Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics

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Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics

Petrie-Flom Center (PFC) — A Harvard center dedicated to interdisciplinary research and debate of In 2005, with a generous gift from Joseph H.

Flom ’48 and the Petrie Foundation, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics was founded to respond to the need for leading legal scholarship in these fields.

09/01/2026

A new post on Bill of Health explores how the increase in private equity ownership of hospitals has led to higher costs and lower quality care.

"By loosening charity care mandates, granting access to Wall Street tax-exempt debt markets, permitting for-profit corporate subsidiaries, incentivizing patent commercialization, and more, federal policy created incentives for nonprofit hospitals to prioritize market share, capital accumulation, and corporate financialization,” writes John McDonough, a professor of practice at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. McDonough is also author of the new book, America’s Wrong Turn: US Healthcare in the Neoliberal Era.

The full blog post is here: https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2026/08/21/how-did-so-many-nonprofit-hospitals-become-so-profitable/

08/28/2026

On Oct. 29 the Petrie-Flom Center will host a blockbuster event. Judicial Dialogues on Health and Climate Change: Emerging Standards, Comparative Trajectories, and Future Directions will convene judges, litigators, and scholars from Africa, Europe, and Latin America for a comparative examination of the evolving relationship between climate change, the right to health, and judicial enforcement.

The event will take place at Harvard law School, and will be livestreamed. Registration is open: https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/events/details/judicial-dialogues-health-climate-change/

08/11/2026

PFC Faculty Director I. Glenn Cohen is featured this week on the CNN podcast Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta. In the episode, “Your Checklist for Medical Care Abroad,” Gupta and Cohen discuss the recent uptick in Americans traveling abroad for medical care, also called medical tourism. Cohen, who has written a book on the topic, shares advice on how to vet providers, understand risks, and ask the right questions.

Listen to the podcast here: https://lnkd.in/gew-HRJt

08/05/2026

Written as part of a recent Harvard Law School faculty essay collection, America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance (The MIT Press, 2026), PFC Faculty Director I. Glenn Cohen's article on reproductive technology has been reposted on SCOTUSblog. The piece is titled “The Future of Family Planning Is Here. Is the Constitution Ready?” and is available to read here: https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/08/reproductive-technologies-and-the-federal-constitutional-vacuum/.

07/29/2026

The Harvard University Gazette published an article this week covering Hot Topics in Embryo Law and Ethics, a panel discussion we held at Harvard Law School in June. The article, written by staff writer Jacob Sweet, focused on the many controversial, complicated issues at stake in fertility cases. “There are more than a million frozen embryos in the U.S.,” writes Sweet, "and it seems just about as many ethical and legal questions behind their regulation.”

Panelists and respondents included I. Glenn Cohen, Judith Daar, O. Carter Snead, Julia Hesse, Leslie Meltzer Henry, Insoo Hyun, and Antonio Regalado.

Read the Article: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/07/youre-getting-a-divorce-what-happens-to-the-frozen-embryo/

07/23/2026

The fifth and final panel of our annual conference was Derived and Synthetic Gametes and Embryos, and featured the following presentations:

-Artificial Problems: synthesis, embryogenesis and the limits of human life, by Benjamin J. Hurlbut
Synthetic embryos and gametes; The status of manufactured human embryos in scientific research and the law, by Maureen L. Condic
-IVG in a Post-Dobbs/Skrmetti World: Parentage, Personhood, & Regulation, by Sonia Suter and Naomi Cahn
-The Aristotelian Philosophy of Artifacts and the Ethics of Synthetic Embryos, by Paul Scherz
-Rethinking the Moral and Legal Value of Human Stem-cell Based Embryo Models: How Extrinsic Considerations Should Inform Governance, by Nienke de Graeff, Megan Munsie, and Ana M. Pereira Daoud
Moderator: I. Glenn Cohen

The full video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-50yhU5JNJw&t=2s

07/21/2026

The fourth panel of our annual conference was titled New Technology, New Challenges, and included the following presentations:

-Algorithms That Choose Life: Examining the Law and Ethics of AI-Selected Embryos (AIVF) through a “True Lifecycle Approach” for AI Governance, by Barry Solaiman
-Polygenic Risk Scores to Select Embryos: Legal and Ethical Issues, by I. Glenn Cohen
-Neither Person Nor Property: Toward a Technology-Neutral Framework for Embryo Legal Personhood in the Age of Artificial Reproduction, by Emma Waters
-Human Embryo Research Beyond Earth: Legal and Ethical Consideration, by Vasiliki N. Rahimzadeh, Onur Sahin, Kristin Kostick-Quenet, Amy McGuire, Bronwyn Walsh, and Victor Cole
-Gene Editing, by Sheila Jasanoff and Benjamin J. Hurlbut
Moderator: Susannah Baruch,

Watch the full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TEVQqAZpkg

07/20/2026

On Bill of Health, Gary Hsuanyu Liu argues FDA should not accept health data that FTC deems unacceptable. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took action recently to ban the collection of health-revealing data without meaningful consent. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has seemingly loosened its standards for drug and device approvals that rest on the data assembled and sold by commercial brokers.

Gary Hsuanyu Liu writes that the FDA should adopt the same standard of data collection as the FTC in order to avoid “epistemic laundering,” as he calls it. "Clean evidence is not a barrier to health innovation. Clean evidence is health infrastructure. The FDA cannot ask the public to trust algorithmic medicine while its evidence rests on practices the government itself has outlawed,” writes Liu.

Read more here: https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2026/07/15/when-surveillance-becomes-science-the-data-the-fda-should-not-trust/

07/17/2026

The third panel at our Embryo Law and Ethics conference last month was Defining Humans and Persons, and featured the following presentations:

-What is an Embryo? A Taxonomy of Human Life, by Radhika Rao
-The U.S. Public’s Reaction to Stem Cell-Based Embryo Models (SCBEMs): Predictions and a Research Agenda. By John Evans
-Embryo Ethics and the Little Red Hen: Personhood v. Progress? by Nancy M. P. King and Christine Coughlin
-Equal Dignity: Embryos, Moral Status, and the Law, by Francis J. Beckwith
Moderator: O. Carter Snead

The full video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1kLHxcztPs

07/14/2026

The second panel of our annual conference focused on Embryo Disposition. Presentations included:

-Meeting the Evolving Challenges for Embryo Disposition in a Post-Dobbs Legal Landscape: Examining the Critical Role of Contract Law Frameworks, by Susan Crockin and Francesca Nardi
-Steering Innovation: How Legal Constraints on Embryo Research Can Inform IVF Governance, by Vincent Joralemon
-Addressing the Problem of Abandoned Frozen Embryos Through Embryo Adoption, by Melissa Moschella
Moderator: Judith Daar

Click here to watch the panel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dCGiK2NnK0&t=2s

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