Dr. Arthur Caplan

Public health, freedom of religion and politics converge in the history of fighting over vaccinations. 

A viral video of a mentally ill woman being abandoned by hospital staff on a cold winter night has caused outrage. But incidents of "patient dumping" are becoming more common. 

Scientists in Oregon have edited the genes of human embryos for the first time, opening the door to helping babies avoid inherited diseases. But ethical concerns abound.

"Even though the parents are trying to do what they can, their love might blind them to his suffering," says a professor of bioethics.

Johnson & Johnson will assemble an independent group of doctors, ethicists, and advocates to evaluate trial drugs for terminally ill patients seeking treatment for their diseases.

Politicians often ignore facts because they don't align with their ideology. But scientists hype research to secure more funding. 

There's likely to be a legal fight about nurse Kaci Hickox's choice to emerge from quarantine for a bike ride in Maine. But was her decision unethical?

Arthur Caplan, professor and the director of the division of medical ethics at the NYU School of Medicine, discusses the news that scientists have successfully used cloning to produce human embryonic stem cells--and discusses the ethical issues it raises.

Is it a doctor’s responsibility to tell you if a disease is written on your genetic code? And if so, do you really want him or her to tell you? Thanks to new guidelines by the America...

There are few professions, if any, that require as much as training as becoming a doctor, but now, that process could become one year shorter. Bioethicist Art Caplan discusses a new p...

The fact that Holmes was seeing a psychiatrist prior to the theatre shooting in Aurora, Colorado, is a fact that has emerged in the past few days. Should his psychiatrist be required ...

Yesterday we heard the story of the 'cyclops baby,' a child born badly disfigured and doomed to die. We put some of the questions it raises to Art Caplan, head of the Division of Medi...

How would you react, if during a regular doctor’s checkup, your physician told you that you were obese? That’s what the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has suggested in a new set ...

In January 2003, The Lancet — one of the world's oldest and most respected medical journals — published an article championing the combination of two drugs (ACE inhibitors and ARBs) i...

The Supreme Court’s scrutiny of President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, anger over the perceived lack of justice in the Trayvon Martin case and the controversial film "Bully."

This week a Federal Drug Administration panel backed the approval of a weight loss drug called Qnexa. Strictly intended for use by clinically overweight people with BMIs over 27kg/m², Qnexa is a combination of an already-existing weight loss drug and another drug not yet approved for weight loss. At present, many doctors use this particular combination of drugs to treat obese patients, but this approval would allow them not to go "off the label" with their prescriptions.

An article published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association says the state should intervene in cases of morbidly obese children. The authors say that parents should lose custody in the most extreme cases of childhood obesity. This opinion has drawn criticism from several lawyers and members of the bioethics community.

The New York state health department released a report this week saying that an organ transplant recipient contracted HIV from a kidney donation at a New York hospital. It’s the nation’s first documented case of HIV transmission via a living donor transplant since the 1980s. How did this happen? And what are the repercussions? 

This week, a presidential bioethics committee met to discuss one of the most shocking violations of medical ethics — a clinical study done back in the 1970s on nearly 400 African American men in Tuskegee Alabama to study the progression of syphilis. The men believed they were receiving free health care from the US government. But just days before the committee met, a new comprehensive investigation by the Associated Press found that for decades, the United States government also knew about and authorized medical experiments on disabled people and prison inmates. Experiments included injecting cancer cells into the chronically ill at a New York hospital and giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut.

Gay men have been banned from donating blood since 1983. But now, a group of senators led by John Kerry are petitioning to put an end to the 27-year-old ban.

There were/are approximately 15,000-20,000 hemophiliacs in the US.  100% of them contracted hepatitis in the late 1960s and early 1970s when their medication (factor concentrate) was brought to the market.  10,000 of them were then infected when HIV emerged in the early 1980s because of this drug.  In 1983, a ban was instituted to prohibit any gay man who had sex since 1977 from ever giving blood. Filmmaker Marilyn Ness explored the history of the ban in her documentary, "Bad Blood."