In Memoriam: The Sudden Demise of the AMA Journal of Ethics — A great loss for physicians, the profession, and the public; MedPage Today, November 14, 2025

Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH, and Kayhan Parsi, JD, PhD, MedPage Today; In Memoriam: The Sudden Demise of the AMA Journal of Ethics — A great loss for physicians, the profession, and the public

"Bioethics is a small field, but we punch above our weight when it comes to writing. Professional journal articles, reports, and policies are arguably our primary written products, since the main job in bioethics is to help clinicians and others navigate ethical challenges in their work. But we also write for the public, in forums like blogs and editorials, since many of the issues we write about have broader implications. Consequently, learning to write for publication is a key skill for bioethicists, and professional journals are critical for the field. One particular journal -- the AMA Journal of Ethics -- has been a stalwart in giving a voice to newcomers to the field...

Why Did the AMA Kill its Journal of Ethics?

The AMA is the nation's largest and most influential medical professional organization, and its Journal of Ethics held the mission of, "illuminating the art of medicine" by being an open access journal, freely available to all, with no advertising, focusing each month on an important ethical issue in healthcare, and, most uniquely perhaps, each issue was edited by health professional trainees and their mentors. Only the AMA, with its mission, resources, and reach, could have produced this journal.

One possible reason for its elimination might be financial. But if financial returns were to be a metric for success, then the AMA JoE had a bad business model from the start: no fees, no subscriptions, no advertising. As Kao argued, a guiding premise for the journal was that "ethics inquiry is a public goodopens in a new tab or window" -- hence no fees or subscriptions and no ads (avoiding conflicts of interest is critical in ethics inquiry).

For the AMA, the business case for AMA JoE could never have been about profit; rather, it was about demonstrating the AMA's integrity, altruism, and service to physicians from very early in their careers. The journal aimed to build goodwill, bolster the AMA's reputation, improve ethical deliberation within the profession and, most importantly, entice students and trainees to engage seriously with the organization. By these metrics it has succeeded. Over its more than 25 years in existence, the journal drew innumerable medical students, residents, and fellows into the AMA. It also provided a crucial training ground for young people in medicine who wanted to learn about bioethics and about writing and editing, and it helped build the credibility and presence of the AMA and its ethics group nationally and internationally.

So, if it wasn't about profit, perhaps it was the political environment. The journal encouraged medical trainees to explore some of the most contentious challenges facing medicine and society, so it inherently provided opportunities for controversy. Issues this year have addressed themes of private equity in medicineopens in a new tab or window, regret and surgical professionalismopens in a new tab or window, and evidence-based design in healthcareopens in a new tab or window. Meanwhile, issues in prior years have addressed some currently inflammatory topics, like ethical issues related to transgender surgical careopens in a new tab or window and segregation in healthcareopens in a new tab or window. Remarkably, the journal still very rarely caused public relations problems for the AMA, perhaps because its editorial staff were highly qualified professionals, but also because its approach to controversy was civil, inquisitive, and exploratory.

As Kao wrote in a farewell essayopens in a new tab or window this month: "For over a quarter of a century, the AMA Journal of Ethics has striven to publish insightful commentaries, engaging podcasts, and provocative artwork that help medical students, physicians, and all health care professionals reflect on and make sound ethical decisions in service to patients and society." In fact, the journal often demonstrated exactly this spirit of respectful discussion about challenging ethical issues that we need to rekindle today, making its loss even more tragic and difficult to explain.

AMA JoE: A Value-Added Offering

In a recent opinion piece in MedPage Today, "Medical Societies Are Facing an Existential Crisis,opens in a new tab or window" the authors exhorted medical societies, facing declining memberships and engagement among young physicians, to reimagine their role by offering "free basic memberships supplemented by value-added services [that] could attract early-career physicians who might otherwise remain disengaged." AMA JoEwas exactly this type of value-added offering that not only served students and trainees, but also educators across health professions. Anecdotally, many health profession educators we know routinely use pieces from AMA JoE in their teaching and now lament its demise.

The AMA has reportedly promisedopens in a new tab or window to keep the historical content of the journal accessible on the AMA JoE website. This is no consolation for the students, residents, and fellows who were working on future issues, but it means the legacy of the journal will live on. Someday, we'd like to believe it might even be revived.

For now, we mourn the loss of AMA JoE for the field of bioethics. Even more, we mourn what the AMA's sudden elimination of its ethics journal might mean for physicians, the profession, and the public."

opens in a new tab or window(AMA JoE) -- has been a stalwart in giving a voice to newcomers to the field.

Cases That Haunt Us: The MSMS 29th Annual Conference on Bioethics; Michigan State Medical Society, October 20, 2025

Michigan State Medical Society; Cases That Haunt Us: The MSMS 29th Annual Conference on Bioethics

"Join us for the 2025 MSMS Conference on Bioethics, a crucial event focused on the ethical complexity of real-world clinical encounters.

This year's theme, "Cases That Haunt Us: Examining Medical Ethics Issues Through the Particularly Difficult Cases," invites you to take a deep dive into the moral challenges of medicine.  We'll explore unforgettable, ethically fraught cases, the kind that truly stay with us.  This is your chance to understand the ethical depth of the cases that matter and why they shape compassionate care."

Better Safe than Sorry? Tylenol, Pregnancy, and Ethics; The Hastings Center for Bioethics, October 2, 2025

Rita Dexter, Sophie Schott, Miranda R. Waggoner and Anne Lyerly, The Hastings Center for Bioethics; Better Safe than Sorry? Tylenol, Pregnancy, and Ethics

"Bioethicists have a big job to do in the current climate, where experts are dismissed and pseudoscience is weaponized to serve a political agenda."

Laws, norms, and ethics for AI in health; Microsoft, May 1, 2025

Peter Lee , President, Microsoft Research  Vardit Ravitsky , President and CEO  Laura Adams , Senior Advisor  Dr. Roxana Daneshjou , Assistant Professor, Microsoft; Laws, norms, and ethics for AI in health

"Two years ago, OpenAI’s GPT-4 kick-started a new era in AI. In the months leading up to its public release, Peter Lee, president of Microsoft Research, cowrote a book full of optimism for the potential of advanced AI models to transform the world of healthcare. What has happened since? In this special podcast series, The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited, Lee revisits the book, exploring how patients, providers, and other medical professionals are experiencing and using generative AI today while examining what he and his coauthors got right—and what they didn’t foresee. 

In this episode, Laura Adams(opens in new tab), Vardit Ravitsky(opens in new tab), and Dr. Roxana Daneshjou(opens in new tab), experts at the intersection of healthcare, ethics, and technology, join Lee to discuss the responsible implementation of AI in healthcare. Adams, a strategic advisor at the National Academy of Medicine leading the development of a national AI code of conduct, shares her initial curiosity and skepticism of generative AI and then her recognition of the technology as a transformative tool requiring new governance approaches. Ravitsky, bioethicist and president and CEO of The Hastings Center for Bioethics, examines how AI is reshaping healthcare relationships and the need for bioethics to proactively guide implementation. Daneshjou, a Stanford physician-scientist bridging dermatology, biomedical data science, and AI, discusses her work on identifying, understanding, and mitigating bias in AI systems and also leveraging AI to better serve patient needs."

Disinformation, Trust, and the Role of AI: The Daniel Callahan Annual Lecture; The Hastings Center, September 12, 2024

 The Hastings Center; Disinformation, Trust, and the Role of AI: The Daniel Callahan Annual Lecture

"A Moderated Discussion on DISINFORMATION, TRUST, AND THE ROLE OF AI: Threats to Health & Democracy, The Daniel Callahan Annual Lecture

Panelists: Reed Tuckson, MD, FACP, Chair & Co-Founder of the Black Coalition Against Covid, Chair and Co-Founder of the Coalition For Trust In Health & Science Timothy Caulfield, LB, LLM, FCAHS, Professor, Faculty of Law and School of Public Health, University of Alberta; Best-selling author & TV host Moderator: Vardit Ravitsky, PhD, President & CEO, The Hastings Center"

Who owns your cells? Legacy of Henrietta Lacks raises ethical questions about profits from medical research; Cleveland.com, August 18, 2023

Gretchen Cuda Kroen, cleveland.com; Who owns your cells? Legacy of Henrietta Lacks raises ethical questions about profits from medical research

"While the legal victory may have given the family some closure, it has raised concerns for bioethicists in Cleveland and elsewhere.

The case raises important questions about owning one’s own body; whether individuals are entitled to a share of the profits from medical discoveries derived from research on their own cells, organs and genetic material.

But it also offers a tremendous opportunity to not only acknowledge the ethical failures of the past and the seeds of mistrust they have sown, but to guide society toward building better, more trustworthy medical institutions, said Aaron Goldenberg, who directs the Bioethics Center for Community Health and Genomic Equity (CHANGE) at Case Western Reserve University."

The Ethics Of Who Gets The COVID-19 Vaccine And When; NPR, December 20, 2021

NPR; The Ethics Of Who Gets The COVID-19 Vaccine And When

"NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Ruth Faden, founder of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, about the ethics of determining who gets vaccinated when resources are limited."

Daniel Callahan, 88, Dies; Bioethics Pioneer Weighed ‘Human Finitude’; The New York Times, July 23, 2019

Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times; Daniel Callahan, 88, Dies; Bioethics Pioneer Weighed ‘Human Finitude’

“The scope of his interests was impressively wide, as the Hastings Center said in an appreciation of him, “beginning with Catholic thought and proceeding to the morality of abortion, the nature of the doctor-patient relationship, the promise and peril of new technologies, the scourge of high health care costs, the goals of medicine, the medical and social challenges of aging, dilemmas raised by decision-making near the end of life, and the meaning of death.”...

Among his most important books was “Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society” (1987), which argued for rationing the health care dollars spent on older Americans.”…

“He urged his peers and the public to look beyond narrow issues in law and medicine to broader questions of what it means to live a worthwhile life,” Dr. Appel said by email.”…

While at Harvard, Mr. Callahan became disillusioned with philosophy, finding it irrelevant to the real world. At one point, he wandered over to the Harvard Divinity School to see if theology might suit him better. As he wrote in his memoir, “In Search of the Good: A Life in Bioethics” (2012), he concluded that theologians asked interesting questions but did not work with useful methodologies, and that philosophers had useful methodologies but asked uninteresting questions.”

Scientist Who Edited Babies’ Genes Is Likely to Face Charges in China; The New York Times, January 21, 2019

Austin Ramzy and Sui-Lee Wee, The New York Times; Scientist Who Edited Babies’ Genes Is Likely to Face Charges in China

"Dr. He’s announcement raised ethical concerns about the long-term effects of such genetic alterations, which if successful would be inherited by the child’s progeny, and whether other scientists would be emboldened to try their own gene-editing experiments.

Scientists inside and outside China criticized Dr. He’s work, which highlighted fears that the country has overlooked ethical issues in the pursuit of scientific achievement. The Chinese authorities placed Dr. He under investigation, during which time he has been kept under guard at a guesthouse at the Southern University of Science and Technology in the city of Shenzhen."

The ethics of gene editing: Lulu, Nana, and 'Gattaca; Johns Hopkins University, January 17, 2019

Saralyn Cruickshank, Johns Hopkins University; The ethics of gene editing: Lulu, Nana, and 'Gattaca

"Under the direction of Rebecca Wilbanks, a postdoctoral fellow in the Berman Institute of Bioethics and the Department of the History of Medicine, the students have been immersing themselves during in the language and principles of bioethics and applying what they learn to their understanding of technology, with an emphasis on robotics and reproductive technology in particular.

To help them access such heady material, Wilbanks put a spin on the course format. For the Intersession class—titled Science Fiction and the Ethics of Technology: Sex, Robots, and Doing the Right Thing—students explore course materials through the lens of science fiction.

"We sometimes think future technology might challenge our ethical sensibilities, but science fiction is good at exploring how ethics is connected to a certain way of life that happens to include technology," says Wilbanks, who is writing a book on how science fiction influenced the development of emerging forms of synthetic biology. "As our way of life changes together with technology, so might our ethical norms.""

In China, Gene-Edited Babies Are the Latest in a String of Ethical Dilemmas; The New York Times, November 30, 2018

Sui-Lee Wee and Elsie Chen, The New York Times;
In China, Gene-Edited Babies Are the Latest in a String of Ethical Dilemmas

"China has set its sights on becoming a leader in science, pouring millions of dollars into research projects and luring back top Western-educated Chinese talent. The country’s scientists are accustomed to attention-grabbing headlines by their colleagues as they race to dominate their fields.

But when He Jiankui announced on Monday that he had created the world’s first genetically edited babies, Chinese scientists — like those elsewhere — denounced it as a step too far. Now many are asking whether their country’s intense focus on scientific achievement has come at the expense of ethical standards.

 

“He studied in the United States, why did he only do this in China?” said Wang Yifang, a medical ethics expert with the School of Medical Humanities at Peking University. “It may still be related to the fact that we have a gap in our ethical supervision — it is not very strict, and some people think it’s dispensable.”"

Facing Backlash, Chinese Scientist Defends Gene-Editing Research On Babies; NPR, November 28, 2018

Rob Stein, NPR; Facing Backlash, Chinese Scientist Defends Gene-Editing Research On Babies

"University of Wisconsin bioethicist Alta Charo, who helped organize the summit, issued an even harsher critique of He's work, calling it "misguided, premature, unnecessary and largely useless."

"The children were already at virtually no risk of contracting HIV, because it was the father and not the mother who was infected," she said.

"The patients were given a consent form that falsely stated this was an AIDS vaccine trial, and which conflated research with therapy by claiming they were 'likely' to benefit," Charo said. "In fact there is not only very little chance these babies would be in need of a benefit, given their low risk, but there is no way to evaluate if this indeed conferred any benefit."

She spoke after Harvard Medical School Dean George Daley alluded to He's claims as "missteps" that he worried might set back a highly promising field of research. "Scientists who go rogue carry a deep, deep cost to the scientific community," Daley said.

Still, Daley argued that He's experiment shouldn't tar the potential work of other scientists. "Just because the first steps into a new technology are missteps, doesn't mean we shouldn't step back, restart and think about a plausible and responsible path forward," Daley said.

"The fact that the first instance came forward as a misstep should in no way leave us to stick our heads in the sand and not consider the very, very positive efforts that could come forward," Daley said. "I hope we just don't stick our heads in the sand."

Daley stressed that the world hadn't yet reached a scientific consensus on how to ethically and safely use new gene-editing techniques to modify embryos that become babies.

But Daley argued that a consensus was emerging that "if we can solve the scientific challenges, it may be a moral imperative that it should be permitted." The most likely first legitimate use of gene-edited embryos would be to prevent serious genetic disorders for which there are no alternatives, Daley said.

"Solving and assessing these deep issues [is] essential," Daley says.

Daley also defended the fact that scientists have long relied on self-regulation to prevent the abuse of new technologies. He's claims represented "a major failure" that called for much stronger regulation and possibly a moratorium on such research, Daley said. "I do think the principle of self-regulation is defensible.""

Why Doctors Should Read Fiction: Could a simple literary exercise make physicians more caring?; The Atlantic, July 30, 2018

Sam Kean, The Atlantic;

Why Doctors Should Read Fiction: Could a simple literary exercise make physicians more caring?

"The annals of literature are packed with writers who also practiced medicine: Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Carlos Williams, John Keats, William Somerset Maugham, and on and on. As doctors, they saw patients at their most vulnerable, and their medical training gave them a keen eye for observing people and what makes them tick.

But if studying medicine is good training for literature, could studying literature also be good training for medicine? A new paper in Literature and Medicine, “Showing That Medical Ethics Cases Can Miss the Point,” argues yes. In particular, it proposes that certain literary exercises, like rewriting short stories that involve ethical dilemmas, can expand doctors’ worldviews and make them more attuned to the dilemmas real patients face."

Gene Editing for ‘Designer Babies’? Highly Unlikely, Scientists Say; New York Times, August 4, 2017

Pam Belluck, New York Times; Gene Editing for ‘Designer Babies’? Highly Unlikely, Scientists Say

"In the future, will there be nations that allow fertility clinics to promise babies with genetically engineered perfect pitch or .400 batting averages? It’s not impossible. Even now, some clinics in the United States and elsewhere offer unproven stem cell therapies, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

But R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, who co-led the national committee on human embryo editing, said historically ethical overreach with reproductive technology has been limited.

Procedures like I.V.F. are arduous and expensive, and many people want children to closely resemble themselves and their partners. They are likely to tinker with genes only if other alternatives are impractical or impossible.

“You hear people talking about how this will make us treat children as commodities and make people more intolerant of people with disabilities and lead to eugenics and all that,” she said.

“While I appreciate the fear, I think we need to realize that with every technology we have had these fears, and they haven’t been realized.”"