Find information on topics in health care and biotechnology ethics, including end-of-life care, clinical ethics, pandemics, culturally competent care, vulnerable patient populations, organ transplantation, and other topics in bioethics. (For permission to reprint articles, submit requests to ethics@scu.edu.)
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Brain organoids are small tissue models derived from human stem cells and are currently being transplanted into animals. They hold great potential to investigate and treat neurological diseases, but their growing complexity could possibly give rise to consciousness in animals.
The goal is to ensure that as AI accelerates the machine of drug development, we have deliberate mechanisms for human accountability.
Analyzing biases against women in cardiovascular care, as well as how to move forward by integrating justice and building on essential bioethical principles.
Saving someone鈥檚 life could be as simple as pushing a button in the event of an opioid overdose, yet this is information not many know about and even fewer act on. Carrying naloxone is not just a public health initiative, but a moral responsibility all of us carry under the ethical framework of the common good.
Since 2015, there have been 20,000 children who have been sent to wilderness programs in Utah for mental health and behavioral issues. The Troubled Teen Industry and these types of programs are marketed as 鈥渞ehabilitation鈥 when they are often masking coercion, abuse, and neglect. When adolescent autonomy is neglected and parental consent creates a loophole of harm, is this really treatment or a systemic ethical failure?聽
Inadequate regulation of anthropogenic nanomaterials鈥攎an-made pollutants ranging from 1-100 nm鈥攎ay reinforce health inequities due to fenceline communities鈥 heightened exposure.
Police are routinely dispatched to mental health crises, yet these encounters disproportionately result in harm for individuals of color, a pattern long highlighted by racial justice movements like Black Lives Matter. This predictable pattern exposes a deeper ethical tension: can a system grounded in enforcement defend a model that endangers those it is meant to protect?
Explainability techniques seek to remedy the 鈥渂lack box鈥 problem of AI. This piece argues that they are ethically insufficient in a health care context, and that interpretable and rigorously validated models should be used instead.
In the brain economy, trust isn't a PR asset. It's structural. And right now, many organizations are building on sand. Guadalupe Hayes-Mota, director of bioethics, explores the ethical implications associated with neurotechnology in his latest essay for Forbes.
The United States health care system has undervalued primary care for the last thirty years, which has directly disincentivized physicians from entering primary care and has led to severe access inequalities.