Articles and Commentary

In 2010, Rebecca Skloot published The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a New York Times bestseller about a poor black woman in the late stages of cancer in 1950s Baltimore whose doctor removed cervical tissue from her without her...

The increasing use of DNA evidence has revolutionized criminal investigations. Over the past several years, DNA forensics—once thought to be a less reliable identifier than other forensic techniques, such as latent fingerprinting—have now become the evidentiary gold standard in criminal...

As best as demographers can figure, the world is short about 160 million girls and women–equivalent to the entire female population of the United States. With numbers of this magnitude in the news from time to time, many people are...

A new approach to testing the genes of early-stage fetuses could radically alter the experience of pregnancy and parenting. And we'd better start thinking about it now-before hype, fear, and the polarized politics of abortion distort the discussion.

The technique...

On Jan. 31, the departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services released the newest version of the official Dietary Guidelines for Americans, billed as "the federal government's evidence-based nutritional guidance to promote health, reduce the risk of chronic...

A great deal of scientific research – especially in medicine – relies on human subjects. Protecting volunteers has been a prominent social and legal issue since the 1950s, when the world recoiled from the horrors of Nazi medicine.

We have...

To view the PDF version of this article, please scroll down to the bottom of this page.

Over the past several decades, millions of people have used new reproductive technologies in their quest for biologically related children. Access to these...

We write in response to the conversation initiated in Volume 24.1 of Bioethics, which focused on the role of prisoners in biomedical and behavioral research. As interdisciplinary legal scholars who have researched the history, ethics, and current practices of...