equity

motivation

The advent of new technologies often outstrips our existing ethical and equity frameworks. Society is then forced to revisit basic normative issues such as the boundaries of privacy, the role of intellectual property, and even the definition of humanity. In sorting out these normative issues, society must also figure out basic economic questions such as what incentives should be provided to encourage the discovery of new technologies, how much regulation should be applied to the development of new technologies, and how many resources should be allocated to the use of a given new technology.

These decisions in turn determine how equitable is access to healthcare and how we go about addressing health disparities across communities.

Digitalis Research is particularly interested in how health is effected as a basic human right.

Are all public policies on some level health policies?

open
questions

Are all public policies health policies?

What are people’s rights to information during a health crisis? Are your privacy rights regarding your health different during an emerging health crisis?

Do new life science technologies necessarily exacerbate social inequalities or produce deeper divides and conflicts? If so, how do we avoid this outcome? Who are the relevant stakeholders (national, international, social, political, economic, scientific)? Who is under-represented?

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution (the Shirky Principle).” True or False?

How do economists, ethicists, and scientists balance the trade-offs between conflicting values and needs? How should we judge the success or failure of the balance struck? How much of the balancing act is universal and how much is place and time dependent?

Is proactive social engineering desirable? Is it even possible to effect the outcomes we want in a medium as complex and uncertain as human social behavior?

curation

BOOKS

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot / Crown / 2010

“She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years.”

ARTICLES

Too Much of a Good Thing:
Coping with Splendid Technologies that Can Go Wrong

Daniel Callahan / The Hastings Center Report / 2003

“Health care brings great health and social benefits: it can save our lives, reduce pain and suffering, and rehabilitate us if injured. Yet its heavy dependency on technology drives up the cost of care, so far uncontrolled.”

Newtons of the Leaves of Grass

Joachim Boldt & Oliver Muller / Nature Biotech / 2008

“Certain ethical implications of synthetic biology research go beyond those of genetic engineeering.”

Engineered Societies

Jessica C. Flack & Manfred D. Laubichler / Medium / 2018

Can science help orchestrate social outcomes? Should it?

What occurs when physical beings transition to information beings?

Tony Fish / Medium / 2021

“When we apply our old governance, old oversight, old accountable models and old frameworks to new problems, it feels like there is a disconnect and there is a level of dysfunctionality as the old model was not designed for the new problems.”

PAPERS

Epistemic Dependence

John Hardwig / The Journal of Philosophy / 1985

“In this paper … I want to explore the ‘logic’ or epistemic structure of an appeal to intellectual authority and the way in which such an appeal constitutes justification for believing and knowing.”

Is there a Human Right to Essential Pharmaceuticals? 
The Global Common, the Intellectual Common, and the Possibility of Private Intellectual Property

Mathias Risse / Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper No. RWP08-074 / 2008

“I argue that there is a human right to vital pharmaceuticals, not in the sense that anybody has a claim right to the provision of pharmaceuticals that are not yet available, but in the sense that access to pharmaceuticals must not be limited by means of overblown private intellectual property right.”

Diversity and Technological Progress

Daron Acemoglu / The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity Revisited / University of Chicago Press, 319-356 / 2011

“This paper proposes a tractable model to study the equilibrium diversity of technological progress and shows that equilibrium technological progress may exhibit too little diversity (too much conformity), in particular, foregoing socially beneficial investments in "alternative" technologies that will be used at some point in the future.”