The debate over plasma therapy continues on. Should its use become widespread? Although it has been authorized for use from the government, many hospitals grapple with this therapeutic due to need for further study.

The race for a COVID-19 vaccine has been on the forefront of many research pursuits, and bioethics is crucial when considering vaccine development and distribution. Clinical trials progressing through defined phases allow developers to gauge the effect of the vaccine in the larger population and study any effects of long-term utilization. Carl Zimmer of The New York Times provides a look at the early results from the “Sputnik V” vaccine in Russia.

“It’s still too soon to try to make genetically edited babies because the science isn’t advanced enough to ensure safety, says an international panel of experts who also mapped a pathway for any countries that want to consider it.”

Nearly two years after the world was shocked from news of the first gene-edited CRISPR babies in China, a panel of experts has reviewed and deemed that editing embryos is not ready scientifically. A further report on the ethics is to come later this year.

In this news and opinion article in The Scientist, Amanda Heidt paints a poignant visual of the extent to which scientists will go in their race for the COVID-19 vaccine. What is known in this history of medical self-experimentation?

Stanford University has cleared Stephen Quake, a bioengineering professor, of any wrongdoing in his interactions with a Chinese researcher who roiled the scientific world by creating the first gene-edited babies.

Last year, more than 1 million Americans attempted suicide, and 47,000 succeeded. While some people display warning signs, many others do not, which makes suicide difficult to predict and leaves family members shocked — and anguished that they couldn’t do something.

Medical providers and tech companies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs and Facebook, are increasingly applying artificial intelligence to the problem of suicide prediction. Machine learning software, which excels at pattern recognition, can mine health records and online posts for words and behaviors linked to suicide and alert physicians or others to impending attempts. The potential upside of this effort is huge, because even small increases in predictive accuracy could save thousands of lives each year.

Do you think you own your own medical data? Your hospital and doctor records, lab and radiology tests, genetic information, even the actual tissue removed during a biopsy or other surgical procedure? Well, you don’t.

It’s a good bet that the fine print of the consent form you signed before your latest test or operation said that all the data or tissue samples belong to the doctor or institution performing it. They can study it, sell it or do whatever they want with it, without notifying or compensating you, although the data must be depersonalized in their best effort to make sure you are anonymous.

But as ubiquitous as the phenomenon is, and as plentiful the studies that demonstrate it, the placebo effect has yet to become part of the doctor’s standard armamentarium — and not only because it has a reputation as “fake medicine” doled out by the unscrupulous to the credulous. It also has, so far, resisted a full understanding, its mechanisms shrouded in mystery. Without a clear knowledge of how it works, doctors can’t know when to deploy it, or how.

Here’s the thing: Even if the Apple Watch excels at detecting undiagnosed AF (a big if), using it to screen large numbers of asymptomatic people isn’t necessarily a good idea.