Inmaculada de Melo-Martín

• PhD Philosophy; MS Biology
• Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine

Science is our most reliable producer of knowledge. Nonetheless, a significant amount of evidence shows that pluralities of members of publics question a variety of accepted scientific claims as well as policies and recommendation informed by the scientific evidence. Scientific misinformation is considered to play a central role in this state of af...

Philosophers of science have come to accept that contextual values can play unavoidable and desirable roles in science. This has raised concerns about the need to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate value influences in scientific inquiry. I discuss here four such concerns: epistemic distortion, value imposition, undermining of public trust in s...

Biobanks are important resources for improving public health and individual care. Some legal frameworks can be more or less conducive to advancing the potential benefits of biobanks. The purpose of this article is to assess biobanking legislation and practices in Spain to determine how well they fare in such a regard. We focus here on some of the p...

During emerging public health crises, both policymakers and members of the public are looking to scientific experts to provide guidance. Even in cases where there are significant uncertainties, there is pressure for experts to “speak with one voice” to avoid confusion, allow officials to make evidence-based decisions rapidly, and encourage public s...

Philosophers of science, particularly those working on science and values, often talk about the need for science to be socially responsible. However, what this means is not clear. In this paper, we review the contributions of philosophers of science to the debate over socially responsible science and explore the dimensions that a fruitful account o...

The growing commercialization of science has raised concerns about financial conflicts of interest (COIs). Evidence suggests that such conflicts threaten the integrity of research and the well-being of research participants. Trying to minimize these negative effects, federal agencies, academic institutions, and publishers have developed conflict-of...

Although science is our most reliable producer of knowledge, it can also be used to create ignorance, unjustified doubt, and misinformation. In doing so, agnotological practices result not only in epistemic harms but also in social ones. A way to prevent or minimise such harms is to impede these ignorance-producing practices. In this paper, I explo...

Is it enough? Reflecting on a pre-pandemic monograph on vaccine hesitancy two years into COVID demands answer to the questions whether the analysis still holds and whether it offers sufficient resources to address the current situation. Maya J. Goldenberg’s Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science argues that vaccines are...

Reprogenetic technologies, which combine the power of reproductive technologies with the tools of genetic science and technology, give prospective parents a remarkable degree of control over a variety of their offspring’s characteristics. Not uncommonly, proponents of these technologies treat them as mere value‐neutral tools, limiting their assessm...

Assessing the safety of biomedical technologies is an essential aspect of any sound ethical assessment. It is, however, not sufficient. Technologies do significantly more than what they are designed to accomplish. Bioethicists should pay more attention to the many ways in which technologies transform our world and ourselves.

Bodily imagery elicits strong affective responses and is highly salient, potentially altering viewers' decision making. When clinicians engage surrogates in video calls showing the patient's body, several competing ethical issues must be considered. On the one hand, surrogates may require visual information to make informed decisions, and video tec...

The use of embryonic genome editing tools is often touted as a way to ensure the birth of healthy and genetically related children. Many would agree that this is a worthy goal. Yet the purpose of this article is to argue that, if we are concerned with justice, accepting such a goal as morally appropriate commits one to rejecting the use of social r...

While various definitions of moral distress have been proposed, some agreement exists that it results from illegitimate constraints in clinical practice affecting healthcare professionals' moral agency. If we are to reduce moral distress, instruments measuring it should provide relevant information about such illegitimate constraints. Unfortunately...

Multiple studies have been performed to identify the most common ethical dilemmas encountered by ethics consultation services. However, limited data exists comparing the content of ethics consultations requested by specific hospital specialties. It remains unclear whether the scope of ethical dilemmas prompting an ethics consultation differ between...

Pregnant women are insistently urged to limit or eliminate risks to their fetuses. This is done even when the risks to fetuses are only theoretical or minimal, and the health and well-being of the pregnant woman is at stake. When using reproductive and reprogenetic technologies, however, evaluations about what risks are acceptable to impose on embr...

An increase in global violence has forced the displacement of more than 70 million people, including 26 million refugees and 3.5 asylum seekers. Refugees and asylum seekers face serious socioeconomic and healthcare barriers and are therefore particularly vulnerable to physical and mental health risks, which are sometimes exacerbated by immigration...

Aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2) deficiency constitutes one of the most common hereditary enzyme deficiencies, affecting 35% to 40% of East Asians and 8% of the world population. It causes the well-known Asian Alcohol Flush Syndrome, characterized by facial flushing, palpitation, tachycardia, nausea, and other unpleasant feelings when alcohol is co...

It now seems technically feasible to culture human embryos beyond the "fourteen-day limit," which has the potential to increase scientific understanding of human development and perhaps improve infertility treatments. The fourteen-day limit was adopted as a compromise but subsequently has been considered an ethical line. Does it remain relevant in...

When the COVID-19 surge hit New York City hospitals, the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College, and our affiliated ethics consultation services, faced waves of ethical issues sweeping forward with intensity and urgency. In this article, we describe our experience over an eight-week period (16 March through 10 May 2020), and de...

Background: First-in-human clinical trials with stem cells for Parkinson’s disease (PD) are on the horizon. Their epistemic success depends on ensuring the participation of a sufficient number and appropriately diverse group of patients with PD. Their ethical soundness requires that the research community ensures that subjects’ decisions about whet...

Background: Much like academic-industry partnerships, industry financial support of patient advocacy organizations (PAOs) has become very common in recent years. While financial conflicts of interest (FCOI) between PAOs and industry have received more attention in recent years, robust efforts to mitigate these conflicts are still limited. Main bo...

The growing commercialization of scientific research has raised important concerns about industry bias. According to some evidence, so-called industry bias can affect the integrity of the science as well as the direction of the research agenda. I argue that conceptualizing industry’s influence in scientific research in terms of bias is unhelpful. I...

Like other repro-genetic technologies, the development and use of embryo screening techniques in the context of reproduction have produced a range of responses. On one side of the spectrum are those who view embryo screening technologies with great suspicion on the grounds that they ultimately promote eugenic goals and threaten human dignity [1,2]....

Although shared decision-making is a standard in medical care, unilateral decisions through process-based conflict resolution policies have been defended in certain cases. In patients who do not stand to receive proportional clinical benefits, the harms involved in interventions such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation seem to run contrary to the prin...

Background: Anonymity remains the more common practice in gamete donations, but legislation prohibiting anonymity with a goal of protecting donor-conceived children's right to know their genetic origins is becoming more common. However, given the dearth of research investigating the function of anonymity for donors and recipients, it is unclear wh...

Proponents of moral enhancement believe that we should pursue and apply biotechnological means to morally enhance human beings, as failing to do so is likely to lead to humanity's demise. Unsurprisingly, these proposals have generated a substantial amount of debate about the moral permissibility of using such interventions. Here I put aside concern...

The lack of public support for climate change policies and refusals to vaccinate children are just two alarming illustrations of the impacts of dissent about scientific claims. Dissent can lead to confusion, false beliefs, and widespread public doubt about highly justified scientific evidence. Even more dangerously, it has begun to corrode the very...

Living donation provides important access to organ transplantation, which is the optimal therapy for patients with end-stage liver or kidney failure. Paired exchanges have facilitated thousands of kidney transplants and enable transplantation when the donor and recipient are incompatible. However, frequently willing and otherwise healthy donors hav...

Reprogenetic technologies have been enthusiastically embraced by well-known authors who argue that these technologies increase reproductive choice, contribute to a reduction of suffering by eliminating genetic diseases and disabilities, and offer the opportunity to improve the human condition by creating beings who will live much longer and healthi...

Anonymous gamete donation continues to be practised in most jurisdictions around the world, but this practice has come under increased scrutiny. Thus, several countries now mandate that donors be identifiable to their genetic offspring. Critics contend that anonymous gamete donation harms the interests of donor-conceived individuals and that protec...

Reprogenetic technologies, which combine the power of reproductive techniques with the tools of genetic science and technology, promise prospective parents a remarkable degree of control to pick and choose the likely characteristics of their offspring. Not only can they select embryos with or without particular genetically-related diseases and disa...

The argument from inductive risk has been embraced by many as a successful account of the role of values in science that challenges the value-free ideal. We argue that it is not obvious that the argument from inductive risk actually undermines the value-free ideal. This is because the inductive risk argument endorses an assumption held by proponent...

Growing concerns about the commercialization of biomedical research and its potential to lead to biased inquiry has sparked calls for a renewed commitment to impartiality. Feminists, however, have roundly rejected the idea that objectivity requires scientists to be value-neutral or disinterested. Indeed, some feminists have argued that concerns abo...

First-in-human clinical trials of innovative medical procedures, such as cell transplantation for Parkinson's disease, present a variety of ethical challenges. In an era of rapidly developing stem cell technologies likely to be translated into clinical trials over the next few years, it is critical that ethical concerns be fully considered. One imp...

Chronic diseases compromise the life of the sufferer, encumber their families, and exert intractable burdens on the health-care system. With the aging of the population, such conditions have become the primary determinants of morbidity and mortality and the leading cause of disability in our society. Despite the serious challenges they impose, the...

Fracking for gas trapped in shale could be a game changer in the quest to find alternatives to dirty fossil fuels, but it also has potential for harm. This book provides "one-stop shopping" for everyone who wants to know more about the issues. Oil and gas account for a large percentage of the world's energy consumption, and the search for new ways...

Despite a growing body of research examining the psychosocial issues involved in oocyte donation, few studies have examined the role of information in the process of donor selection. The aim of this interview-based qualitative study was to understand how donor oocyte recipients relate to information provided about potential oocyte donors, how they...

Many argue that encouraging critical dissent is necessary for promoting scientific objectivity and progress. Yet despite its importance, some dissent can have negative consequences, including undermining confidence in existing scientific consensus, confusing the public, and preventing sound policy. For example, private industries and think tanks ha...

Dissent is thought to play a valuable role in science, so that scientific communities ought to create opportunities for receiving critical feedback and take dissenting views seriously. There is concern, however, that some dissent does more harm than good. Dissent on climate change and evolutionary theory, for example, has confused the public, creat...

Recently, some have proposed moral bioenhancement as a solution to the serious moral evils that humans face. Seemingly disillusioned with traditional methods of moral education, proponents of bioenhancement believe that we should pursue and apply biotechnological means to morally enhance human beings. Such proposal has generated a lively debate abo...

Although there is increased recognition of the inevitable--and perhaps sometimes beneficial-- role of values in scientific inquiry, there are also growing concerns about the potential for commercial values to lead to bias. This is particularly evident in biomedical research. There is a concern that conflicts of interest created by commercialization...

Recent discussion on the need to reassess research ethics standards has called into question familiar concepts such as equipoise, coercion, undue inducement, and the protection of vulnerable subjects. Reassessment of these concepts can be useful for a variety of reasons. It can eliminate conceptual murkiness, can assist in the proposal of regulatio...

The vast majority of gamete donations worldwide are made anonymously, and in some countries, including Spain, France, and Denmark, the anonymity of donors is explicitly protected by law. Nonetheless, a growing number of countries have called into question the morality of such practices and are enacting laws allowing children access to identifying i...

In this chapter, Inmaculada de Melo-Martin and Marin Gillis begin by presenting some background on embryonic stem cells, including on why their distinctive feature — the capacity to differentiate into any type of cell in the body — is thought to hold so much biomedical research and therapeutic potential. They then explore the ethical issues raised...

In this chapter, Inmaculada de Melo Martin addresses the ethical issues raised the technologies that enable parents to select the sex of their children. These technologies are rapidly proliferating. She begins by examining arguments in favor of the use of the technologies based on appeals to reproductive liberty and parental autonomy, and argues th...

The United States has experienced a boom in natural gas production due to recent technological innovations that have enabled natural gas to be produced from unconventional sources, such as shale. There has been much discussion about the costs and benefits of developing shale gas among scientists, policy makers, and the general public. The debate ha...

The practice of sex selection for social reasons has raised serious criticism. Advocates of this practice, however, insist that objections to it are unfounded and that legal bans are ethically unjustified. Usually, proponents use a rights-based liberal approach as the framework to evaluate this practice. Under this framework, reproductive choice is...

The temptation to silence dissenters whose non‐mainstream views negatively affect public policies is powerful. However, silencing dissent, no matter how scientifically unsound it might be, can cause the public to mistrust science in general.

Despite increasing awareness of the ways in which non-epistemic values play roles in science, many scientists remain reluctant to acknowledge values at stake in their own work. Even when research clearly relates to risk assessment and establishing public policy, contexts in which the presence of values is less likely to be contentious, scientists t...

mt is a cross-disciplinary biomedical journal devoted to publishing the most exciting advances in pharmacology and therapeutics, as they pertain to advances in translational and clinical medicine. It is recognized as one of the most prestigious journals in the field. With an impact factor of 6.825*, mt ranks in the top 4.2% of scientific journals i...

“Dissecting Bioethics,” edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics. The section is dedicated to the idea that words defined by bioethicists and others should not be allowed to imprison people’s actual concerns, emotions, and thoughts. Papers that expose the many meanings...

The commercialization of academic science has come to be understood as economically desirable for institutions, individual researchers, and the public. Not surprisingly, commercial activity, particularly that which results from patenting, appears to be producing changes in the standards used to evaluate scientists' performance and contributions. In...

Employment status is related to treatment recovery and quality of life in breast cancer survivors, yet little is known about return to work in immigrant and minority survivors. We conducted an exploratory qualitative study using ethnically cohesive focus groups of urban breast cancer survivors who were African-American, African-Caribbean, Chinese,...

For more than three decades clinical research in the United States has been explicitly guided by the idea that ethical considerations must be central to research design and practice. In spite of the centrality of this idea, attempting to balance the sometimes conflicting values of advancing scientific knowledge and protecting human subjects continu...

Several feminist philosophers of science have argued that social and political values are compatible with, and may even enhance, scientific objectivity. A variety of normative recommendations have emerged regarding how to identify, manage, and critically evaluate social values in science. In particular, several feminist theorists have argued that s...

In a recent article, Alasdair Cochrane argues for the need to have an undignified bioethics. His is not, of course, a call to transform bioethics into an inelegant, pathetic discipline, or one failing to meet appropriate disciplinary standards. His is a call to simply eliminate the concept of human dignity from bioethical discourse. Here I argue th...

Recent advances in biotechnologies have led to speculations about enhancing human beings. Many of the moral arguments presented to defend human enhancement technologies have been limited to discussions of their risks and benefits. The author argues that in so far as ethical arguments focus primarily on risks and benefits of human enhancement techno...

This paper examines C. P. Snow's diagnoses of the gap between the sciences and the humanities as presented in his now classical essay The Two Cultures, and his analysis of the associated problems. The first part presents Snow's central thesis and his characterization of the problem. Next, I discuss the solutions that Snow offered to bridge the gap...

Several have argued that the aims of scientific research are not always independent of social and ethical values. Yet this is often assumed only to have implications for decisions about what is studied, or which research projects are funded, and not for methodological decisions or standards of evidence. Using the case of the recently developed HPV...

Current developments in biomedicine are presenting us with difficult ethical decisions and raising complex policy questions about how to regulate these new developments. Particularly vexing for governments have been issues related to human embryo experimentation. Because some of the most promising biomedical developments, such as stem cell research...

Most agree that the recent decades-long boom in biomedical research discoveries has not had a sufficient effect on the public's health. To overcome some of the barriers to speeding clinical and translational (C/T) research, the National Institutes of Health has established the Institutional Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA). To explor...

New science policy initiatives are encouraging multidisciplinary collaborations between social scientists, humanists, biomedical scientists, and engineers. Although these policy initiatives are not always clear about how such interactions should take place, the idea is that social scientists and humanists can bring a broader perspective to the tabl...

The disclosure policies of scientific journals now require that investigators provide information about financial interests relevant to their research. The main goals of these policies are to prevent bias from occurring, to help identify bias when it occurs, and to avoid the appearance of bias. We argue here that such policies do little to help ach...

It might come as a surprise to many that Spain, a country with a strong Catholic tradition that officially banned contraceptive technologies until 1978, has some of the most liberal regulations in assisted reproduction in the world. Law No. 35/1988 was one of the first and most detailed acts of legislation undertaken on the subject of assisted-conc...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced recently that food products derived from some animal clones and their offspring are safe for human consumption. In response to criticism that it had failed to engage with ethical, social, and economic concerns raised by livestock cloning, the FDA argued that addressing normative issues prior to...