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Recommendations from Thai Stakeholders About Protecting HIV Remission (‘cure’) Trial Participants: Report from a Participatory Workshop

November 1, 2020
Background The social/behavioral HIV Decision-Making Study (DMS) assesses informed consent and trial experiences of individuals in HIV remission trials in Thailand. We convened a 1-d multi-stakeholder participatory workshop in Bangkok. We provide a meeting summary and reactions from DMS investigators. Methods Workshop members viewed de-identified interview excerpts from DMS participants....

Parallel but connected: Nuances of conducting behavioral and social science research alongside ethically challenging HIV remission trials

June 25, 2020
Collaborations between clinical investigators and behavioral and social science researchers (BSSR) produce many benefits, but also may generate challenges and complexities. Ongoing relationships between teams may affect the research carried out by the BSSR team and the way they interpret their findings. Here we describe our experiences conducting the HIV...

Incidental Enhancements: A Neglected Governance Challenge for Human Genome Editing Research

June 25, 2020
The increasing pace and international diffusion of developments in human genome editing research have prompted ongoing efforts to develop responsible governance for such research. One point of broad agreement across these efforts is that human genome editing research should prioritize medical applications over attempts to enhance human traits because of...

Professionalism and Ethics: A Standardized Patient Observed Standardized Clinical Examination to Assess ACGME Pediatric Professionalism Milestones

May 1, 2020
Introduction: The ethical skills fundamental to medical practice encompass a large portion of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) professionalism milestones. Yet many ethical practices are difficult to reduce to milestone frameworks given the variety of traditions of moral reasoning that clinician-trainees and their colleagues might properly employ....

Is Real-Time ELSI Realistic?

May 1, 2020
Background: A growing literature has raised—skeptically—the question of whether cutting-edge scientific research can identify and address broader ethical and policy considerations in real time. In genomics, the question is: Can ELSI contribute to genomics in real time, or will it be relegated to its historical role of after-the-fact outsider critique?...

Assessing the Implications of Positive Genomic Screening Results

May 1, 2020
Aim: Before population screening of ‘healthy’ individuals is widely adopted, it is important to consider the harms and benefits of receiving positive results and how harms and benefits may differ by age. Subjects & methods: Participants in a preventive genomic screening study were screened for 17 genes associated with 11...

Exploring the Emotional Labor of Medical Trainees in the Setting of Ethics Education

November 2, 2019
Julie Childers and Bob Arnold’s (2019) article, “The Inner Lives of Doctors: Physician Emotion in the Care of the Seriously Ill,” uses Kübler-Ross’s influential work on death and dying to remind us that the experiences contained within her framework relate not only to patients but also to members of their...

Perils of the Hidden Curriculum: Emotional Labor and “Bad” Pediatric Proxies

October 11, 2019
Today’s medical training environment exposes medical trainees to many aspects of what has been called “the hidden curriculum.” In this article, we examine the relationship between two aspects of the hidden curriculum, the performance of emotional labor and the characterization of patients and proxies as “bad,” by analyzing clinical ethics...

Public Health Genomics, Biobanking, and Ethics

April 12, 2019
As large-scale biobanks are developed for translational genomic research and health care quality improvement, they are also becoming attractive as sites for public health interventions, such as population-based preventive sequencing for actionable variants. With the rapid advance of next-generation sequencing, the feasibility of such population health interventions is also increasing....

Is Enhancement the Price of Prevention in Human Gene Editing?

November 26, 2018
New gene-editing tools challenge conventional policy proscriptions of research aimed at either human germline gene editing or human enhancement by potentially lowering technical barriers to both kinds of intervention. Some recent gene-editing reports have begun to take up the prospect of germline editing, but most experts are in broad agreement...