Like any top-level White House appointee, Surgeon General Jerome Adams serves at the pleasure of President Donald Trump and owes him some measure of political and institutional loyalty. But one thing makes Adams different from the yes men and women orbiting the Oval Office. He is a doctor, bound by strict ethical standards and codes of professional conduct.

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State lawmakers are expected to pass a bill requiring campus health centers to provide pills used for medication abortions. If the measure becomes law, it will be the first of its kind in the U.S.

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Abortion as a voting issue typically motivates its opponents more than its supporters. But Democrats running to defeat President Trump in 2020 are trying to reverse that momentum by harnessing outrage against a slew of new state restrictions.

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Rep. Kim Schrier – one of the 40 freshmen House Democrats who flipped GOP-held seats – is the only female doctor in Congress. The Washington state pediatrician also manages a chronic illness after having been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes as a teenager. She narrowly captured her seat last November, defeating Republican Dino Rossi in the most expensive House race in the state’s history.

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Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) turned heads this week after saying on a radio show that he had intentionally tried to get his children infected with chickenpox and that he did not support the state’s mandatory chickenpox vaccine.

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Police stations from Massachusetts to Mumbai have received similar alerts from Facebook over the last 18 months as part of what is most likely the world’s largest suicide threat screening and alert program. The social network ramped up the effort after several people live-streamed their suicides on Facebook Live in early 2017. It now utilizes both algorithms and user reports to flag possible suicide threats.

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A Chinese researcher claiming to have led a team that genetically edited human babies is now under investigation, as well as an American professor who might have helped him.

He Jiankui, an associate professor at Shenzhen’s Southern University of Science and Technology of China, revealed his gene editing work on Monday to an organizer of an international conference on gene editing in Hong Kong. He told the Associated Press he altered the DNA of twin girls born this month to resist HIV and AIDS virus. He said he’s altered embryos for seven couples in fertility treatments, but only had one pregnancy result.

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In a landmark move bound to further shake the tobacco industry, the Food and Drug Administration plans to propose a ban on menthol cigarettes next week as part of its aggressive campaign against flavored e-cigarettes and some tobacco products, agency officials said.

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The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a new form of an extremely potent opioid to manage acute pain in adults, weeks after the chairman of the advisory committee that reviewed it asked the agency to reject it on grounds that it would likely be abused.

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Identity is socially, politically and legally determined, even if shaped by genetics. Yet, genetic ancestry testing does not offer insights about these dynamics. So we can’t look to DNA to settle debates about identity.

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