Mildred Z Solomon
Biographic Data
| ID | 7524190 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mildred Z Solomon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mildred Z |
| FAMILY NAME | Solomon |
| SIGNATURE | SOLOMON M Z |
| AFFILIATIONS | Education Development Center |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2144-2946 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Public Engagement as a Form of Moral Leadership
Government leaders and social influencers are using "informed consent," "choice," and other bioethical terms related to autonomy to justify dramatically weakening U.S. vaccination policy. In response, we call on bioethicists to help the public understand that the mere availability of choice does not ensure that a moral choice is made. Bioethicists have the skills, and, we hope, the willingness, to help the public understand that there are equally…
Choice in the Context of Dementia
This introduction to the special report “Facing Dementia: Clarifying End‐of‐Life Choices, Supporting Better Lives” explains why focused attention to dementia is needed in bioethics and in health care practice in a range of settings. It explains how this strongly age‐associated condition shapes individual lives over years, revealing inequities in how dementia care is financed. The introduction explains the structure of the report, which consists o…
Recalibrating Bioethics for the Reality of Interdependence
Bioethics in the twenty‐first century is confronting what one might call “collective‐impact problems.” The ethics guidance and policies that are developed to address these kinds of problems will affect not only individuals but everyone living and future generations too. With many collective‐impact problems, all parties will eventually be worse off if there is a failure to develop solutions to head off damage to the shared environment. However, th…
Trust in Health Care and Science
This essay summarizes key insights across the essays in the Hastings Center Report's special report “Time to Rebuild: Essays on Trust in Health Care and Science.” These insights concern trust and trustworthiness as distinct concepts, competence as a necessary but not sufficient input to trust, trust as a reciprocal good, trust as an interpersonal as well as structural phenomena, the ethical impermissibility of seeking to win trust without being t…
Looking Closely at Health Inequities
In January 2022, The Hastings Center convened a two‐day virtual summit called “Righting the Wrongs: Tackling Health Inequities.” On day one, speakers including Isabel Wilkerson and Richard Rothstein discussed how the social and economic determinants of health came to be so unequal in the first place. Day two focused on solutions, with panels offering examples of what can be done to improve health policy, clinical care, research, and professional …
Recommendations for Better Civic Learning
This is the concluding essay for a special report from The Hastings Center entitled Democracy in Crisis: Civic Learning and the Reconstruction of Common Purpose , which grew out of a project supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. This essay provides an integrative discussion of various theoretical and practical reform perspectives offered by other essays in the report. It also offers a number of recommendations. It notes that th…
The Center's Highest Award
Prompted by a 2019 essay by Jonathan Moreno in the Hastings Center Report, the Center's board of directors undertook a careful examination of the name of its preeiminent award, the Henry Knowles Beecher Award, which has been given to twenty‐nine individuals who have made lifetime contributions to bioethics. citing new research that revealed that Beecher's earlier experimentation on drugs had involved nonconsenting adults, Moreno urged the Center …
Civic Learning for a Democracy in Crisis
This essay introduces a special report from The Hastings Center entitled Democracy in Crisis: Civic Learning and the Reconstruction of Common Purpose , which grew out of a project supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. This multiauthored report offers wide‐ranging assessments of increasing polarization and partisanship in American government and politics, and it proposes constructive responses to this in the provision of objecti…
Can Our Schools Help Us Preserve Democracy? Special Challenges at a Time of Shifting Norms
Civic education that prepares students for principled civic participation is vital to democracy. Schools face significant challenges, however, as they attempt to educate for democracy in a democracy in crisis. Parents, educators, and policy‐makers disagree about what America's civic future should look like, and hence about what schools should teach. Likewise, hyperpartisanship, mutual mistrust, and the breakdown of democratic norms are perverting…
Scarcity in the Covid‐19 Pandemic
As we write, U.S. cities and states with extensive community transmission of Covid‐19 are in harm's way—not only because of the disease itself but also because of prior and current failures to act. During the 2009 influenza pandemic, public health agencies and hospitals developed but never adequately implemented preparedness plans. Focused on efficiency in a competitive market, health systems had few incentives to maintain stockpiles of essential…
Annual Award for an Essay by an Early‐Career Scholar
As part of the celebrations of The Hastings Center’s fiftieth anniversary, we are launching an annual prize, The David Roscoe Award for an Early‐Career Scholar’s Essay on Science, Ethics, and Society. The award is named in honor of David Roscoe, an accomplished essayist and recent past chair of the Hastings board. The award is intended to highlight the good scholarship that will take the field of bioethics forward into the next fifty years. It wi…
A Last Gift
Here at the Center, we had the privilege of seeing how Dan Callahan lived out his last days and weeks. True to his nature, Dan never stopped thinking or writing. Indeed, his wife Sidney told me that he finished his last essay one day before his death, on July 16th, insisting that she help him get to the computer so he could discuss it with a colleague. “It's my last one,” he told her with his characteristic self‐awareness. Dan also chose the last…
Crossing Boundaries
I met Dan Callahan in 1986—when I came to pitch him. Coming from a sleek office setting near Boston, I was intrigued by The Hastings Center's higgledy‐piggledy environment where so many smart people got to work in a relaxed, inviting atmosphere. I had noticed that the Center was producing a great deal of policy work on a wide range of topics but didn't seem to go further than publishing the highly valuable guidance developed under Dan Callahan's …
Brain Death at Fifty
This special report is published in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the “Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death,” a landmark document that proposed a new way to define death, with implications that advanced the field of organ transplantation. This remarkable success notwithstanding, the concept has raised lasting questions about what it means to be dead. Is death defined …
Becoming Good Citizens of Aging Societies
The ethical dimensions of an aging society are larger than the experience of chronic illness, the moral concerns of health care professionals, or the allocation of health care resources. What, then, is the role of bioethics in an aging society, beyond calling attention to these problems? Once we’ve agreed that aging is morally important and that population‐level aging across wealthy nations raises ethical concerns that cannot be fixed through tra…
On Patient Well‐being and Professional Authority
Two papers in this issue address the limits of surrogates’ authority when making life‐and‐death decisions for dying family members or friends. Using palliative sedation as an example, Jeffrey Berger offers a conceptual argument for bounding surrogate authority. Since freedom from pain is an essential interest, when imminently dying, cognitively incapacitated patients are in duress and their symptoms are not manageable in any other way, clinicians…
Bioethics and Populism
Across the world, an authoritarian and exclusionary form of populism is gaining political traction. Historically, some populist movements have been democratic and based on a sense of inclusive justice and the common good. But the populism on the rise at present speaks and acts otherwise. It is challenging constitutional democracies. The polarization seen in authoritarian populism goes beyond the familiar left‐right political spectrum and generate…
What Is Bioethics Worth
What is bioethics to do when it strives to assess the quality of its research and scholarship and when it needs to justify its work to prospective funders, especially a funder like the National Institutes of Health that privileges empirical discovery? In “A Conceptual Model for the Translation of Bioethics Research and Scholarship,” Debra Mathews and colleagues take an important first step at advancing an answer. The authors describe what they ca…
The Pedagogical Challenges of Teaching High School Bioethics
A belief that high school students have the cognitive ability to analyze and assess moral choices and should be encouraged to do so but have rarely been helped to do so was the motivation for developing Exploring Bioethics, a six‐module curriculum and teacher guide for grades nine through twelve on ethical issues in the life sciences. A multidisciplinary team of bioethicists, science educators, curriculum designers, scientists, and high school bi…
Looking up
Together this August, Hastings Center fellows and staff scholars left their respective studies to look up. Over a three‐day period, we engaged with one another, renewing ties with beloved old friends and welcoming new ones. We asked what each other was passionate about. We asked how our field could be better. We shared works‐in‐progress and imagined how we might work together across institutions, across miles to accomplish things we couldn't do a…
Teaching Bioethics
From accessible and affordable health care to old or new reproductive technologies, human or animal research, and beyond, the justice and well‐being of our society depends on the ability of key groups—such as scientists and health care providers—along with members of the public to identify the key issues, articulate their values and concerns, deliberate openly and respectfully, and together find the most defensible ways forward . The Presidential…
The Examined Life. A Tribute to Edmund Pellegrino
Edmund Pellegrino was a huge figure who leaves a huge legacy. Since his death on June 13, 2013, much has been written to honor his prodigious accomplishments in scholarship, public policy, and institution-building and to express gratitude for his kindness, humility, and sense of humor. I want to honor his commitment to living a life in which ideas mattered. For him, ideas were not just the stuff by which to build an academic career or rocks to hu…
Ethical Oversight of Research on Patient Care
The Institute of Medicine has called on health care leaders to transform their health systems into “learning health care systems,” capable of studying and continuously improving their practices. Learning health care systems commit to carrying out numerous kinds of investigations, ranging from clinical effectiveness studies to quality improvement research and implementation science. There has been progress in realizing the IOM's vision, but also m…
Seeking the unseen
When Dan Callahan and Will Gaylin began The Hastings Center, they saw and sought to study the unseen. They were among the very first to recognize that remarkable advances in biomedical technology were generating questions our society had never before faced. As I take the helm of The Hastings Center forty‐plus years later, it's now my job to be sure we see, name, grapple with, and act on today's questions. Over the next two years, the Center will …
Realizing Bioethics' Goals in Practice
A familiar criticism of bioethics charges it with being more conceptual than practical—having little application to the "real world." In order to answer its critics and keep its feet on the ground, bioethics must utilize the social sciences more effectively. Empirical research can provide the bridge between conceiving a moral vision of a better world, and actually enacting it
Preventing Aids and other STDs through condom promotion
We report on two studies that assessed the impact of a soap-opera style videotape on inner-city STD (sexually transmitted disease) patients' knowledge about and attitudes toward condom use, and willingness to redeem coupons for free condoms. Subjects in the first study who viewed the videotape (and participated in a brief oral recall session) had higher knowledge scores and more accepting attitudes than subjects who did not (knowledge test means …
Decisions near the end of life
OBJECTIVES. How do health care professionals assess the care of hospital patients near the end of life? Are physicians and nurses aware of and in agreement with national recommendations regarding patients' rights to forgo life-sustaining medical treatments and to receive adequate pain control? METHODS. We surveyed 687 physicians and 759 nurses in 5 hospitals. RESULTS. Almost half (47%) of all respondents and fully 70% of the house officers report…
Preventing Aids and other STDs through condom promotion
We report on two studies that assessed the impact of a soap-opera style videotape on inner-city STD (sexually transmitted disease) patients' knowledge about and attitudes toward condom use, and willingness to redeem coupons for free condoms. Subjects in the first study who viewed the videotape (and participated in a brief oral recall session) had higher knowledge scores and more accepting attitudes than subjects who did not (knowledge test means …
Decisions near the end of life
OBJECTIVES. How do health care professionals assess the care of hospital patients near the end of life? Are physicians and nurses aware of and in agreement with national recommendations regarding patients' rights to forgo life-sustaining medical treatments and to receive adequate pain control? METHODS. We surveyed 687 physicians and 759 nurses in 5 hospitals. RESULTS. Almost half (47%) of all respondents and fully 70% of the house officers report…
The Enormity of the Task
Moving beyond a focus on knowledge and attitudes to redesign of the\nday-to-day practice environment represents a shift in the usual way in which\nwe think about engineering change
The Ethics and Efficacy of Behavior Change Research
ot surprisingly, given the American focus on individualism, the dominant health promotion paradigm in the United States has been a model, in which behavior change experts design interventions aimed at encouraging individuals to change personal behaviors that put them at increased risk of disability or disease. Recently, this emphasis on personal lifestyle choices has come under scrutiny. Some critics point out that attempts at risk reduction have…
Realizing Bioethics' Goals in Practice
A familiar criticism of bioethics charges it with being more conceptual than practical—having little application to the "real world." In order to answer its critics and keep its feet on the ground, bioethics must utilize the social sciences more effectively. Empirical research can provide the bridge between conceiving a moral vision of a better world, and actually enacting it
Seeking the unseen
When Dan Callahan and Will Gaylin began The Hastings Center, they saw and sought to study the unseen. They were among the very first to recognize that remarkable advances in biomedical technology were generating questions our society had never before faced. As I take the helm of The Hastings Center forty‐plus years later, it's now my job to be sure we see, name, grapple with, and act on today's questions. Over the next two years, the Center will …
The Examined Life. A Tribute to Edmund Pellegrino
Edmund Pellegrino was a huge figure who leaves a huge legacy. Since his death on June 13, 2013, much has been written to honor his prodigious accomplishments in scholarship, public policy, and institution-building and to express gratitude for his kindness, humility, and sense of humor. I want to honor his commitment to living a life in which ideas mattered. For him, ideas were not just the stuff by which to build an academic career or rocks to hu…
Ethical Oversight of Research on Patient Care
The Institute of Medicine has called on health care leaders to transform their health systems into “learning health care systems,” capable of studying and continuously improving their practices. Learning health care systems commit to carrying out numerous kinds of investigations, ranging from clinical effectiveness studies to quality improvement research and implementation science. There has been progress in realizing the IOM's vision, but also m…
Teaching Bioethics
From accessible and affordable health care to old or new reproductive technologies, human or animal research, and beyond, the justice and well‐being of our society depends on the ability of key groups—such as scientists and health care providers—along with members of the public to identify the key issues, articulate their values and concerns, deliberate openly and respectfully, and together find the most defensible ways forward . The Presidential…
Looking up
Together this August, Hastings Center fellows and staff scholars left their respective studies to look up. Over a three‐day period, we engaged with one another, renewing ties with beloved old friends and welcoming new ones. We asked what each other was passionate about. We asked how our field could be better. We shared works‐in‐progress and imagined how we might work together across institutions, across miles to accomplish things we couldn't do a…
What Is Bioethics Worth
What is bioethics to do when it strives to assess the quality of its research and scholarship and when it needs to justify its work to prospective funders, especially a funder like the National Institutes of Health that privileges empirical discovery? In “A Conceptual Model for the Translation of Bioethics Research and Scholarship,” Debra Mathews and colleagues take an important first step at advancing an answer. The authors describe what they ca…
The Pedagogical Challenges of Teaching High School Bioethics
A belief that high school students have the cognitive ability to analyze and assess moral choices and should be encouraged to do so but have rarely been helped to do so was the motivation for developing Exploring Bioethics, a six‐module curriculum and teacher guide for grades nine through twelve on ethical issues in the life sciences. A multidisciplinary team of bioethicists, science educators, curriculum designers, scientists, and high school bi…
On Patient Well‐being and Professional Authority
Two papers in this issue address the limits of surrogates’ authority when making life‐and‐death decisions for dying family members or friends. Using palliative sedation as an example, Jeffrey Berger offers a conceptual argument for bounding surrogate authority. Since freedom from pain is an essential interest, when imminently dying, cognitively incapacitated patients are in duress and their symptoms are not manageable in any other way, clinicians…
Bioethics and Populism
Across the world, an authoritarian and exclusionary form of populism is gaining political traction. Historically, some populist movements have been democratic and based on a sense of inclusive justice and the common good. But the populism on the rise at present speaks and acts otherwise. It is challenging constitutional democracies. The polarization seen in authoritarian populism goes beyond the familiar left‐right political spectrum and generate…
Brain Death at Fifty
This special report is published in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the “Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death,” a landmark document that proposed a new way to define death, with implications that advanced the field of organ transplantation. This remarkable success notwithstanding, the concept has raised lasting questions about what it means to be dead. Is death defined …
Becoming Good Citizens of Aging Societies
The ethical dimensions of an aging society are larger than the experience of chronic illness, the moral concerns of health care professionals, or the allocation of health care resources. What, then, is the role of bioethics in an aging society, beyond calling attention to these problems? Once we’ve agreed that aging is morally important and that population‐level aging across wealthy nations raises ethical concerns that cannot be fixed through tra…
Annual Award for an Essay by an Early‐Career Scholar
As part of the celebrations of The Hastings Center’s fiftieth anniversary, we are launching an annual prize, The David Roscoe Award for an Early‐Career Scholar’s Essay on Science, Ethics, and Society. The award is named in honor of David Roscoe, an accomplished essayist and recent past chair of the Hastings board. The award is intended to highlight the good scholarship that will take the field of bioethics forward into the next fifty years. It wi…
A Last Gift
Here at the Center, we had the privilege of seeing how Dan Callahan lived out his last days and weeks. True to his nature, Dan never stopped thinking or writing. Indeed, his wife Sidney told me that he finished his last essay one day before his death, on July 16th, insisting that she help him get to the computer so he could discuss it with a colleague. “It's my last one,” he told her with his characteristic self‐awareness. Dan also chose the last…
Crossing Boundaries
I met Dan Callahan in 1986—when I came to pitch him. Coming from a sleek office setting near Boston, I was intrigued by The Hastings Center's higgledy‐piggledy environment where so many smart people got to work in a relaxed, inviting atmosphere. I had noticed that the Center was producing a great deal of policy work on a wide range of topics but didn't seem to go further than publishing the highly valuable guidance developed under Dan Callahan's …
Scarcity in the Covid‐19 Pandemic
As we write, U.S. cities and states with extensive community transmission of Covid‐19 are in harm's way—not only because of the disease itself but also because of prior and current failures to act. During the 2009 influenza pandemic, public health agencies and hospitals developed but never adequately implemented preparedness plans. Focused on efficiency in a competitive market, health systems had few incentives to maintain stockpiles of essential…
Recommendations for Better Civic Learning
This is the concluding essay for a special report from The Hastings Center entitled Democracy in Crisis: Civic Learning and the Reconstruction of Common Purpose , which grew out of a project supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. This essay provides an integrative discussion of various theoretical and practical reform perspectives offered by other essays in the report. It also offers a number of recommendations. It notes that th…
The Center's Highest Award
Prompted by a 2019 essay by Jonathan Moreno in the Hastings Center Report, the Center's board of directors undertook a careful examination of the name of its preeiminent award, the Henry Knowles Beecher Award, which has been given to twenty‐nine individuals who have made lifetime contributions to bioethics. citing new research that revealed that Beecher's earlier experimentation on drugs had involved nonconsenting adults, Moreno urged the Center …
Civic Learning for a Democracy in Crisis
This essay introduces a special report from The Hastings Center entitled Democracy in Crisis: Civic Learning and the Reconstruction of Common Purpose , which grew out of a project supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. This multiauthored report offers wide‐ranging assessments of increasing polarization and partisanship in American government and politics, and it proposes constructive responses to this in the provision of objecti…
Can Our Schools Help Us Preserve Democracy? Special Challenges at a Time of Shifting Norms
Civic education that prepares students for principled civic participation is vital to democracy. Schools face significant challenges, however, as they attempt to educate for democracy in a democracy in crisis. Parents, educators, and policy‐makers disagree about what America's civic future should look like, and hence about what schools should teach. Likewise, hyperpartisanship, mutual mistrust, and the breakdown of democratic norms are perverting…
Looking Closely at Health Inequities
In January 2022, The Hastings Center convened a two‐day virtual summit called “Righting the Wrongs: Tackling Health Inequities.” On day one, speakers including Isabel Wilkerson and Richard Rothstein discussed how the social and economic determinants of health came to be so unequal in the first place. Day two focused on solutions, with panels offering examples of what can be done to improve health policy, clinical care, research, and professional …
Political science (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Ethics in medical practice (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Bioethics (11 works) · Public relations (9 works) · Medicine (8 works) · Center (category theory) (7 works) · Health care (7 works)