The sweep of Covid-19 across the globe has raised a fundamental question about medical ethics: Do physicians, nurses, EMTs, and other health care workers have moral and legal obligations to risk their health and lives to treat patients during a pandemic?

Full Article

It’s never easy to tell a patient about a terminal illness, but a longtime doctor whose own diagnosis was botched says physicians must do better.

Full Article

Primary care doctors are really good at checking seniors’ cholesterol levels and blood pressure but often fail to use tests that could detect dementia.

Fewer than half of primary care doctors surveyed say they routinely test patients 65 and older for problems with memory and thinking, according to a report released Tuesday by the Alzheimer’s Association.

Full Article

The Trump-Pence administration just made an unprecedented move to implement an unethical “gag” rule, prohibiting doctors and nurses from providing millions of patients with full information about their health-care options. This is a serious threat to the deep trust between health-care providers and our patients, and an attack on access to health care for those who need it most.

Full Article

Officials at Stanford University have opened an investigation into what several high-profile faculty members knew about a Chinese effort to create gene-edited babies led by a onetime researcher at the California school, He Jiankui.

The investigation, according to people familiar with it, aims to understand what liabilities or risks Stanford may have in connection with the controversial medical experiment, which led last year to the birth of two girls whose genomes had been altered with a molecular tool called CRISPR to render them immune to HIV.

Full Article

Some U.S. researchers knew of a Chinese scientist’s intentions to implant edited embryos but were unable to stop him. Now scientific institutions are trying to devise global safeguards.

Full Article

A near-drowning had left the woman in a persistent vegetative state for nearly a decade. So when she went into labor a few days after Christmas, her caretakers were flummoxed.

On Dec. 29, with help from one of the facility’s nurses, the patient gave birth to a healthy baby boy, KPHO reported. The birth — and the sexual assault of a vulnerable individual that must have preceded it — has cast a harsh glare on conditions at a nonprofit organization that bills itself as a leading provider of health care for Phoenix’s medically fragile.

Full Article

The Sarah Cannon Research Institute, based in Nashville, received nearly $8 million in payments from drug companies on behalf of its president for clinical operations, Dr. Howard Burris, largely for research work. Dozens of his articles published in prestigious medical journals did not include the required disclosures of those payments and relationships.

Full Article

BEIJING — China said on Thursday that it had suspended the work of a scientist who claims to have created the world’s first genetically edited babies, saying his conduct appeared to be unethical and in violation of Chinese law.

The scientist, He Jiankui, announced on Monday that he had used the gene-editing technique Crispr to alter embryos, which he implanted in the womb of a woman who gave birth to twin girls this month. At an international conference on Wednesday, he asserted that he was proud of what he had done.

Full Article

A Chinese researcher claims that he helped make the world’s first genetically edited babies — twin girls born this month whose DNA he said he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life.

If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics.

A U.S. scientist said he took part in the work in China, but this kind of gene editing is banned in the United States because the DNA changes can pass to future generations and it risks harming other genes.

Full Article