We present a training module in AI ethics designed to prepare a broad group of professionals to recognize and address potential ethical challenges of AI applications in healthcare. Training materials include a two-page checklist, a brief glossary, and three practical case studies. While we have developed and applied this framework for training Research Ethics Committee members in France and South Africa, it can also be helpful in university courses ranging from public health and healthcare law to biomedical engineering and applied ethics.

I write in tribute to my friend Larry Gostin, who has long emphasized that accountability and governance are central to global health policy.

Human rights offer to ground global health law in equity and justice. Human rights norms, advocacy, and strategies have proven successes in challenging private and public inequities and in realizing more equitable domestic and global health governance. However, mobilizing human rights within global health law faces enormous political, economic, technological, and epidemiological challenges, including from the corrosive health impacts of power, politics, and commerce. This article focuses on what human rights could bring to three major global health law challenges — health systems strengthening and universal health coverage, the commercial and economic determinants of health, and pandemic disease threats. We argue that human rights offer potentially powerful norms and strategies for achieving equity and justice in these and other key global health domains. The challenge for those working in human rights and global health law is to work nimbly, creatively, and courageously to strengthen the contribution of these instruments to health justice.

I have been investigating and reporting on image manipulation in the bioscience literature since 2011. During this time, several new tools have emerged to streamline the processes of image analysis and reporting. When presenting and discussing examples of scientific image manipulation, a common question is “how do you find this stuff?” Herein, I outline common software and other utilities — a toolbox for discovery and reporting of problematic scientific images and other data. This may serve as a useful reference for those seeking to enhance the effective removal of problematic papers from the bioscience literature.

This article critically examines the inequities in the access to COVID-19 vaccine and the lessons for global health law. Despite the rapid development and approval of COVID-19 vaccines, the rollout exposed severe systemic failures rooted in preexisting economic distortions and market inefficiencies. The article argues that addressing vaccine inequity requires more than improved distribution and solidarity, but effective reinvention of the global vaccine supply chain through evidence-based and meaningful market-shaping measures. It calls for a transformative approach to global health governance, emphasising the need for a comprehensive, human rights-compliant policy framework to correct structural problems in international markets, moving beyond superficial exhortations to equity.

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) represent a significant global health challenge, requiring distinct prevention and control strategies. Public health efforts have concentrated on regulating three primary risk factors: tobacco and nicotine products, unhealthy foods and beverages, and alcohol. While the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) stands as a legally binding international treaty, similar international legal efforts for alcohol and unhealthy foods have never gained significant traction. Consequently, global governance of NCD risk factors largely relies on soft law instruments, including WHO strategies, UN resolutions, and cross-sectoral initiatives that set political goals and technical standards. The article argues for the potential of a human rights-based approach to enhance global NCD regulation, emphasizing legal capacity building and managing industry influence. Future efforts should leverage regional and local governance, and ensure robust legislative frameworks to overcome the limitations of current international law and effectively address NCD risk factors.

Journal editors often deal with allegations of research misconduct, defined by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) in the United States as fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. It is important that editors have a transparent and consistent process to deal with these allegations quickly and fairly. This process will include the authors and may include research integrity officers at the sponsoring institution as well as funders. Retractions may not be consistent with the ORI definition, for example, specifying inadequate peer-review and unreported conflict of interest, but nevertheless represent scientific misconduct.

Multiple factors aligning in 2025 implicate challenges to vaccines as a primary public health intervention. Anti-vaccine proponents seek to recast immunization policies in promotion of perceived individual liberties. Recalibrating national vaccine approaches, however, runs counter to long-standing public health laws and policies grounded in a core truth: safe and effective vaccines save lives.

The federal government has a long history of trying to find the right balance in supporting scientific and medical research while protecting the public and other researchers from potential harms. To date, this balance has been generally calibrated differently across contexts – including in clinical care, human subjects research, and research integrity. New challenges continue to face this disparate model of regulation, including novel Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools. Because of potential increases in unintentional fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism using GenAI – and challenges establishing both these errors and intentionality in retrospect – this article argues that we should instead move toward a system that sets accepted community standards for the use of GenAI in research as prospective requirements.

In Massachusetts, a proposed bill would reduce the sentence of those incarcerated who become living donors of either organs or bone marrow. We outline two concerns with such a proposal, which relate directly to the content of the proposal (as opposed to broader debates about payment for organs and validity of consent obtained from the incarcerated). The first of these concerns is about equality of opportunity. The proposal provides the opportunity for a sentence reduction for some but not for others – and the distribution of these opportunities reflects circumstances largely beyond the control of the incarcerated. The second concern is that the proposal may conflict with why we punish in the first place. The proposal is at odds with the non-consequentialist general deterrence defended by Tadros, retributivism, and communicative theories of punishment. Among the theories examined, only the purely consequentialist version of general deterrence might find the practice palatable. The upshot of the latter observation is that the proposal presupposes the truth of a purely consequentialist theory of punishment and sets aside others.

Trust in the validity of published work is of fundamental importance to scientists. Confirmation of validity is more readily attained than addressing the question of whether fraud was involved. Suggestions are made for key stakeholders - institutions and companies, journals, and funders as to how they might enhance trust in science, both by accelerating the assessment of data validity and by segregating that effort from investigation of allegations of fraud.

Global health law has now emerged as an area of specialisation for students interested in global problems concerning health due largely, if not principally, to the inspiring lifelong scholarly work of Professor Lawrence Gostin. A growing number of universities in the world have established programs on global health law in which they address questions of equity and solidarity in addressing public health issues and emergencies, global and national preparedness for pandemics and other health related emergencies, international health regulations, and the intersection between health and human rights, to mention a few. We can expect that as global health threats and inequalities in access to health continue to rise, interest in global health law as a field of legal research and education will continue to grow.

This article discusses the prospects and pitfalls of a legally binding pandemic agreement under the auspices of the World Health Organization, currently under negotiation in Geneva. Such an agreement could foster a rules-based pandemic prevention, preparedness and response as a reaction to the failures by states during the COVID-19 pandemic, including a lack of effective coordination for sharing all kinds of data and the global inequity in the distribution of medical goods fueled by vaccine nationalism. Achieving these goals, however, will depend upon a meaningful engagement by delegations negotiating the agreement, a legally sound formulation of its provisions, and overcoming the currently pervasive emergency-bias in this field of global health law. Thus, as advocated by Lawrence Gostin in his seminal treatise on Global Health Law ten years ago, the pandemic agreement could help realize the transformative potential of law for facing one of the greatest health threats to humanity.

Portable MRI for neuroimaging research in remote field settings can reach populations previously excluded from research, including communities underrepresented in current brain neuroscience databases and marginalized in health care. However, research conducted far from a medical institution and potentially in populations facing barriers to health care access raises the question of how to manage incidental findings (IFs) that may warrant clinical workup. Researchers should not withhold information about IFs from historically excluded and underserved population when members consent to receive it, and instead should facilitate access to information and a pathway to clinical care.

In this article, we examine the relationship between the World Health Organization International Health Regulations (IHR) and human rights and its implications for IHR reform, considering the evolution of human rights in the 2005 IHR, the role of human rights in IHR reforms and the implications of these reforms in key domains including equity and solidarity, medical countermeasures, core capacities, travel restrictions, vaccine certificates, social measures, accountability, and financing.

This article explores two questions: (1) whether portable MRI research might escape regulatory oversight altogether under existing U.S. privacy and research ethical frameworks, leaving research participants without adequate protections, and (2) whether existing regulatory frameworks, when they do apply, can guard society’s broader interest in ensuring that portable MRI research pursues socially beneficial, ethically sound aims that minimize the potential for externalities affecting nonparticipating individuals and groups, who might be stigmatized or otherwise harmed even if they decline participation in the research.

In a new era of regulatory oversight, the US Supreme Court upended traditional Chevron deference to agency interpretations of ambiguous Congressional provisions in Loper in June 2024. Federal courts were instructed to make their own assessments of statutory authorities amid an onslaught of public health agency challenges surfacing nationally. Even so, SCOTUS may be eyeing further limits on agency powers despite clear and substantial repercussions for the health of the nation.

The paucity of existing baseline data for understanding neurologic health and the effects of injury on people from Indigenous populations is causally related to the limited representation of communities in neuroimaging research to date. In this paper, we explore ways to change this trend in the context of portable MRI, where portability has opened up imaging to communities that have been neglected or inaccessible in the past. We discuss pathways to engage local leadership, foster the participation of communities for this unprecedented opportunity, and empower field-based researchers to bring the holistic worldview embraced by Indigenous communities to neuroimaging research.

This pilot study is the first formal exploration of the concept of “Organizational Professionalism” (OP) among health system leaders in high-performing healthcare organizations. Semi-structured key informant interviews with 23 leaders from 8 healthcare organizations that were recipients of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) or Baldrige-based state quality award programs explored conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement of OP. Further exploration and understanding of OP in healthcare organizations has the potential to establish and sustain professional and ethical organizational cultures that bolster trust through the sound implementation of laws, policies, and procedures to support the delivery of high-quality patient care.

The introduction of portable MRI (pMRI) has the potential to directly impact dementia research and ultimately clinical care. In this paper, we explore two ethical challenges facing the introduction of pMRI in dementia research. The first is the need to ensure that pMRI enhances rather than undermines efforts aimed at improving ethnoracial representation in dementia research. The second is the need to implement pMRI in dementia research in a dementia-friendly way that attends to the social context and lived experience of people with dementia.