Glenn Cohen

Is sperm basic property?  What happens when frozen sperm is contested?  Can children born after the death of the father inherit from the father's estate? Glenn Cohen is a professor of law at Harvard Law School. He is one of the world's leading experts on the intersection of bioethics (sometimes also called "medical ethics") and the law, as well as health law.

Danielle Teuscher decided to give DNA tests as presents last Christmas to her father, close friends and 5-year-old daughter, joining the growing number of people taking advantage of low-cost, accessible genetic testing. But the 23andMe test produced an unexpected result. Ms. Teuscher, 30, a nanny in Portland, Ore., said she unintentionally discovered the identity of the sperm donor she had used to conceive her young child. ...I. Glenn Cohen, a professor and bioethicist at Harvard Law School, agreed and questioned whether such a contract is “contrary to public policy” and thus unenforceable. The mother of a child conceived with donated sperm might well argue that in trying to determine whether the child has any inherited medical issues, she inadvertently discovered a donor’s identity. A sperm bank likely can’t prevent her from obtaining that medical information, he said.

In 1996, the year Congress passed its landmark health privacy law, there was no Apple Watch, no Fitbit, no Facebook support groups or patients tweeting about their medical care. Health data was between you, your doctor, and the health care system. More than two decades later, that law — the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) — is still the key piece of legislation protecting our medical privacy, despite being woefully inadequate for dealing with the health-related data we constantly generate outside of the health care system. Now, there could be an opportunity for a revamp. ... Worse, HIPAA is a “four-letter word that medical people often use when they don’t want to do anything,” according to [I. Glenn] Cohen, a professor of law at Harvard University. Doctors have used it to avoid giving patients their own medical records, which, he says, “is like working with someone to write an autobiography and then being told you can’t take that biography out of the library.”

In an effort to get critical parts of the US government funded, the House of Representatives is going to vote today on a bill, H.R. 265, that would pay for health inspectors, food stamps, and drug approvals, according to Politico. It would also would renew the prohibition on genetically modified human beings in the US. ... By blocking any-and-all DNA changes to an embryo, I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, says American legislation has taken a "meat axe" approach when what's needed is a "scalpel" to separate good uses of technology from bad. Congress is again missing a chance “to craft a better, more subtle policy” that could allow real public debate on new reproductive technologies, Cohen says.

Medicine is at a turning point, on the cusp of major change as disruptive technologies such as gene, RNA, and cell therapies enable scientists to approach diseases in new ways. The swiftness of this change is being driven by innovations such as CRISPR gene editing, which makes it possible to correct errors in DNA with relative ease. ... Yet as I. Glenn Cohen, faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, has said, gene editing comes in many varieties, with many consequences. Any deep ethical discussion needs to take into account those distinctions.

The Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School published a full collection of United States court cases dating from 1658 to 2018 on Monday as part of a years-long project to make case law more accessible. The initiative, dubbed the Caselaw Access Project, digitized more than 40 million pages of U.S. state, federal, and territorial case law documents from the Law School library. Though basic information for all cases in the database is now publicly accessible, users are limited to five hundred full case texts per day. Harvard affiliates currently have unlimited access to all case texts. Adam Ziegler, who directed the project, said his team worked on the Caselaw Access Project for more than six years. “It started with the simple observation that there was a real need for ready access to court opinions,” Ziegler said...Several Law School faculty members expressed their optimism about the project and its potential. Law School Professor I. Glenn Cohen called the project “a game changer,” and Law School Professor Christopher T. Bavitz said the initiative will bring about “enormous benefits” for teaching, research, and legal analysis.

...Mehl soon learned she was one of 950 patients whose genetic material was destroyed when the temperature inside the storage tank rose more than 150 degrees...“Any attempt to regulate reproductive technology almost inevitably leads to difficult questions relating to abortion,” says I. Glenn Cohen, director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. “As a result, people have been shy, including those on the left who might be interested in pushing regulation in this area, because once they do so, there’s a real possibility it ends up resulting in restricting women’s reproductive rights.”

...It’s impossible to expect a true sense of privacy among 55,000 people, but users and bioethicists alike have lingering questions about Facebook’s use of data. “How much of Facebook is truly closed?” asked Glenn Cohen director of Harvard’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law, Biotechnology and Bioethics. “How visible are your posts? Could someone take a screenshot of something you said and repost it?”...Cohen is also concerned about the possibility of so-called anonymized data being used for commercial reasons. Imagine what kind of connections future data miners could make based on your social media posts, fitness trackers, voting record, purchasing history and perhaps even genetic data.

Last month, 253 men got new jobs. The process was highly publicized, and employers announced new hires to an audience of millions on live television. It’s likely that no one in the Cowboys’ stadium, where the 2018 NFL Draft took place, was thinking about them that way, though...But in the eyes of the law and regulatory systems, professional football players are, in fact, employees of the NFL. That means that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which is responsible for overseeing and intervening in health risks to employees, could technically step in and issue rules and regulations to reduce the potential harm caused by the work they do—which, in this case, is play football. “The NFL is many things,” says Glenn Cohen, a professor of health law and bioethics at Harvard Law School. “It’s also a workplace, and it ought to be regulated the way other workplaces are.”

...Costly medicines can give rise to misplaced expectations for patients and doctors navigating America’s Byzantine health care system. And the problem is compounded by well-intentioned regulators trying to help desperate patients whose medical needs are unmet. “The problem is the way the system creates incentives for both drug makers and insurers to act as they do,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who is an expert in bioethics and health law policy. “When you allow private insurers to make decisions with only a patchwork of state regulations, they will choose not to cover every drug approved by the FDA. And drug companies are for-profit entities that set prices based on market conditions. This is why you have debates over coverage.”

An interview with Glenn Cohen. More than 12 million people have had their DNA analyzed by direct-to-consumer genealogy tests like 23andMe and ancestry.com. That number more than doubled last year, giving the industry a huge boost. Late last month, authorities charged a man in Sacramento County, California as the so-called Golden State Killer after tracking him down with a private DNA test company, one called GEDmatch.  Joseph James DeAngelo is accused of a string of rapes and murders in the 1970s and 80s. The suspect never gave his own DNA to GEDmatch, but his relatives did, and that allowed police to find him. Some law enforcement officials say such tests are a promising tool to catch criminals, while privacy advocates are worried that innocent people might be swept up if a search is too broad. 

Three Planned Parenthood affiliates sued Wednesday to demand taxpayer money keep flowing to the country’s largest abortion network, saying a new Trump administration policy appears designed to cut them out of family planning money. Affiliates in Wisconsin, Ohio and Utah said changes announced by Health and Human Services would boost clinics that focus on abstinence rather than providing contraceptives. They said HHS didn’t follow the law last year when it issued the new funding priorities for doling out money under Title X, which is the government’s main family planning fund...In 1991, the Supreme Court upheld HHS rules prohibiting clinics that receive Title X funds from advising or referring patients for abortion services. Glenn Cohen, a law professor at Harvard, said that kind of precedent suggests the government has latitude to set conditions on the funding. “Challenging an administration’s decision on what funding priorities to set, a litigant faces an uphill battle,” he said. Mr. Cohen said if the court were to decide HHS didn’t follow the proper steps when issuing its new policy, the government could go back and do it accordingly.

You’ve probably read about concerns over “designer babies,” whose DNA is shaped by gene editing. Greely is focused on a different technology that has gotten much less attention: In a startling bit of biological alchemy, scientists have shown that in mice, they can turn ordinary cells into sperm and eggs. It’s too soon to know if it could be done in people. But if it can, it could become a powerful infertility treatment, permitting genetic parenthood for people who can’t make their own sperm or eggs...Once the genetic profile is done, could it come back to haunt a child if, say, a life insurer or nursing home demanded to see it to assess disease risk? How would the large number of rejected embryos be handled ethically and politically? Perhaps future regulation could limit the number of embryos created, as well as what traits a couple could select for, said I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard law professor.

...Critics say the pervasive problems in Togo’s medical system — where equipment frequently malfunctions, electricity and water supplies are unreliable and new doctors earn less than taxi drivers — are the result of government corruption and ineptitude. But the current unrest in Togo extends far beyond the nation’s troubled health care system...I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on health law and bioethics, said medical ethicists generally agree that the potential benefits of a doctors’ strike can justifiably outweigh the potential risk to patients, if the dispute is about the quality of patient care (as opposed to, for example, pensions or vacation time). A recent peer-reviewed study of doctor’s strikes around the world found no evidence that they lead to an increase in patient mortality, he said. “When you agree to become a doctor, you do not agree to work under any possible condition with whatever quality of care that might mean for patients,” Professor Cohen said.

Over a single weekend in March, an unprecedented disaster hit fertility clinics—twice. First came the news that the University Hospitals Fertility Center in Ohio, lost more than 4,000 eggs and embryos in a malfunctioning cryogenic tank. Then, in an unrelated incident, Pacific Fertility Center in California reported that liquid-nitrogen levels had fallen too low in a tank holding “several thousand” eggs and embryos, affecting an unconfirmed number. In-vitro fertilization can be a draining process—financially, physically, emotionally. And for some families, these embryos had been their last chance to have biological children. Dozens of lawsuits have since been filed; parents and would-be parents spoke of the children they will never have, of the siblings their children will never know. At times, they spoke not just of “embryos” but of “babies.”...The filing cites a 1985 Ohio Supreme Court case, Werling v. Sandy, that held a viable fetus is a person. But I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, says that case may not be the most relevant one here. A viable fetus is one that can survive outside of a womb. And in Egan v. Smith, an Ohio Court of Appeals court held in 1993 that wrongful death could not be brought for a nonviable fetus. This case is more likely to apply to embryos. “It’s a real stretch,” he says, “but lawyers are supposed to give every argument they can.”