Editorial Trends

I was recently asked to report on editorial trends in the Hastings Center Report, past and future. What I reported is that HCR has been going in two seemingly contrasting directions. One has to do with moral decision-making in clinical ethics-the core theme in bioethics for fifty years, but still developing. A second editorial trend is treatment of larger social and political issues that bear on health, such as public health interventions and access to health care. I could also have noted a continuing stream of pieces on emerging technologies, from whole-genome screening for newborns to artificial intelligence in clinical diagnoses to the so-called de-extinction of extinct animals and plants through various genetic and reproductive tricks. This January-February 2019 issue of HCR reflects all these trends.