Social Justice

February 19, 20244min readPeople struggling with addiction cite untreated withdrawal, pain, discrimination and stringent policies as reasons for leaving hospitals against medical advice. We need to take their complaints seriouslyBy Zoe Adams At 3 A.M., a high-pitched beep rang on my pager from a patient’s nurse. The page read: “Please come to bedside ASAP. Patient agitated and threatening to leave AMA. Security on their way.”Like many medical trainees, I have received countless pages like this one. Fred (not his real…

February 15, 20244min readU.S. elected officials must protect public health and the foundations of our democracy by limiting the intrusion of guns into politicsBy Tim CareyTrump supporters near the U.S Capitol, on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. Three years after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the U.S. finds itself at a crossroads of democracy. Inflamed by inciteful rhetoric, a “deeply disturbing spike” in threats against elected officials and perceived political foes has prompted increased attention from the…

The Supreme Court of the United States ruling last year that colleges and universities can no longer take race and ethnicity into consideration as a specific basis for granting admission delivered a significant blow to diversity efforts on campuses nationwide. This ruling applies to medical education, where the lack of a diverse physician workforce is a known factor that leads to health care inequalities.Without affirmative action, how can we recruit the next generation of physicians to care for people from…

Recently, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, along with IBM and over 50 other founding members, announced an AI Alliance to “advance open, safe, responsible AI.” The group would be committed to “open science and open technologies,” promoting standards and benchmarks to reduce the risk of harm that advanced models might cause.These are critically important goals, as many tech companies, driven by the breakneck AI arms race, have come out with products that could upend the lives and livelihoods of many, and pose an…

In December the White House announced a new draft guidance that allows federal agencies to grant nonvoluntary licenses to patents on inventions funded with taxpayer dollars. These are called “march-in” rights, and they allow the government to force licensing, when necessary, to remedy an abuse or nonuse of such patented inventions.The draft guidance fundamentally changes policy on federally funded inventions, including drugs and other products that rely on inventions that are sold at high prices by pharma and biotech…

In my senior year of college, I began my first job as a social worker, counseling victims of sexual assault. I began every morning determined to help my clients, who had experienced major trauma. But in sessions, I felt powerless, like there was never enough I could do for them. And by the time I left each evening, all I could feel was rage for my clients who had been sexually abused—especially when they were children. I wondered why their abuse hadn’t been prevented; why we weren’t stopping it before it…

January 4, 20243min readAstronomy is beautiful and elegant. The language we use to describe its processes is anything butBy Juan P. Madrid This summer, a team of students and I were enjoying breathtaking views of the night sky while we collected data using telescopes at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas. One night, when we were outside on a telescope catwalk between the screams of a mountain lion, one of my students amazed me with her interpretation of the fate of Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our Milky Way. In…

Physician and author Gabor Maté is known for his insights into the imprints that trauma leaves on the mind and body—and for his compassionate guidance on healing. In a series of best-selling books, he has argued that childhood adversities and other stressors may underlie addictions, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and other conditions. In Maté’s most recent work, The Myth of Normal, written with his son, Daniel Maté, he postulates that trauma—by which he means “wound,” as in the original Greek—is woven into the…

December 29, 20235min readAs 2023 comes to a close, we look back at a year of poignant commentary on space, politics, climate, artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, and health—and the ways we explore the human experienceBy Megha Satyanarayana Credit: Adrián AstorganoIn 2023 Scientific American’s opinion section offered decisive commentary on science and the most important issues of the moment. We started with water as a climate change issue, delved into light pollution and nuclear waste, investigated controversial…

More than 50 years ago my parents took a big chance. They fell in love, got married and had three daughters, not knowing that they both carried the genetic trait for sickle cell disease.When I first started my career in emergency medicine 28 years ago, the main treatments for this disease were intravenous fluids, oxygen and a powerful narcotic used to manage the pain of sickle cell. With the Food and Drug Administration’s recent approval of two treatments for sickle cell that use the gene-editing technology CRISPR, people…