人文科学最新文献

Scientific fakery is a centuries old problem. Twinned with the long history of hard-working scientists earning fame for genuine discoveries, runs a tawdry history of those who were willing fabricate results to falsely gain prestige. Fraud in the past relied on bespoke fakery, but today's fraudsters can exploit the online scientific world to quickly create realistic looking papers on an industrial scale. Fraudsters are using open data sets to create meaningless analyses and combining these results with text from large language models. There has been an explosion of these low value papers using openly available and highly regarded data sets, such as the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The paper miners will likely exploit whatever open data resources they can find until data custodians put more stringent controls in place, or journals and publishers push back. Some scientific data may be too open, even though making research data openly available is a recommended policy for increasing research integrity. Journals and researchers need to be aware of this new threat to research integrity.

Whether children have a right to know that they were created via “donated” gametes has generated debate for a quarter of a century. Pro-transparency theorists use policies and attitudes concerning adoption to argue for changes in regulations related to “donor” gametes. Anti-transparency theorists claim that discussions about whether children have a right to know their genetic origins must consider natural reproduction (and not just adoption). They argue that if we use an analogy to natural reproduction instead, we begin to see the problems with requiring transparency. I will argue that adoption is the more appropriate analogy for this debate and that we can make an argument for a strong right to know. I end with some further reasons that we can apply stronger regulation to the use of “donor” gametes than we would to natural reproduction.

Advance directives have historically relied upon human agents. But what happens when a patient appoints an artificial intelligence system as an agent? This essay introduces the idea of roboagents—chatbots authorized to make medical decisions when individuals lose capacity. After describing potential models, including a personal AI companion and a chatbot that has not been trained on a patient's values and preferences, the essay explores the ethical tensions these roboagents generate regarding autonomy, bias, consent, family trust, and physician well-being. This essay then calls for legal clarity and ethical guidance regarding the status of roboagents in light of their potential as alternative health care agents.

On the cover: Polish Chess Players, by Paul Powis, acrylic on card © Paul Powis. All rights reserved 2026 / Bridgeman Images

Artificial intelligence is reshaping clinical decision-making in ways that challenge assumptions about patient-centered care, moral responsibility, and professional judgment. Encoding Bioethics: AI in Clinical Decision-Making, by Charles Binkley and Tyler Loftus, begins where ethical reflection on this topic should begin—in the trenches of clinical care. Together with the National Academy of Medicine's publication An Artificial Intelligence Code of Conduct for Health and Medicine: Essential Guidance for Aligned Action, which came out after the book, Encoding Bioethics goes a long way toward offering physicians, patients, developers, and health-system leaders actionable guidance. Through explanation, probing questions, and case studies, Binkley and Loftus illuminate the ethical difficulties posed by opacity, bias, and shifting clinical roles. Yet their analysis stops short of identifying the governance tools and operational structures that are essential for achieving patient-centered, morally responsible AI that strengthens clinical judgment. This review essay argues that bridging ethics and practice requires attention to psychological safety, organizational dynamics, and implementation science to ensure that AI supports—not supplants—ethical care.

“Shield laws” declare that, for purposes of reproductive health care, the law of the jurisdiction in which the clinician practices governs when state laws conflict. In 2024, approximately 100,000 pregnant people living in states that criminalize abortion provision received pills for a medication abortion from a clinician living in one of the eight states with these laws. One of these clinicians is New York's Margaret Carpenter, who was criminally charged in Louisiana and fined and enjoined in Texas. Carpenter's case testing shield laws, which is likely to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, should be framed as a “right to travel case” because telemedicine should be understood as a modern version of travel. If the Supreme Court ultimately accepts Louisiana and Texas's likely argument that it's a narrow “state regulation of medicine” case, the Court will be limiting the constitutional right to travel to people who have the money and time to physically travel for medical care, and withholding it from people who need the same care but who can afford to access it only through virtual travel.

On the cover: Polish Chess Players, by Paul Powis, acrylic on card © Paul Powis. All rights reserved 2026 / Bridgeman Images

In in vitro fertilisation (IVF) mix-ups and contested parenthood, Prince and colleagues argue that the familiar 'genetic presumption' in parenthood disputes should be treated as rebuttable in favour of the gestational relationship, and that custody and guardianship outcomes will typically be resolved under best-interests standards, with biological relatedness operating as one relevant factor among others. Their paper effectively re-centres moral attention on pregnancy, embodiment and gestation in a domain often organised around DNA and prior intention. This response agrees that gestation generates morally weighty interests and that a purely genetic default can obscure how parental bonds are formed and sustained.However, IVF mix-ups are a structurally distinctive category: they arise within an ex ante consent-based system of embryo creation, allocation and implantation, where predictability and institutional accountability are central. To preserve these values without collapsing into rigid geneticism, I propose a time-sensitive hybrid model. On this approach, genetic-intentional parenthood supplies the default entitlement at the point of error identification, reflecting the consent architecture of assisted reproduction, while settled attachment and caregiving reliance modify the remedy when discovery occurs late. The model thereby protects relational stability while preserving identity interests and institutional accountability, offering a temporally staged allocation framework that better fits assisted reproduction's underlying structure.