Tag: Rebecca L. Walker

Nonhuman animal research and phase I healthy‐volunteer clinical trials are both critical components of testing the safety of investigational drugs as part of the development of new pharmaceuticals. In addition, these types of research share important structural features, as both take place in confinement and both use subjects that are...

“Beyond Our Beginnings:  50 Years of Bioethics“. We are hosting it at the Mews location at the  Graylyn International Conference Center In recognition of the Hastings Center’s 50th anniversary, this conference surveys the past, present, and future of bioethics scholarship, practice, and policy. The program addresses a broad range of...

In human subject research ethics, we appeal to principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. In laboratory animal studies, the three Rs (reduce, refine, replace) are key touchstones, along with an overarching principle of promoting animal welfare—when consistent with the needs of science and within the constraints introduced by...

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...

There is limited research on healthy volunteers’ perceptions of the risks of Phase I clinical trials. In order to contribute empirically to long-standing ethical concerns about healthy volunteers’ involvement in drug development, it is crucial to assess how these participants understand trial risks. The objectives of this study were to...

Other than the financial motivations for enrolling in Phase I trials, research on how healthy volunteers perceive the benefits of their trial participation is scant. Using qualitative interviews conducted with 178 U.S. healthy volunteers enrolled in Phase I trials, we investigated how participants described the benefits of their study involvement,...

Philosophical approaches to animal research have typically asked whether nonhuman animals have rights that would prohibit such research or whether the benefit of such research on the whole balances out the harms to animals. The professional ethics approach instead promotes compliance with regulatory norms that aim to support science progress....

Phase 1 healthy volunteer clinical trials—which financially compensate subjects in tests of drug toxicity levels and side effects—appear to place pressure on each joint of the moral framework justifying research. In this article, we review concerns about phase 1 trials as they have been framed in the bioethics literature, including...

Advances in DNA sequencing technology open new possibilities for public health genomics, especially in the form of general population preventive genomic sequencing (PGS). Such screening programs would sit at the intersection of public health and preventive health care, and thereby at once invite and resist the use of clinical ethics...

In the United States at present, the death penalty is a possible sentence in 31 out of 50 states, as well as within the military and for federal cases. In the U.S., numbers of executions are declining, in part due to moratoriums in place and challenges to execution by lethal...