With the advancement of human microbiome research, it is inevitable that a growing number of biobanks will include a collection of microbiota specimens to characterize the microbial communities that inhabit the human body and explore the relationships between the microbiota and their human hosts. Biobanks of human microbiota and their associated genetic information may become a valuable health resource. But, this area of research also presents ethical and social problems, some of which are distinct from those faced by biobanks that (...) store human tissue samples. This paper examines four core issues which are considered highly relevant to microbiome biobanking: the nature of human microbiome samples and how different understandings have an impact on benefit/risk evaluation, privacy, informed consent, and returning the result to participants. We argue that these issues should be addressed early on in microbiome research projects and also call for adjusting or developing new governance mechanism to better accommodate these changes. (shrink)

The authors argue that in preventing and controlling the pandemic of Covid‐19, we should have taken an offensive or proactive strategy rather than a defensive or reactionary one because the former type of approach can bring about more health benefits and fewer harms than can the latter. The offensive or proactive approach consists of two parts: The first part is to preemptively establish a barrier between a novel virus and humans in order to prevent the spillover of the virus into (...) humans, and the second part is that, when a spillover fails to be prevented, we should take public interventions, such as contact tracing, social distancing, and quarantine and isolation, as early as when there are several dozens or one hundred or more cases that manifest symptoms with an unknown etiology in order to prevent an epidemic that is still limited to relatively small groups from developing into an outbreak. (shrink)

This article consists of four parts. In the first part it briefly describes the history of body‐to‐head transplantation (BHT) and the surgical plan proposed by Drs. Sergio Canavero and Ren Xiaoping on a human subject. In the second part it argues that the BHT procedure that they propose is scientifically invalid and technically infeasible so therefore would end in failure. In the third part it argues that the present conceivable procedure of BHT cannot be ethically justified because it would bring (...) great harm to the human subject, it is uncertain who would be the possible beneficiary, and valid informed consent cannot be obtained. In the fourth part it argues that the action of performing the procedure of BHT might violate China’s current criminal and civil laws. The conclusion that follows from the arguments above is that BHT should be prohibited now and also in the near future. However, this conclusion does not preclude scientists, neurosurgeons and bioethicists doing research into scientific, technical, surgical and ethical issues raised by BHT. (shrink)