Faculty Bibliography

Immorally acquired information from Nazi experimentation or other sources infects the body of scientific and biomedical knowledge. Responding to this reality ethically means insisting on good teaching about the horrific history of such information's sources and careful deliberation about how it is referenced and described.

The federal research misconduct regulations finalized in 2005 did not incorporate important principles regarding human subjects protections articulated in The Belmont Report, yet research misconduct can involve harms to research subjects and to subsequent patients whose treatments are based on false research findings. Consistency with the Belmont principles would require assuring regular monitoring to detect research misconduct, tracing effects of research misconduct on trial participants and informing them of these effects, and assuring timely correction of published reports of research findings if research misconduct related to the study was subsequently discovered. Research misconduct has historically been viewed as a matter for the scientific community to manage; it is actually a threat to the welfare of human subjects and ethically ought to be treated as such.

Pediatric patients are excluded from most COVID-19 therapeutic trials. We outline a rationale for the inclusion of children in COVID-19 therapeutic trials with enabled us to include children of all ages in a therapeutic COVID-19 trial at our institution.

Although a safe, effective, and licensed coronavirus vaccine does not yet exist, there is already controversy over how it ought to be allocated. Justice is clearly at stake, but it is unclear what justice requires in the international distribution of a scarce vaccine during a pandemic. Many are condemning 'vaccine nationalism' as an obstacle to equitable global distribution. We argue that limited national partiality in allocating vaccines will be a component of justice rather than an obstacle to it. For there are role-based and community-embedded responsibilities to take care of one's own, which constitute legitimate moral reasons for some identity-related prioritisation. Furthermore, a good form of vaccine nationalism prioritises one's own without denying or ignoring duties derived from a principle of equal worth, according to which all persons, regardless of citizenship or identity, equally deserve vaccine-induced protection from COVID-19. Rather than dismissing nationalism as a tragic obstacle, it is necessary to acknowledge that a limited form of it is valuable and expresses moral commitments. Only then can one understand our world of competing obligations, a world where cosmopolitan duties of benevolence sometimes conflict with special obligations of community membership. Once these competing obligations are recognised as such, we can begin the work of designing sound ethical frameworks for achieving justice in the global distribution of a coronavirus vaccine and developing practical strategies for avoiding, mitigating or resolving conflicts of duty.

Research misconduct (RM) remains an important problem in health research despite decades of local, national, regional, and international efforts to eliminate it. The ultimate goal of every health research project, irrespective of setting, is to produce trustworthy findings to address local as well as global health issues. To be able to lead or participate meaningfully in international research collaborations, individual and institutional capacities for research integrity (RI) are paramount. Accordingly, this paper concerns itself not only with individuals' research skills but also with institutional and national policies and governance. Such policies and governance provide an ethical scaffold for the production of knowledge and structure incentives. This paper's operational definition of research therefore draws from Institute of Medicine's articulation of health research as an inquiry that aims to produce knowledge about the structure, processes, or effects of personal health services; and from an existing health systems framework. The paper reviews the research regulatory environment and the ethics apparatus in Ghana, and describes a project jointly undertaken by Ghanaian researchers in collaboration with New York University to assess the perceived adequacy of current institutional practices, opportunities, and incentives for promoting RI.

In September 2020, a detailed report on Heritable Human Genome Editing was published. The report offers a translational pathway for the limited approval of germline editing under limited circumstances and assuming various criteria have been met. In this perspective, some three dozen experts from the fields of genome editing, medicine, bioethics, law, and related fields offer their candid reactions to the National Academies/Royal Society report, highlighting areas of support, omissions, disagreements, and priorities moving forward.