ns that focus on pain, swelling, medication taken or investigating diagnostic accuracy are likely to have shorter follow-up periods. As a result of the GDG consensus process, the outcome measures and length of follow-up will, alongside the use of standard instruments to assess the methodological quality of clinical trials and other comparative studies, be applied to all the commissioned systematic reviews that will inform the subsequent process when developing the ESE S3 Level Clinical Practice Guidelines.The allocation of vaccines and therapeutics for Covid-19 obviously raises ethical questions, and physicians and ethicists have begun to address them. Writers have identified various criteria that should guide allocation decisions, but the criteria often conflict and need to be balanced against one another. This article proposes a model for thinking about how different considerations that are relevant to the distribution of vaccines and scarce treatments for Covid-19 could be integrated into an allocation procedure. The model employs the construct of a weighted lottery, which is a construct that has been employed in other contexts that involve the distribution of scarce resources. The article highlights the advantages of applying a weighted lottery to the Covid-19 context and offers an illustration for how it might work in practice. The primary aim of the article is to articulate the structural features of a weighted lottery for this context and to bring out its advantages over other methods for allocating Covid-19 medications.Like people, academic fields grow, acquire an identity, establish goals, and ultimately impact the world in various ways. Here we check in with our young friend Neuroethics-a field I want to see develop and thrive. This won't happen if it keeps returning to issues like cognitive enhancement or neural causation of behavior and responsibility, with minor adjustments of its analyses. Neuroethics is at its best when scanning the horizon for new scientific and technical developments that intersect in new ways with ethics and law. Consider the development of open- and closed-loop deep brain stimulation for behavioral disorders. Under what conditions are patients responsible for their behavior when it is influenced by an implanted system? Neuroethics has also increased understanding of people's beliefs and attitudes toward neuroscience and its applications because effective policy must take empirical facts into account.It now seems technically feasible to culture human embryos beyond the "fourteen-day limit," which has the potential to increase scientific understanding of human development and perhaps improve infertility treatments. The fourteen-day limit was adopted as a compromise but subsequently has been considered an ethical line. Does it remain relevant in light of technological advances permitting embryo maturation beyond it? Should it be changed and, if so, how and why? What justifications would be necessary to expand the limit, particularly given that doing so would violate some people's moral commitments regarding human embryos? Robust stakeholder engagement preceded adoption of the fourteen-day limit and should arguably be part of efforts to reassess it. Such engagement could also consider the need for enhanced oversight of human embryo research. learn more In the meantime, developing and implementing reliable oversight systems should help foster high-quality research and public confidence in it.The Covid-19 pandemic has created a clinical environment in which health care practitioners are experiencing moral distress in numerous and novel ways. In this narrative reflection, a pediatric palliative care physician explores how his hospital's strict visitation policy set the stage for moral distress when, in the early months of the pandemic, it prevented two parents from being together at the bedside of their dying child.The lead article in this January-February 2021 issue-the first of the Hastings Center Report's fiftieth year of publication-does not set out to change medicine. It tries instead to understand it. In "A Heart without Life Artificial Organs and the Lived Body," Mary Jean Walker draws on work in phenomenology and on empirical research with people who have received artificial heart devices to argue that such devices may have two very different effects on how a patient experiences the body and the self. Several other pieces in this issue address the ongoing slew of patient care and health policy problems surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, and a special report titled Democracy in Crisis Civic Learning and the Reconstruction of Common Purpose considers the requirements for public involvement in policy-making about bioethical issues.The Covid-19 crisis has accelerated a trend toward burnout in health care workers, making starkly clear that burnout is especially likely when providing health care is not only stressful and sad but emotionally alienating; in such situations, there is no mental space for clinicians to experience authentic clinical empathy. Engaged curiosity toward each patient is a source of meaning and connection for health care providers, and it protects against sympathetic distress and burnout. In a prolonged crisis like Covid-19, clinicians provide care out of a sense of duty, especially the duty of nonabandonment. We argue that when duty alone is relied on too heavily, with fear and frustration continually suppressed, the risk of burnout is dramatically increased. Even before Covid-19, clinicians often worked under dehumanizing and unjust conditions, and rates of burnout were 50 percent for physicians and 33 percent for nurses. The Covid-19 intensification of burnout can serve as a wake-up call that the structure of health care needs to be improved if we are to prevent the loss of a whole generation of empathic clinicians.Provision of adequate nutrition to elderly patients who develop dysphagia after a stroke can be quite challenging, often leading to the placement of a percutaneous entero-gastrostomy (PEG) tube for nutritional support. This hypothetical case describes the additional challenge of cross-cultural belief that leads a daughter to provide oral feeding to her mother, an act that the medical team believes is dangerous and the daughter sees as salubrious. In this case, what is the proper balance between patient safety and deference to cultural traditions and norms? Where are the limits? Two commentaries offer insights for conflict resolution, including recommending that the medical team seek to understand the cultural motivations of the family, balancing safety and respect for cultural norms. The second commentary also disagrees with the team's presumption that the daughter's feeding of her mother is a greater threat to the patient than the PEG tube feeding is.