Archive for November, 2007
The United Nations University Institute for Advanced Studies recently published a report on human cloning offering the international community two choices: either prepare for the legal and ethical issues associated with living, cloned humans, or prohibit human reproductive cloning.
The Bush administration wants to push clean-technology exports without taking meaningful measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at home. That’s the wrong message to send on the eve of a major global summit on climate change next week in Indonesia.
Maine voters recently voted to support targeted investment in the state’s technology sector through the Maine Technology Initiative. Technology investments have yielded significant gains for the state economy since the 19th century.
In his most recent book,
The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker argues that language is one of many mental organs that shape our participation in a just and free society.
Nanotechnology offers great promise, but an incomplete understanding of the potential dangers and the lack of a unified regulatory framework threaten the potential of research. And despite the concerns of scientists, the public is not engaged with nanotech policy.
Humans should be extremely cautious about meddling any further with the Earth’s atmosphere. But we should study the possibility nevertheless, in case someone else tries it—or in case we don’t have a choice.
The Center for American Progress today releases the first pieces of
Progressive Growth, its Economic Plan for the Next Administration, which includes a chapter on expanding growth and opportunity through science and technology.
The Center for American Progress today releases the first pieces of
Progressive Growth, its Economic Plan for the Next Administration, which includes a chapter on new energy solutions.
John Kanzius, a retired electrical engineer and TV and radio station owner, is developing one of the most promising new techniques to kill cancer cells.
The announcement that researchers can reprogram skin cells to behave like embryonic stem cells is a triumph, but the discovery has implications beyond the creation of pluripotent cells.
Entrepreneurial, venture capital-backed innovation industries require a deft public policy hand to find the financing they need to help boost economic prosperity.
Researchers working independently in Japan and the U.S. published papers this week announcing the creation of non-embryonic pluripotent stem cells. The method side-steps the ethical concerns over the destruction of embryos and could open the doors for federal funding of research on stem cells and the medical breakthroughs they promise.
Providing medical care over tens of millions of miles is fraught with complications central to the success of any manned mission to Mars.
A recent
New York Times Op-Ed on brain response to political keywords has drawn criticism from the neuroscience community for its incomplete findings and its false air of scientific certainty.
A new proposal to grant embryos legal rights could disrupt more than just access to abortion: it threatens women’s rights and demonizes medical technology.
DeCode Genetics, an Icelandic company, announced personal genome sequencing, available immediately for $985. But there’s quite a bit of fine print to consider as other companies join this infant industry.
In the Minor Cosmic Irony department, the same day that
The New York Times reported the monkey cloning story on the front page, back in obituaries the paper reported the passing of Ira Levin, the novelist whose
The Boys From Brazil became a fairly successful film.
Two dozen representatives from around the country met in Cambridge, MA last month to discuss interstate collaboration in stem cell research, highlighting the need for a systematic negotiation between states to allow collaboration and to unify the patchwork of currently existing regulations.
President Bush vetoed the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, which would have increased funding for the National Institutes of Health from $29 billion to $30 billion and required open access to published NIH-funded research.
How U.S. media coverage of global warming finally moved past “he said, she said, we’re clueless.”
The drug maker agreed to pay $4.85 billion to settle lawsuits from individuals who say its painkiller Vioxx led to heart attacks and strokes. Predictions put the settlement costs at $25 billion when Vioxx was taken off the market in September 2004.
A team at the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton, Oregon has succeeded in cloning twenty macaque monkey embryos. The techniques they used to achieve this monumental breakthrough in cloning work should also work for making human embryos. Could this breakthrough pave the way to a new source for embryonic stem cells?
The onrush of new genetic information that appears to reflect differences in various characteristics that are statistically associated with continents of origin means that we have special reason to be alert to that data’s misuse.
Journalists who cover scientific and medical “breakthroughs” need to do a better job explaining the complexities of medical research and scientific inquiry.
Family responsibilities are forcing many women to leave the upper ranks of life science research, according to a new survey of fellows at the National Institutes of Health.
Researchers who can move around dense regional clusters of colleagues have more opportunities to share new ideas about their work. A new study focuses on Boston as a prime example.
The J. Craig Venter Institute, along with researchers at MIT and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, recently released a report entitled “Synthetic Genomics | Options for Governance.” But are there larger unanswered questions about the societal impacts of creating synthetic life?
Among the finalists for the Best Science Blog category in 2007 Weblog Awards is ClimateAudit.org, a site devoted to denying and downplaying the scientific data on global climate change.
Fear of science is still alive and well. This past Tuesday at the Heritage Foundation, John West of the pro-Intelligent Design Discovery Institute gave a lecture entitled, “The Abolition of Man? How Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science.”
“It is much easier to say we need more scientists and engineers than to talk about equity issues,” explained David Goldston yesterday at an Urban Institute on science and engineering education, quality, and workforce demand.
With water conservation and reuse entering public debate on the heels of drought season, the House Science and Technology Subcommittee on Energy and Environment spoke with experts about gray water, conservation, and how to dispel the fear of “toilet to tap.”
Some bioethics and health policy wonks argue that state-based stem cell research initiatives stimulated by the Bush administration’s limits on federal funding show the virtues of federalism. But NJ voters rejected a $450 million bond issue for stem cell research, in spite of Gov. Jon Corzine’s support.
Sperm banking is largely unregulated, raising controversial genetic, medical, and ethical questions. Yet the remedies are equally contentious.
The America COMPETES Act is open-ended legislation, paving the way for future innovation to flourish. In contrast, life sciences and information technology firms are lobbying to shape pending patent reform that will benefit their particular industry. Where are the groups thinking about innovation in the public interest?
October 4 marked the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, and as we leave that milestone behind, 21st-century America needs to prepare for the century of science and engineering. One pathway is adoption of a new National Defense Education Act.
A new report from the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research is the largest study ever to explore the connection between lifestyle and cancer, and represents the work of nine independent research teams that evaluated over 7000 existing studies over five years.
While President Bush’s “Vision for Space Exploration” will send the U.S. back to the Moon and on to Mars, NASA has many competing responsibilities, and the next administration may have its own vision.
Two companies are about to become the first Embryonic Stem Cell biotech firms to draft FDA applications for human testing. For some time, ESC-research opponents have complained that human trials have involved therapies utilizing adult stem cells, but none have utilized embryonic stem cells.
Talking about about climate change solely in terms of impending catastrophe may still be reasonable from a factual standpoint, but it may not be the most effective frame for debates on climate and energy policy. Here are four other frames in current discussions.
Nanotechnology is fertile new field with a host of unexplored risks, so how should the government go about cultivating it? This was the major question at yesterday’s hearing on the National Nanotechnology Initiative.
