Glenn Cohen

An op-ed by Glenn Cohen, Dan Pedrotty, Jason Schmitt and Mario Nguyen `17. Midway through the first semester of the school year is a time when many college students begin struggling with exams, roommate disputes, and career plans. But the one-third of college students who are first in their families to attend college (“first-gens”) face a different formidable set of challenges. For two-thirds of these first-gens, college reality likely involves living at home and working while commuting to local community colleges or earning online degrees. Only 40 percent of first-gens will graduate from four-year colleges within six years, earning that critical degree that helps open doors to higher earnings and good jobs. This trend can be reversed but requires addressing challenges faced specifically by first-gens.

Bioethics, the law, and how they pertain to health information technologies, reproduction, and research have raised questions, and often hackles, since humans began to debate the boundaries of life. Should physicians assist in the death of a patient? Or create embryos and destroy them in the service of creating stem cell lines? Under what circumstances should the state be allowed to involuntarily hospitalize individuals, and what procedures are in place to protect the rights of those individuals? Harvard Law School Professor Glenn Cohen brought those questions, and an approach to consider them, to an interactive, one-night class at the Harvard Ed Portal that delved into the intricacies surrounding the legal, medical, and ethical aspects of bioethics. The Sept. 13 lecture, attended by nearly 60 people and audited online by more than 100 viewers from all over the world, was held in conjunction with Cohen’s HarvardX course, “Bioethics: The Law, Medicine, and Ethics of Reproductive Technologies and Genetics.”

In August, this often-silly presidential campaign became a medical theatre of the absurd. After Donald Trump campaign surrogates raised questions about Hillary Clinton’s physical stamina—and circulated photos of her propped up by pillows—she demonstrated her strength … by opening a pickle jar on late-night TV. Meanwhile, wild speculation about Trump’s mental fitness led New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd to imagine up an entire scenario where Trump is institutionalized post-election...Ethicists point out that a mandatory medical review might not be feasible. While some important jobs—think airline pilot—do require medical approval, it would be harder to make the case for a politician and would raise complicated legal questions. So “let’s assume it is not a government panel,” muses Harvard ethicist I. Glenn Cohen, “but rather something that candidates voluntarily undertake.” He points to how the American Bar Association, for instance, has historically rated the qualifications of Supreme Court nominees. Many lawmakers say they consider the ABA’s assessment as one factor among many when vetting a judicial appointee. Yes, it’s possible for candidates to buck a voluntary expectation—Trump’s doing it right now with his tax returns—but it reframes the focus, Cohen argues.

An article by I. Glenn Cohen and Eli Y. Adashi. A potentially renewable provision of the Consolidated Appropriation Act of 2016 forestalling the prospect of human germline modification was signed into law on 18 December 2015. The provision...stipulates that “none of the funds made available by this Act [to the FDA] may be used to review or approve an application for an exemption for investigational use of a drug or biological product… in which a human embryo is intentionally created or modified to include a heritable genetic modification”. Destined to expire at the conclusion of this fiscal year (30 September 2016), the rider has since been incorporated yet again into the House and Senate appropriation bills for the fiscal year ending 30 September 2017. Subject to ongoing annual renewal, this congressionally legislated ban undermines ongoing conversations on the possibility of human germline modification, its likely distant time horizon notwithstanding. Also affected are ongoing efforts of the FDA to review the prevention of mitochondrial DNA diseases through germline modification of human zygotes or oocytes at risk.

The Supreme Court issued a historic decision Monday, weighing in again in the nation’s fractious abortion debate. In a 5-3 ruling, the court overturned a Texas law requiring that abortion clinics maintain hospital-like standards at their facilities as well as admitting privileges at local hospitals. Pro-life activists argued that the rules were aimed at protecting women’s health, but those in the pro-choice camp countered that the law left many abortion clinics with no choice but to shut down and infringed on women’s constitutional rights...Harvard Law School’s I. Glenn Cohen, a professor of law and faculty director at the School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics, spoke with the Gazette about the ruling. Cohen filed an amicus brief in support of the court’s decision.

On World Blood Donation Day and in the wake of the Orlando mass shooting, a leading bioethicist Tuesday called for a change in the FDA’s policy regulating blood donations from gay men. Professor Glenn Cohen who studies bioethics and the law at Harvard told KCBS radio that the policy in place since December is based in fear and not facts...“We are talking about a policy more based on fear than a policy based that makes sense based on the facts,” he said. Annually, the Harvard bioethicist said the policy is robbing blood banks around the country of more than 300,000 pints of much needed blood. Cohen said the one-year restriction tells gay men “not to donate blood.”

Early in the 1980's, there was a lifetime ban or deferral for any man who had everhad sex with another man. Even once. But in May, the FDA released new recommendations that would allow gay men to donate blood with a big 'if'- if those men had been celibate for a year.  Critics charge these restrictions have no scientific bearing and are discriminatory. Harvard Law Professor Glenn Cohen (@CohenProf) joined Adam on Tuesday night to discuss these restrictions.

An op-ed by Glenn Cohen and Eli Y. Adashi. On February 3, 2016, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its Ethical and Social Policy Considerations of Novel Techniques for Prevention of Maternal Transmission of Mitochondrial DNA Diseases report...Expansive in its purview and thorough in its scrutiny, the report concludes that it is “ethically permissible” to embark on clinical trials involving human beings, subject to rigorous safety and efficacy imperatives. The report further recommends that initial clinical trials be limited to male embryos whose mitochondria cannot be transmitted to their progeny. In so doing, the IOM is seeking to preclude transmission of unintended outcomes to the progeny. In an unforeseen turn of events, the release of the IOM report was preceded by the enactment of a federal statute that prohibits the FDA from considering research applications for the conduct of this therapy. This Viewpoint seeks to contextualize the IOM report by describing the drive to bring mitochondrial replacement therapy to the clinic and the statutory constraints blocking its adoption.

As Harvard Law School admissions officers finalize next year’s class, they do so with an eye toward a group of fields that deviate from the traditional path to legal studies: STEM. Law School chief admissions officer Jessica L. Soban said the percentage of admitted students with backgrounds in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—will remain in the double digits for the second year in a row, reflecting a deliberate effort by Law School admissions officers in recent years to increase the number of students with such backgrounds...Law School clinical professor Christopher T. Bavitz said he thinks students with STEM backgrounds possess skills well-suited to the law. “There are a lot of reasons why people with tech backgrounds can do well in the law,” he said. “A lot of law practice is explaining complicated concepts to people...and people with science and tech backgrounds do that well. I think they’re great analytical thinkers in ways that kind of map on to the thinking lawyers do.” The Law School has pioneered programs bridging science and the law. The school’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics—which was established a decade ago—was the first of its kind among law schools, according Faculty Director and Law professor I. Glenn Cohen, putting Harvard ahead of peer institutions.

Yelena Sablina was stunned when she came across the forensic record of her late 19-year-old daughter, who died days after a speeding car hit her at a Moscow pedestrian crossing. Going through the file she discovered that her daughter Alina's heart, kidneys and a number of other organs had been removed -- without her family's knowledge or consent. Since making the grim discovery in February 2014, one month after Alina's death, Sablina has made it her mission to challenge a Russian law that allows doctors to remove the organs of dead people without needing permission...Harvard law professor Glenn Cohen said that concerns over such laws usually focus on “the cost and infrastructure as well as pragmatic political considerations”.

Drugs that failed to make it to the market in the U.S. and elsewhere are finding new life in China...But the new trend also raises the question of whether China has become a dumping ground for inferior drugs. I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who studies medical ethics, said that because of differences in regulatory standards it isn’t unusual or unlawful for a company to get a drug approved in one jurisdiction and not another. For one thing, in China a drug doesn’t have to prove superiority over existing drugs—a major hurdle in the U.S., where 90% of candidates get dropped in the clinical-trial process.

A week after Harvard Law School’s seal change became final, a group of faculty members are publicly speaking out in support of Law School Dean Martha L. Minow, charging that student activists at the school have not given her due credit for her efforts to address racial issues on campus. Seven Law School faculty members—Glenn Cohen, Randall L. Kennedy, Richard J. Lazarus, Todd D. Rakoff, Carol S. Steiker, Kristen A. Stilt, and David B. Wilkins—published an open letter in the Harvard Law Record Monday defending Minow. They wrote, “Our goal here is… to express our support and deep appreciation for Dean Minow and all that she has done during this difficult and important process, and to advance the cause of justice throughout her long and distinguished career.”

An article by I. Glenn Cohen and Eli Y. Adashi...Mitochondrial replacement therapies (MRTs) constitute a family of technologies that seek to prevent the transmission of mutant mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from carrier mothers to their children. The embryos so created comprise nuclear DNA from the intended mother and nonpathogenic mtDNA from another woman (the 'mitochondrial donor')2. As such, MRTs allow a woman at risk to be the 'genetic mother' of the resulting child (at least in terms of her nuclear DNA) without passing on the pathogenic mtDNA.

So-called “three parent babies” may be returning to labs in the United States. But it won’t happen this year and the experiments will probably be limited to male embryos only. A recent advisory report concludes that clinical research into mitochondrial therapy procedures on human embryos is “ethically permissible” as long as it meets several conditions. ... I. Glenn Cohen, JD, the faculty director at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center, published a blog post about the report. He described the recommendations that MRT be limited to the transfer of male embryos as “clever and interesting.” He said it could have some negative ramifications, such as requiring that female embryos be discarded or frozen. That move could anger some religious conservatives.

While the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sits on the fence over whether to approve preclinical or clinical trials using mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRT) to help prevent the transmission of certain diseases passed from mother to child, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine came out with a new report on Wednesday detailing how it believes FDA should allow such trials and regulate them. ...Glenn Cohen, faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, wrote on the center’s blog Wednesday: “The big headline is they have recommended FDA largely move toward allowing [MRT] to go forward under a regulatory pathway with restrictions, the most important of which is the transfer only of male embryos (to avoid germ-line issues)."