•  169
    The Role of Family Members in Psychiatric Deep Brain Stimulation Trials: More Than Psychosocial Support
    with Sara Goering, Eran Klein, Darin Dougherty, and Alik S. Widge
    Neuroethics 16 (2): 1-18. 2023.
    Family members can provide crucial support to individuals participating in clinical trials. In research on the “newest frontier” of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS)—the use of DBS for psychiatric conditions—family member support is frequently listed as a criterion for trial enrollment. Despite the significance of family members, qualitative ethics research on DBS for psychiatric conditions has focused almost exclusively on the perspectives and experiences of DBS recipients. This qualitative study is…Read more
  •  26
    How Medical Technologies Materialize Oppression
    American Journal of Bioethics 23 (4): 40-43. 2023.
    Biomedical practice can encode and perpetuate oppressive ideologies. This encoding and perpetuation, scholars like Liao and Carbonell (2023) convincingly argue, can occur not only via social practi...
  •  238
    Why “sex as a biological variable” conflicts with precision medicine initiatives
    with Marina DiMarco and Helen Zhao
    Cell Reports Medicine 10050 (3): 1-3. 2022.
    Policies that require male-female sex comparisons in all areas of biomedical research conflict with the goal of improving health outcomes through context-sensitive individualization of medical care. Sex, like race, requires a rigorous, contextual approach in precision medicine. A “sex contextualist” approach to gender-inclusive medicine better aligns with this aim.
  •  15
    A Feminist Approach to Analyzing Sex Disparities in COVID-19 Outcomes
    with Annika Gompers, Katharine M. N. Lee, and Heather Shattuck-Heidorn
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 15 (1): 167-174. 2022.
    Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers reported a surprising trend in disease outcomes: men were more likely to require hospitalization and die from COVID-19 than women. Researchers looked to sex-linked biology to explain these disparities, hypothesizing innate sex differences in immune function, suggesting the use of estrogens or androgen-suppressants as therapy, and even pushing for sex-specific vaccine strategies. Leading bioethicists like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel at the University of Pennsyl…Read more
  •  6
    Sex disparities in COVID-19 mortality vary across US racial groups
    Journal of General Internal Medicine 35 (1). 2021.
    Background Inequities in COVID-19 outcomes in the USA have been clearly documented for sex and race: men are dying at higher rates than women, and Black individuals are dying at higher rates than white individuals. Unexplored, however, is how sex and race interact in COVID-19 outcomes. Objective Use available data to characterize COVID-19 mortality rates within and between race and sex strata in two US states, with the aim of understanding how apparent sex disparities in COVID-19 deaths vary …Read more
  •  10
    Is there a gender equality paradox in STEM?
    with Meredith Reiches, Sarah Richardson, Joseph Bruch, Nicole Noll, and Heather Shattuck-Heidorn
    Psychological Science 31 (3): 338-341. 2020.
    Is the feminist project to bring about parity for women and men in traditionally male fields doomed? Recent headlines trumpet that "The more gender equality, the fewer women in STEM." The American Enterprise Institute proposes that it is futile to fund efforts to increase women in STEM fields, given that, “as paradoxical and counter-intuitive as it seems, female underrepresentation in STEM may actually be the result of the great advances in female empowerment, progress, and advancement that have…Read more
  •  202
    Analyzing COVID-19 sex difference claims
    with Sarah Richardson
    Apa Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 20 (1): 3-7. 2020.
    In “Analyzing COVID-19 Sex Difference Claims: The Harvard GenderSci Lab,” Marion Boulicault and Sarah Richardson summarize some of the groundbreaking work that they’re doing at the Harvard GenderSci Lab. Since March 2020, their lab has been analyzing, interrogating, and critiquing sex essentialist explanations of COVID-19 outcome disparities that are fairly ubiquitous in news media. Using interdisciplinary tools from feminist philosophy, science studies, and critical public health, they…Read more
  •  13
    The past 50 years have seen heated debate in the reproductive sciences about global trends in human sperm count. In 2017, Levine and colleagues published the largest and most methodologically rigorous meta-regression analysis to date and reported that average total sperm concentration among men from ‘Western’ countries has decreased by 59.3% since 1973, with no sign of halting. These results reverberated in the scientific community and in public discussions about men and masculinity in the moder…Read more
  •  48
    Multi-cellular engineered living systems: building a community around responsible research on emergence
    with Matthew Sample, Caley Allen, Rashid Bashir, Insoo Hyun, Megan Levis, Caroline Lowenthal, David Mertz, and Nuria Montserrat
    Biofabrication 11 (4). 2019.
    Ranging from miniaturized biological robots to organoids, multi-cellular engineered living systems (M-CELS) pose complex ethical and societal challenges. Some of these challenges, such as how to best distribute risks and benefits, are likely to arise in the development of any new technology. Other challenges arise specifically because of the particular characteristics of M-CELS. For example, as an engineered living system becomes increasingly complex, it may provoke societal debate about its mor…Read more
  •  732
    What makes science trustworthy to the public? This chapter examines one proposed answer: the trustworthiness of science is based at least in part on its independence from the idiosyncratic values, interests, and ideas of individual scientists. That is, science is trustworthy to the extent that following the scientific process would result in the same conclusions, regardless of the particular scientists involved. We analyze this "idiosyncrasy-free ideal" for science by looking at philosophical d…Read more
  •  14
    How Relationships Matter: The Need for Closer Attention to Relationality in Neuroethical Studies
    with Timothy Emmanuel Brown
    American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 9 (4): 235-237. 2018.