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10The misplaced embryo: legal parenthood in ‘embryo mix-up’ casesJournal of Medical Ethics. forthcoming.Recently in Israel, a woman was mistakenly implanted with an embryo that is genetically related to another couple. Unfortunately, this case is not an isolated occurrence, as other cases of embryo mix-ups have been reported in several countries, including the USA, China, the UK and various other countries within the European Union. Cases of mixed-up embryos are ethically and legally complex: the woman who carried the pregnancy and the woman who is genetically related to the resulting child—both o…Read more
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Nudging Health: Health Law and Behavioral Economics (edited book)Johns Hopkins University Press. 2016.
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4Human Subjects Research Regulation: Perspectives on the Future (edited book)MIT Press. 2014.Experts from different disciplines offer novel ideas for improving research oversight and protection of human subjects.
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9Readings in comparative health law and bioethics (edited book)Carolina Academic Press. 2020.Originally edited by Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, this text examines how different countries around the world approach the same challenges in health care law and ethics: how to finance care for as many people as possible; how to ensure quality care; how to best secure patients' rights; how to regulate abortion, end of life decision making, and assisted reproduction; and how to manage infectious diseases, tobacco use, and human subject research. The new edition considers a broader array of countries, …Read more
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19Consumer genetic technologies: ethical and legal considerations (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2021.For the average person, genetic testing has two very different faces. The rise of genetic testing is often promoted as the democratization of genetics by enabling individuals to gain insights into their unique makeup. At the same time, many have raised concerns that genetic testing and sequencing reveal intensely personal and private information. As these technologies become increasingly available as consumer products, the ethical, legal, and regulatory challenges presented by genomics are ever …Read more
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59What Should ChatGPT Mean for Bioethics?American Journal of Bioethics 23 (10): 8-16. 2023.In the last several months, several major disciplines have started their initial reckoning with what ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) mean for them – law, medicine, business among other professions. With a heavy dose of humility, given how fast the technology is moving and how uncertain its social implications are, this article attempts to give some early tentative thoughts on what ChatGPT might mean for bioethics. I will first argue that many bioethics issues raised by ChatGPT are…Read more
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15The Development, Implementation, and Oversight of Artificial Intelligence in Health Care: Legal and Ethical IssuesIn Erick Valdés & Juan Alberto Lecaros (eds.), Handbook of Bioethical Decisions. Volume I: Decisions at the Bench, Springer Verlag. pp. 441-456. 2023.Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially of the machine learning (ML) variety, is used by health care organizations to assist with a number of tasks, including diagnosing patients and optimizing operational workflows. AI products already proliferate the health care market, with usage increasing as the technology matures. Although AI may potentially revolutionize health care, the use of AI in health settings also leads to risks ranging from violating patient privacy to implementing a biased algor…Read more
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20When Potential Does Not Matter: What Developments in Cellular Biology Tell Us About the Concept of Legal PersonhoodAmerican Journal of Bioethics 13 (1): 38-40. 2013.No abstract
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29Medical Crowdfunding for Unproven Medical Treatments: Should Gofundme Become a Gatekeeper?Hastings Center Report 49 (6): 32-38. 2019.Medical crowdfunding has raised many ethical concerns, among them that it may undermine privacy, widen health inequities, and commodify health care. One motivation for medical crowdfunding has received particular attention among ethicists. Recent studies have shown that many individuals are using crowdfunding to finance access to scientifically unsupported medical treatments. Recently, GoFundMe prohibited campaigns for antivaccination groups on the grounds that they “promote misinformation about…Read more
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24The Legality of Biometric Screening of Professional AthletesAmerican Journal of Bioethics 17 (1): 65-67. 2017.
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18Streamlining Review by Accepting EquivalenceAmerican Journal of Bioethics 14 (5): 11-13. 2014.No abstract
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24Confronting Biospecimen Exceptionalism in Proposed Revisions to the Common RuleHastings Center Report 46 (1): 4-5. 2016.On September 8, 2015, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a Notice of Proposed Rule Making to revise the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, widely known as the “Common Rule.” The NPRM proposes several changes to the current system, including a dramatic shift in the approach to secondary research using biospecimens and data. Under the current rules, it is relatively easy to use biospecimens and data for secondary research. This approach systematically facilitates …Read more
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16Patient‐Centered Outcomes Research: Stakeholder Perspectives and Ethical and Regulatory Oversight IssuesIRB: Ethics & Human Research 40 (1): 7-17. 2018.
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62The Ethics of Smart Pills and Self-Acting Devices: Autonomy, Truth-Telling, and Trust at the Dawn of Digital MedicineAmerican Journal of Bioethics 18 (9): 38-47. 2018.Digital medicine is a medical treatment that combines technology with drug delivery. The promises of this combination are continuous and remote monitoring, better disease management, self-tracking, self-management of diseases, and improved treatment adherence. These devices pose ethical challenges for patients, providers, and the social practice of medicine. For patients, having both informed consent and a user agreement raises questions of understanding for autonomy and informed consent, therap…Read more
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23When clinical trials compete: prioritising study recruitmentJournal of Medical Ethics 43 (12): 803-809. 2017.It is not uncommon for multiple clinical trials at the same institution to recruit concurrently from the same patient population. When the relevant pool of patients is limited, as it often is, trials essentially compete for participants. There is evidence that such a competition is a predictor of low study accrual, with increased competition tied to increased recruitment shortfalls. But there is no consensus on what steps, if any, institutions should take to approach this issue. In this article,…Read more
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76Using Social Media as a Research Recruitment Tool: Ethical Issues and RecommendationsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 17 (3): 3-14. 2017.The use of social media as a recruitment tool for research with humans is increasing, and likely to continue to grow. Despite this, to date there has been no specific regulatory guidance and there has been little in the bioethics literature to guide investigators and institutional review boards faced with navigating the ethical issues such use raises. We begin to fill this gap by first defending a nonexceptionalist methodology for assessing social media recruitment; second, examining respect for…Read more
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34Institutions as an ethical locus of research prioritisationJournal of Medical Ethics 43 (12): 816-818. 2017.Ensuring that clinical trials, once launched, successfully complete and generate useful knowledge is an important and indeed ethically imperative goal, given the risks and burdens borne by research participants. Since there are insufficient willing research participants to power all the trials that are currently undertaken,1 addressing underenrolment will require prioritisation decisions that reduce the number of trials competing for participants. While there are multiple levels at which researc…Read more
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36Mitigating Racial Bias in Machine LearningJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 50 (1): 92-100. 2022.When applied in the health sector, AI-based applications raise not only ethical but legal and safety concerns, where algorithms trained on data from majority populations can generate less accurate or reliable results for minorities and other disadvantaged groups.
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31Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “The Ethics of Smart Pills and Self-Acting Devices: Autonomy, Truth-Telling, and Trust at the Dawn of Digital Medicine”American Journal of Bioethics 18 (10): 4-7. 2018.
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115Transplant Tourism: The Ethics and Regulation of International Markets for OrgansJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 41 (1): 269-285. 2013.“Medical Tourism” is the travel of residents of one country to another country for treatment. In this article I focus on travel abroad to purchase organs for transplant, what I will call “Transplant Tourism.” With the exception of Iran, organ sale is illegal across the globe, but many destination countries have thriving black markets, either due to their willful failure to police the practice or more good faith lack of resources to detect it. I focus on the sale of kidneys, the most common subje…Read more
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12Travel to Other States for Abortion after DobbsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 22 (8): 42-44. 2022.As Professor Ziegler’s article and prior books show, the reversal of Roe v. Wade has been an overarching goal of the abortion-restrictive movement. With that goal approaching—indeed if the l...
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42This Is Your Brain on Human Rights: Moral Enhancement and Human RightsLaw and Ethics of Human Rights 9 (1): 1-41. 2015.
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9The Enduring Allure of Person-Affecting Arguments for Reproductive TechnologiesAmerican Journal of Bioethics 22 (9): 44-46. 2022.Professor Sparrow’s (2022) Target Article helpfully elucidates the question of when the ordinary person-affecting conception of harm and benefit should apply to discussions of germline genome editi...
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5American Journal of Law & Medicine and Harvard Law & Health Care SocietyJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 28 (3): 305-307. 2000.
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17Making Residency Work Hour Rules WorkJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 41 (1): 310-314. 2013.In July 2011, the ACGME implemented new rules that limit interns to 16 hours of work in a row, but continue to allow 2nd-year and higher resident physicians to work for up to 28 consecutive hours. Whether the ACGME's 2011 work hour limits went too far or did not go far enough has been hotly debated. In this article, we do not seek to re-open the debate about whether these standards get matters exactly right. Instead, we wish to address the issue of effective enforcement. That is, now that new wo…Read more
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26Legal and Ethical Issues in the Report Heritable Human Genome EditingHastings Center Report 51 (3): 8-12. 2021.This essay discusses the new report, Heritable Human Genome Editing, by the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society. After summarizing the report, we argue that the report takes four quite bold steps away from prior reports, namely (1) rejecting an omnibus approach to heritable human genome editing (HHGE) in favor of a case‐by‐case analysis of possible uses of HHGE, accepting that HHGE is acceptable in some cases; (2) recognizing that the interest in…Read more
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48How to Regulate Medical Tourism (and Why It Matters for Bioethics)Developing World Bioethics 12 (1): 9-20. 2012.A growing literature examines descriptive and normative questions about medical tourism such as: How does it operate? What are its effects? Are home country patients or their governments failing in moral duties by engaging in or permitting medical tourism?By contrast, much less has been written on the regulatory dimension: What might be done about medical tourism if we were convinced that it posed ethical issues and were motivated to act? I shall argue that this kind of regulatory analysis is es…Read more