Glenn Cohen

In the future, the medication you take will not only be a matter between you and your doctor. Pills with built-in electronic sensors are already a reality in both Europe and the US, and in the future, they will fill pharmacy shelves. The new electronic pills can collect data, for example, on the state of the stomach and intestines, and this creates new opportunities for diagnosing diseases. The pills can also be used to monitor medication e.g. in patients with mental disorders. In an article published in Nature Electronics, a group of researchers point out that the use of the new electronic pills is not without problems. The researchers, Professor Timo Minssen and Assistant Professor Helen Yu from the Centre for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law (CeBIL) at the University of Copenhagen, together with Professor Glenn Cohen and CeBIL’s Research Fellow Sara Gerke from Harvard Law School, point out that the new methods of treatment create both ethical and legal challenges.

A bioethics study published on December 8th calls on crowdfunding platform GoFundMe to ditch campaigns for unproven and unsafe medical procedures. People turn to GoFundMe for help paying for all sorts of medical interventions. These campaigns have brought in over $650 million since 2010. But a subset of the money raised is spent on unproven and even illegal operations...The paper, written by Snyder and his co-author, Harvard Law professor I. Glenn Cohen, suggests steps GoFundMe may take to upend its “ethical problem.” They concede that expecting the platform to independently evaluate evidence for medical claims would be expensive and difficult. Instead, they propose a “white list approach,” only allowing people to raise money for regulated treatments or those cleared by the FDA for a special program called expanded access.

What does it mean to complete a sentence of life in prison? One prisoner claims he has done it by serving time until the moment of his death — plus another four years since — and said it is well past time to set him free. ... Ms Primus said that if people were considered legally dead before being resuscitated, it would create a web of problems, not just in criminal cases but also for insurance and inheritance claims. She and I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies medical ethics and the law, said Schreiber’s argument was clever but never stood a chance. “It equivocates on what life and death means for the purposes of the criminal law,” Mr Cohen said in an email. He added that Schreiber would still be considered alive for purposes including organ donation, making it “hard to think he should be ‘dead’ for the purpose of serving a life sentence”.

Facial-recognition software correctly matched photos of research volunteers to unidentified medical scans of their heads, in a new study of images that are commonly used in brain research. The finding draws attention to a privacy threat that will increase with technology improvements and the growth of health-care data, experts in medical imaging and facial recognition said. ...The findings suggest existing privacy protections don’t go far enough, the study’s authors said. They also point to the continuing challenge of anticipating new risks from emerging technology, as well as to the need for caution in handling medical data, said I. Glenn Cohen, director of Harvard University’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics. “Our imaginations are only so good,” he said.

For generations, it was a basic tenet of donating sperm: Clinics could forever protect their clients’ identities. But, increasingly, donor anonymity is dead. The rise of consumer genetic tests—which allow people to connect with relatives they never knew they had, including some who never intended to be found in the first place—is forcing sperm donation clinics to confront the fact that it is now virtually impossible to guarantee anonymity to their clients. Instead, sites like 23andMe and Ancestry.com are giving customers the genetic clues they need to identify biological parents on their own. ... In a 2016 study conducted by I. Glenn Cohen, a professor of bioethics at Harvard Law School, about 29 percent of potential sperm donors said they would refuse donating if their names were put on a registry. The study suggested that prohibiting anonymous sperm donations would lead to a decline in the number of donors and that those who were willing to be identified would likely demand more compensation.

Students enrolling at Harvard’s Business School, Law School, and Graduate School of Education (HBS, HLS, HGSE) for M.B.A., J.D. and LL.M., and Ed.M. degrees now can—and in some cases must—begin their programs of study before matriculating. Making use of the summer before the new academic year, each school has linked a new kind of instruction with online technology to introduce entering students to content critical to their coursework and, for HBS and HLS, their distinctive pedagogies...Shortly after he became dean of the law school in mid 2017, as part of his plans for online education, John F. Manning expressed interest in developing a common learning experience “meant to ensure that all incoming students, whatever their backgrounds and previous areas of study, start with the foundational knowledge that will enable them to thrive at HLS,”as a Harvard Law Today (HLT) report put it...Attwood and Williams professor of law I. Glenn Cohen, who had taught an online course on the HarvardX platform and also leads a first-year section, was tapped to lead the faculty group developing a pilot program—not least, he said, because he “thought it was a supercool project.” One reason for that, Cohen explained, derived from his own “origin story”: he was a first-generation college student, too (neither parent finished high school); there were no lawyers in his family; because he had studied bioethics (philosophy) and psychology, coming to HLS was a “big transition” (he is J.D. ’03); and as a native of Canada, “I knew nothing about the U.S. legal system.”

Donna Ferguson awoke in the resort city of Cancún before sunrise on a sweltering Saturday in July. She wasn’t headed to the beach. Instead, she walked down a short hallway from her Sheraton hotel and into Galenia Hospital. ... I. Glenn Cohen, a law professor at Harvard and an expert on medical tourism, called the model used by NASH and a few other similar operations a “clever strategy” to attack some of the perceived risks about medical tourism. “It doesn’t answer all concerns, but I will say it’s a big step forward,” he said. “It’s a very good marketing strategy.”

I. Glenn Cohen explains why we should scrutinize what is and then ponder what should be

A rogue Chinese scientist stunned the world last year when he announced the birth of genetically modified twin girls, prompting widespread outcry from the broader scientific community and calls for a “global moratorium” on editing human embryos that result in births. Yet months later, Democrats on Capitol Hill surprised many science policy experts when they attempted to roll back a related, 4-year-old ban on altering the DNA of embryos intended for pregnancies. To many health policy experts here, and research advocates across the country, the timing — just months after the biggest genome editing scandal in world history — was inexplicable...Research advocates say there’s a way for Congress to roll back the ban on MRT without opening the door to other types of heritable gene editing in or accusations of “designer babies” — or inviting the kind of political criticism that characterized this month’s appropriations debate. “One easy, quick suggestion would be to differentiate mitochondrial replacement therapy” from the other types of germline gene editing, said I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard law professor specializing in bioethics and health law. “That would then let FDA evaluate it directly, which it is currently prohibited from doing.”

The anti-abortion movement is hitting an aggressive new stride in the United States. Whether it breaks into a sprint toward the Supreme Court is worrying reproductive rights activists amid a renewed push to reverse the long-standing precedent that legalized abortions. ... It would take four votes from justices to agree the case deserves review, explained Glenn Cohen, a bioethicist and lawyer with Harvard Law School. "It's the kind of case where they're unlikely to take the case unless they have five votes to get rid of Roe v. Wade," he said, as well as enough votes to overturn Casey vs. Planned Parenthood, the 1992 ruling that partially reaffirmed the abortion law. Cohen said he can't foresee both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh facially overruling Roe. And Chief Justice John Roberts, who is also a conservative, has shown himself to be an "institutionalist" keen to protect the court's reputation, he added.

Here’s a quick thought experiment: What if the FDA operated more like the CIA That’s not a suggestion that the agency engage in eater surveillance or conduct covert drug-testing operations. Rather, it’s a question about the state of the agency’s political independence and how it can be protected in the face of partisan pressure. ...So why not make FDA an independent agency? Earlier this year, seven of America’s most recent FDA commissioners co-wrote a piece of commentary urging such a change in Health Affairs journal. Today, in a new article for Science magazine, a team of researchers considers the ways that doing so would benefit the FDA’s mission and protect consumers. ... “FDA regulates a huge percentage of our economy and makes a huge difference to people’s lives,” says I. Glenn Cohen, professor at Harvard Law School and co-author of the paper. In addition, ongoing changes to FDA leadership make the current moment an apt time to consider the agency’s independence. In March, FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb resigned from his role, after a brief tenure where he advanced a surprising number of Obama-era food policies. Currently, the agency is overseen by acting commissioner Ned Sharpless.

An article by I. Glenn Cohen, Eli Y. Adashi and Rohit S. Rajan: For the better part of a century, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) preserved public health by rigorously applying the scientific method. The central tenet of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 which created the FDA calls for “experts qualified by scientific training and experience to investigate the safety of drugs.” In recent times, however, partisan political interposition has grown increasingly worrisome. As the sole arbiter standing between a new drug application and a potential public health calamity, the FDA can hardly afford to be buffeted by undue political interference. In a recent salvo in this decades-long tug-of-war over politics and independence, seven former FDA commissioners, hailing from both sides of the political aisle and spanning many administrations, recently recommended that the “FDA should be an independent federal agency reporting to the President” (1, 2). It is against this backdrop that we explore the utility, desirability, and feasibility of restructuring the FDA charter with political insulation and administrative streamlining in mind. Amid uncertainty over leadership and direction at the FDA since the commissioner stepped down in April, it is a particularly critical time to reflect on how to enhance the independence of the FDA in keeping with its enabling statute.

Harvard Law School’s incoming class of students will get a head start on their legal studies this summer. The school will soon launch the second iteration of its Zero-L program—a first-of-its kind curriculum of online courses designed to give new students some legal basics and a roadmap of what to expect once they arrive on campus. I caught up with professor Glenn Cohen, who developed Zero-L with associate dean for strategic initiatives Jessica Soban at the direction of Dean John Manning, to talk about the program and how it’s evolving after the pilot last summer.

Dozens of women were filmed without their knowledge while receiving medical attention — including having surgery and giving birth — at a California hospital, according to a lawsuit filed last week in a state superior court. A lawyer for the women said 1,800 patients may have been filmed. The lawsuit alleges that motion-activated cameras were set up in three operating rooms at Sharp Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa, Calif., as part of an effort to catch a possible medicine thief. ...“They were reckless, to say the least,” Ms. Goddard said. It seemed that Sharp Grossmont could have found less intrusive ways to investigate the missing medicine, said I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School and an author of the casebook “Health Care Law and Ethics.” He noted that he did not have information about the hospital’s defense. “It appears they kept at least some of the videos for some time,” Professor Cohen said, “and one would think the right thing to do, even on the hospital’s own rationale, would be rapidly review them and destroy them right after if they didn’t show any evidence of the drug theft. “The fact that they failed to do even that is quite troubling.”