World View in 2020

Nearly a year after the first cases of COVID-19 were reported, it is time to look back and assess what could have been predicted by health experts.

The relentless violence against Black people takes an overwhelming emotional toll on Black trainees. In those we continue to lose, we see our families, our friends and our own lives being taken.

Melanoma Patient Network Europe has a lot of experience in connecting researchers with patients, including organizing patient-led conferences. The group’s founder explains how productive interaction can be transformative to research.

Patients’ contributions to biomedical research have quickly been shifting from passive participant to active contributor. But what happens when the person with lived experience of the disease becomes the clinical researcher?

Being a parent scientist can feel like a catch-22, feeling guilty for both the time spent away from the children and the time spent away from the bench. Embracing healthy boundaries can be liberating but will only go so far if childcare remains unaffordable.

A patient partner provides perspectives on the development of the SPIRIT-AI and CONSORT-AI guidelines.

Every crisis is a strong call to mobilize the entire research community to respond. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Researchers, universities, funders, philanthropies, journals, and journalists have all pivoted, en masse, to COVID-19. Everyone is ‘Covidized’, and it should worry us.

Patents and other intellectual properties could slow down the scale-up and accessibility of treatments and vaccines against COVID-19.

Healthcare workers are having to work under incredibly stressful conditions. Videoconferencing can be harnessed to provide mental-health support, but some report ‘tele-health’ fatigue. To protect public health, prepare for the mental-health surge among healthcare workers.

Reuse of patient data for research purposes could be very fruitful. However, too seldom are those whom the data are from—the patients—involved in how their data should be used.

There is a pervasive problem in academia of principal investigators who abuse their powers and mistreat their trainees. Here I share suggestions that would help protect the trainees and ultimately reduce the number of toxic supervisors.

The opioid epidemic in the USA has brought many to examine their antiquated understanding of addiction, which has led to the professionalization of addiction medicine. How can translational researchers learn from these cross-cutting specialists to open new avenues for discovery?

A compounding factor of the outbreak is the potential for the general public to misunderstand the facts and design conspiracy theories.

Thinking the e-mail was a system error, she almost didn’t learn that her genetic test result had been revised. With the advent of commercial genomic screening, who is ethically responsible for communicating variant reclassification?

As medical students, we have a responsibility to our future patients, but our training is not preparing us for healthcare provision in the era of climate change, say Areeb Mian and Shujhat Khan.