn Cohen appears in Science this week and picks up where those papers left off. Adashi, Rajan, and Cohen write that the crucial mission of the FDA, which has been to make science-based decisions about drug and medical device safety since 1938, has recently been undermined and threatened by politically motivated interference from congressional legislators.

Interactions with artificial intelligence (AI) will become an increasingly common aspect of our lives. A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now completed the first study of how 'embodied AI' can help treat mental illness. Their conclusion: Important ethical questions of this technology remain unanswered. There is urgent need for action on the part of governments, professional associations and researchers.

Less chemotherapy is as effective at controlling disease for elderly or frail patients with advanced cancer of the stomach or oesophagus (food pipe), and leads to fewer side effects such as diarrhoea and lethargy. These are the results of a Cancer Research UK funded study, presented prior to the ASCO conference today (Wednesday).

Reproducible scientific results are not always true and true scientific results are not always reproducible, according to a mathematical model produced by University of Idaho researchers.

One year after Philadelphia passed its beverage tax, sales of sugary and artificially sweetened beverages dropped by 38% in chain food retailers, according to Penn Medicine researchers who conducted one of the largest studies examining the impacts of a beverage tax. The results, published this week in JAMA, translate to almost one billion fewer ounces of sugary or artificially sweetened beverages -- about 83 million cans of soda -- purchased in the Philadelphia area.

In a new study, George Mason University faculty researchers assessed primary care provider experiences with the CareFirst Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) program. Nurse care coordinators and individual care plans for adults with chronic conditions were key to improving health care delivery.

As New Zealand considers a bill looking to legalise euthanasia, an Otago University ethicist considers it's time to shine the light on the ethical complications surrounding body donation and assisted dying.

The Global Health Impact Index, developed by faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York to rank pharmaceutical companies based on their drugs' impact on global health, is launching a new, more-robust model that addresses even more diseases worldwide.

The first reported instance of germline gene editing in humans was bad science as well as bad ethics, according to a commentary publishing April 30 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Haoyi Wang of the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Hui Yang of the Institutes of Neuroscience, CAS, both well-known experts in gene editing.