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.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has overturned the state’s “Safer at Home” orders and mandated that all future statewide restrictions to battle the coronavirus must be approved by the legislature’s rule-making committee before they could be implemented.

The decision came after a group of doctors, patients and proponents sued, arguing that a 2015 law infringed on their constitutional right to make decisions about their own lives.

For years, California law required psychotherapists to report any patient who admitted developing, duplicating, printing or exchanging material depicting an obscene act involving a child. The therapists accepted that requirement. They regarded it as an obligation to report producers and distributors of child pornography. But when the Legislature amended the law in 2014 to reflect new technology, many therapists balked, complaining the new wording required them to inform on patients who posed no threat to others.

The new owner of a consumer DNA database that has powered a revolution in forensics vowed to resist attempts by police to circumvent the site’s privacy rules.

The use of a unique set of cells — human fetal tissue cells — has led to immense medical breakthroughs, but President Donald Trump, to the delight of many anti-abortion groups, has thwarted any such future scientific advances by placing an additional layer of scrutiny on National Institutes of Health (NIH) research proposals that would use these cells.

The French ban on direct-to-consumer genetic testing is part of the country’s bioethics laws, which legislators are supposed to revise every seven years. When those discussions got under way earlier this year, some geneticists expected the National Assembly to relax the rules about commercial DNA analysis. It didn’t.

Unwed pregnant women in China face a legal gray zone where they are unable to access public services for themselves and their children.

The state of California will pay $3.85 million to researchers at the University of California, Davis, to develop the nation’s first program to train health care professionals to help their patients reduce firearm-related injury and death, university officials announced Tuesday.