Research Library

This issue brief examines how produced water recycling in Texas oilfields threatens landowners’ ability to earn revenue from selling frac water and disposal services, a more lucrative revenue stream compared to raising cattle.

To what lengths should we go to preserve human life? Doctors from Italy and China plan to provide a Russian volunteer with a new body. But is this ethical? Should they proceed? Nonresident scholar Ana S. Iltis explores these issues in a post on the Baker Institute Blog.

The Advancing Care for Exceptional Kids Act proposes a national database that would serve as a centralized source of information on children with medically complex conditions. The aim is to improve treatment and care coordination. The authors of this brief argue, however, that the database could put children and their families at risk of discrimination by making their health information public, and therefore accessible to employers and health insurers.

The author analyzes the major claims and implications of the Surgeon General's report "Facing Addiction in America," and proposes additional drug policy considerations for addressing substance use disorders.

The "molecular autopsy," or the collection of blood and tissue for DNA analysis, is an increasingly pervasive tool in investigating sudden death in the young. The authors offer recommendations that address ethical and policy issues that arise when molecular autopsies are conducted as part of a death investigation by medical examiner or coroner offices.

This issue brief argues that continued investments in global health and the study of emerging pathogens could yield better tools to fight infectious diseases like the Zika virus long before they become a problem in the developed world.

In addition to their therapeutic potential, cord blood banks raise ethical and regulatory questions, especially in emerging markets in the Arab world. In this article, the authors review cord blood banking in five countries in the region (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates) that were selected for their different CB banking policies and initiatives.

The international Human Microbiome Project trumpeted the coming of age of the field of metagenomics, the study of entire communities of microbes and their contributions to health and disease. In parallel, the field of metabolomics emerged as the systematic, nonbiased analysis of all low-molecular-weight small molecules, or metabolites, produced by a system in response to an environmental stimulus. These fields have enabled discoveries pertinent to a number of human conditions — namely, acute gastroenteritis, antibiotic-associated diarrhea, inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, liver disease, undernutrition and obesity — and have begun to shed new light on multiple aspects of the neglected tropical diseases.