February 5, 2020

Hastings Responds to the Coronavirus Epidemic

Two Hastings Center fellows in China–Ruipeng Lei and Renzong Qiu--report on ethical questions raised by China’s response to the fast-spreading coronavirus epidemic. Writing in Hastings Bioethics Forum, they cite a lack of transparency early on, especially during mid-January, a time when it is customary “to sing the praise of the government’s achievement, not to deal with problems and expose mistakes.” They acknowledge government decisions that have been beneficial—including the ban on wild animal trade at least until the end of the epidemic--and discuss ethical issues to be addressed, including taking action to “prevent and fight discrimination against people from Wuhan or those infected by the virus.” Read the Bioethics Forum post. And the Washington Post quotes Hastings Center senior advisor Rosemary Gibson on concerns about the impact of the coronavirus epidemic on the generic drug industry in the U.S., which depends on ingredients from China. Read the Washington Post article.

Should Crowdsourced Research Have Special Ethical Oversight?

The use of online crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, to recruit research participants has become ubiquitous in social, behavioral, and educational research. Crowdsourced research involves finding research participants on online platforms that connect people who post tasks with other people (crowd workers) who will perform these tasks for a small sum of money. An article in the latest issue of The Hastings Center’s journal Ethics & Human Research concludes that crowdsourced research participants are vulnerable to exploitation and proposes measures that ethical reviewers can take against this risk, including encouraging collective action by crowd workers themselves and ground-up crowdsourced research ethics guidelines. Read the article for free. This month, the entire issue of the journal is free. Read it here.

Hastings Rice Fellow Founds Journal on Philosophy of Disability

Joel Michael Reynolds, The Hastings Center’s Rice Family Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities and an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, is launching a journal: The Journal of Philosophy of Disability. Edited by Reynolds and Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, an associate professor of philosophy at Gallaudet University, the journal will feature the highest-quality work in the field of philosophy of disability. It will be published by the Philosophy Documentation Center on an open-access basis without requiring payments from authors. Although it will cover the full breadth of the field of philosophy of disability, the journal will regularly publish pieces of interest to clinicians, bioethicists, and those in public health. Read more.

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