“In the imminent future, patients will start to die because there simply aren’t enough people to care for them. Doctors and nurses will burn out. The most precious resource the U.S. health-care system has in the struggle against COVID-19 isn’t some miracle drug. It’s the expertise of its health-care workers—and they are exhausted.”

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“With all of the tumult surrounding the coronavirus, few people likely noticed that three important figures in bioethics recently died within a month of one another. But us, the deaths of Renée Fox, Charles Bosk, and David Rothman were a major loss.”

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Ten years ago, Renee Bach left her home in Virginia to set up a charity to help children in Uganda. One of her first moves was to start a blog chronicling her experiences.

Among the most momentous: On a Sunday morning in October 2011, a couple from a village some distance away showed up at Bach’s center carrying a small bundle.

“When I pulled the covering back my eyes widened,” Bach wrote in the blog. “For under the blanket lay a small, but very, very swollen, pale baby girl. Her breaths were frighteningly slow. … The baby’s name is Patricia. She is 9 months old.”

Bach went on to write that Patricia had fallen sick three weeks earlier. But her parents had been unable to find anyone closer to home who could cure her.

Then, wrote Bach, “One of their relatives told them about a ‘hospital’ … with a ‘White Doctor.’ ”

Except Bach was not a doctor.

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WASHINGTON — Pound for pound, the deadliest arms of all time are not nuclear but biological. A single gallon of anthrax, if suitably distributed, could end human life on Earth.

Even so, the Trump administration has given scant attention to North Korea’s pursuit of living weapons — a threat that analysts describe as more immediate than its nuclear arms, which Pyongyang and Washington have been discussing for more than six months.

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Ever since scientists created the powerful gene-editing technique CRISPR, they have braced for the day when it would be used to produce a genetically altered human being. Now, the moment they feared may have come. What’s likely to happen next?

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All over the country, specialized strike teams of doctors are giving hope to families who are desperately searching for a diagnosis.

The medical sleuths have cracked more than a third of the 382 patient cases they’re pursuing, according to a recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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We have long understood, however, that the robustness of the biomedical research enterprise is under constant threat by risks to the security of intellectual property and the integrity of peer review.  This knowledge has shaped our existing policies and practices, but these risks are increasing.

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In recent years, however, this practice of appraising researchers by counting their publications has become problematic. This is because an astonishing number of journals that bill themselves as “peer-reviewed” do not, in fact, take the trouble to be so. A tally of journals that an American analytics firm, Cabells, believes to falsely claim to peer-review submissions, amounted, on a recent day, to 8,699—more than double the number of a year ago. A blacklist compiled by other experts is even longer.

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In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of “black.” In the United States, historically, a person is “black” if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not “black” if he is known to have any European ancestry. If “black” refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?

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Four former heads of the Food and Drug Administration have issued a joint statement opposing “right to try” legislation that is designed to permit desperately sick patients to get experimental treatments without the approval of the agency.

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