Day: December 11, 2015

Bioethicist Art Caplan: Engineering the Better Baby

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Bill of Health Contributor Arthur Caplan has a new article in Project Syndicate:

There should no longer be any doubt about whether humans will one day be genetically modified. A new tool – called CRISPR – is already being used to edit the genomes of insects and animals. Essentially a very sharp molecular knife, CRISPR allows scientists to carve out and insert genes precisely and inexpensively. It is only a matter of time before it will be used to engineer our descendants – eliminating many dangerous hereditary diseases in the process.

To be sure, this eventuality is being hotly debated. The main arguments against genetic modification of human embryos are that it would be unsafe and unfair, and that modification would quickly go beyond efforts to reduce the incidence of inherited maladies. But, ultimately, none of these reasons is likely to be persuasive enough to stop the technology from being widely used. […]

Read the full article here.

Stay Up-To-Date with Email Alerts from the Journal of Law and the Biosciences

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

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The Journal of Law and the Biosciences is the first fully Open Access peer-reviewed legal journal focused on the advances at the intersection of law and the biosciences. A co-venture between Duke University, Harvard University Law School, and Stanford University, and published by Oxford University Press, this open access, online, and interdisciplinary academic journal publishes cutting-edge scholarship in this important new field. The Journal contains original and response articles, essays, and commentaries on a wide range of topics, including bioethics, neuroethics, genetics, reproductive technologies, stem cells, enhancement, patent law, and food and drug regulation. JLB is published as one volume with three issues per year with new articles posted online on an ongoing basis.

‘The Week in Health Law’ Podcast

Nicolas P. Terry Leave a comment

By Nicolas Terry

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This week we talked with Robert I. Field, Professor of Law at Drexel University. Robert is also a professor of health management and policy at Drexel’s Dornsife School of Public Health, a lecturer in health care management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a senior fellow of Penn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He is the author of “Mother of Invention: How the Government Created ‘Free-Market’ Health Care,” which presents a historical overview of government programs in creating and maintaining the health care system and places health reform in the context of an ongoing evolutionary process. He is also the author of “Health Care Regulation in America: Complexity, Confrontation and Compromise,” a comprehensive overview of health care regulation.

We discussed a number of recent developments surrounding the ACA, including the most recent judicial challenges (and their potential to congeal into an emerging ACA SCOTUS jurisprudence) and legislative attacks. We discussed mainstream health economists’ zeal for the Cadillac tax, despite such thin evidence it will actually raise wages. We closed with a discussion of one theme from Robert’s book: what the US health care sector would look like if there were dramatic reductions in government support and regulation.

The Week in Health Law Podcast from Frank Pasquale and Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in Health Law & Policy. Subscribe at iTunes, listen at Stitcher Radio, Tunein and Podbean, or search for The Week in Health Law in your favorite podcast app. Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find us on twitter @nicolasterry @FrankPasquale @WeekInHealthLaw

Changing How We Think (and Talk) About Public Health Law

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research Leave a comment

By Scott Burris, JD

Marice Ashe, Donna Levin, Matthew Penn, Michelle Larkin and I have a new piece in the Annual Review of Public Health (also available on SSRN). We set out a “transdisciplinary model of public health law” that encompasses within the core of the field both the traditional public health law practice of lawyers and what we call “legal epidemiology” — all the important public health law functions (from policy design to evaluation) that are typically carried out by people without legal training. I hope you will take a look.

Why this article and a transdisciplinary model? The idea comes out of the experience that the authors have all had trying to promote public health law practice and research. We realized that in spite of the success of the field and its importance to public health, a lot of non-lawyers in public health training, practice and research were uncomfortable with law — even when their work had to do with enforcing it or evaluating its impact.

We realized that we as lawyers were making things worse, by adhering to a traditional view of public health law as purely a practice of lawyers. We found that acknowledging the work of non-lawyers in public health law, conceptualizing key public health law activities in scientific terms, and even borrowing some scientific practices for legal work, were effective ways to change attitudes and improve our impact. Many of us have articles in the pipeline on legal epidemiology, policy surveillance and “the five essential public health law services” that will show the model in action.

I don’t have to tell readers of this blog that public health law is a great field. I hope the concept of transdisciplinary model will help make it a truly integral part of public health.

Read the full article here.