September 22, 2026
Amanda-Erickson-avatar-staff-412x412
News Editor

We write a lot at STAT about artificial intelligence and medicine. But I hadn’t seen a paper quite like this one before. In it, Penn State researchers probed how AI would choose who should receive a donor kidney, one of the thorniest issues in medical ethics. “Often, there is no single objective correct answer,” the researchers wrote. “Rather the decisions rely on nuanced human and moral judgements.”

But when they asked several prominent large language models to choose between possible kidney recipients, they found that AI diverged from human judgement in a few key ways: The AI was less indecisive than humans, “tending toward deterministic recommendations even when abstention is explicitly permitted.” It also rarely chose against the majority choice, which could “fail to capture the plurality inherent in moral values.”

I’m curious whether and how AI is finding its way into medical ethics, and whether this research lines up with real-world experiences. How are you thinking about AI and medical ethics? Thoughts, examples, and other research welcome!

nih

Congress pushes back on effort to let political appointees control NIH grants

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Finn Gomez/Getty Images

The fight over science grant funding boiled over at an Oval Office meeting Friday, when Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought pushed to give political appointees more direct control over National Institutes of Health funding. According to The Washington Post, Vought encouraged Trump to sign an executive order establishing a commission of political appointees to review all grants coming out of NIH, saying current research is too “woke.” In response, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle released statements warning that such a move would be “contrary to congressional intent.”

It’s the latest example of Vought trying to exert more political control over the types of research projects funded by the NIH. Where is NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya in all this? Anil Oza and Chelsea Cirruzzo have the scoop.

mind blowing

Should it be ‘Pinky and the Brains’ now?

We all know about left brain and right brain. But a new paper suggests a more surprising division — our brains might have developed from two distinct organs.

To draw that conclusion, Stanford University researchers examined how the brains of mouse embryos develop. They found that at the earliest stages of growth, the hindbrain expresses discrete genes and a different chromatin configuration than the midbrain and forebrain. That raises some interesting possibilities.

“Although the brain is often construed as a single organ, the brain may itself derive from two parallel progenitors that emerge early in development and that, respectively, form the forebrain/midbrain versus the hindbrain,” the researchers write. “Analogously, the heart derives from two parallel progenitors, the first and second heart fields, which converge to form a single organ.”

The researchers hope their discovery will make it easier to grow hindbrain neurons, which support the study of diseases like spinal muscular atrophy and ALS. Read more here.

research

New federal autism committee head has financial ties to leucovorin

Move over, Sylvia Fogel. It’s John Gaitanis’s turn to steer autism research.

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has installed Gaitanis, a pediatric neurologist, as the new chair of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, which helps the federal government decide how to allocate roughly $2 billion in autism research.

Gaitanis, who recently began a stint at the National Institutes of Health's child health institute, is best known for co-founding Meadow Biosciences. The telehealth startup is centered around helping autistic kids access leucovorin — a drug that President Trump touted during a news conference last year even though the clinical evidence that it helps improve speech is sparse.

Fogel will remain on the autism council. During her tenure as chair, she got into testy exchanges with other autism committee members, pushed for doubling autism research funding, and oversaw the creation of a new strategic plan that ditches genetic research for investigations into environmental causes, including vaccines. — O. Rose Broderick

the midterms

‘I have people, moms, showing up who hate vaccines, but they like me’

OHGV_0309-1600x900Ross Mantle for STAT

If you want a window on how health related issues are playing this election, look no further than Ohio. As Sarah Todd writes in her dispatch from the state, the gubernatorial race could be “the most direct test of where public opinion in the heartland currently stands on health care, trust in science, and the lasting legacy of the Covid pandemic.”

Sarah spent the day in Cleveland attending rallies for both Democrat Amy Acton, the physician who led Ohio’s aggressive response to Covid-19, and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, the billionaire founder and former CEO of biotech company Roivant. Read more from her on how voters are weighing the candidates, including a fascinating look at how Acton is trying to attract vaccine skeptics.

statistics

The sobering number in the CDC’s latest mortality report

This morning, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new demographic data on 2024’s leading causes of death. Most of the killers — heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injuries top the list — remained unchanged from 2023. But suicide moved into the top ten, accounting for 1.6% of all deaths in 2024. It was the seventh most common cause of death for men, and the second leading cause of death for Americans between 10 and 24.

Johns Hopkins professor Paul Nestadt, medical director of the Center for Suicide Prevention, offered some helpful context, writing in an email that suicide has crept up the cause of death list “more because Covid deaths shrank than any particular increase in suicide rates." What has been rising, he said, is the proportion of suicides by firearm. “Right along with that, we see increases in suicide specifically in the populations that are having the most new increases in firearm ownership: Black Americans,” he added. 

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. For TTY users: Use your preferred relay service or dial 711 then 988.

kids these days 

How will we know if social media bans aid teens? These teens have some thoughts

Teen social media bans are hot these days, with new regulations installed or soon to come in Australia, Indonesia, and the European Union. But how will we know these rules are working? And what does “working” even mean?

Researcher Camilla Iannone asked a group of young people for advice on how to answer those questions. Their feedback reframed the whole debate for her. “Rather than focusing solely on whether social media is harmful and whether we need a ban, they repeatedly asked us to look at what role social media currently plays in young people’s lives, and what might replace it if access is restricted,” she writes in a new First Opinion.

Read more on the questions teens had for researchers, and what kinds of data they’d like to see.

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