Archive for March, 2009
Not only is Congress handicapped in its ability to deal with the critical technological components of current policy issues, but it is also poorly suited to anticipate the significance or the implications of emerging technologies.
Injections of stem cells into the brain may not offer a great treatment for Alzheimer’s, but human embryonic stem cells may yet provide the information that scientists need to find a cure for this devastating disease.
Transparency, trust, and diverse community participation are critical to proper ethical use of biotechnologies. Full disclosure of the policymaking process and extensive public engagement are a must.
It is a commonplace that the physician’s role is a complicated one: applying inexact science to demanding patients, caring for people when they are at their most vulnerable while also worrying about reimbursement to sustain the effort, and balancing duties to patients and family. But success in modern science also requires a remarkable set of [...]
Yesterday, the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, released a statement authored by members of the President’s Council on Bioethics critiquing the Obama administration’s stem cell policy. [Clarification: The statement appeared on the Center's Bioethics Forum, but does not represent the position of the Hastings Center itself, nor does publication there represent an endorsement of [...]
Our guest blogger is Emma Diebold, intern with online communications at the Center for American Progress.
“Who is best equipped to protect the consumer from dangerous drugs and medical devices: regulatory agencies or the courts?” Mark Agrast, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, asked a panel of experts during his introductory remarks at the [...]
Having just moved his blog from one mainstream outlet to another, our Contributing Editor considers the many hats science bloggers now wear in an era of struggling science journalism.Ch
A federal court ruled Monday that an FDA decision to limit access to emergency contraception was based on politics and ignored scientific advice. The move highlights the importance of Obama administration directives to protect scientific integrity in the policymaking process.
To reduce the massive carbon footprint of buildings in this country, we must re-envision their entire lifecycle, understand exactly how we use them, and adjust accordingly.
The Associated Press reports that drug makers are quietly hopeful that recent appointments signal an agency-level bifurcation between food safety and drug safety responsibilities:
Drug industry advocates are quietly allying with some of their longtime critics pushing to split the Food and Drug Administration into two agencies, one for food safety and one for medical products.
President [...]
Science policymakers must balance inherent scientific uncertainty about the specific consequences of climate change with the broader need for action. And insurance companies now have to take note.
Despite being major engines for local economies and important sites for informal science education, section 1604 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 makes it explicitly illegal to appropriate even a dollar of bailout money to aquariums or zoos.
Good news came yesterday evening as the Senate confirmed John Holdren as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Jane Lubchenco as head of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Despite several previous holds on the nominations, the LA Times reports that the vote was unanimous. Lubchenco also spoke to the restoration [...]
Patients should have the autonomy to make their own medical decisions such as whether to have or not have a child. And physicians should have the freedom to refuse a request if they feel the patient would be compromising the quality of life of the resulting child.
Home-grown fuels have dropped out of mainstream discussion, but recent research continues to improve our understanding of the emissions calculus of trading biofuels for gasoline—along with the health and environmental impacts. And in the last few months, scientists have refined principles that can guide sustainable public policies.
Predictably, President Obama has run into some political pushback on last week’s Executive Order. The complaints have arisen primarily over two issues, neither of which is substantial and both of which deserve to be countered.
The titanic issues that surround the prospect of modifying the planet, currently off the radar for most Americans, could come up in a very big way in the relatively near future. We need leaders to start talking to the public before that happens.
Just a few weeks ago, some conservative policymakers and commentators were questioning the value of using stimulus funds to invest in scientific research. Fortunately, Congress and the Obama administration ignored their backwards logic and instead made a down payment on our scientific future of $21.5 billion. But in doing so, lawmakers were listening to [...]
Vaccine policy in the United States is riddled with inconsistencies that are prejudiced against those coming into the country and which undermine the system as a whole.
Although we are still celebrating President Obama’s executive order on stem cell research, it’s important to remember that the policy change was proceeded by new research involving the creation of virus-free induced pluripotent cells. The discovery came courtesy of Rudolf Jaenisch’s team at the Whitehead institute.
Publishing their research in the journal Cell, the group described [...]
The peanut product recalls continue, revealing more cracks up and down the food safety system. And people keep getting sick.
Public knowledge and understanding of science as an engine of progress will reveal solutions to today’s most pressing problems, including climate change, energy independence, and national security.
Stem cell policy just caught up with research, and SP contributor and CAP Research Assistant Michael Rugnetta outlines how to move forward with dicussions on how to to conduct ethical research involving human embryonic stem cells at the Huffington Post. From his op-ed:
What the Department of Health and Human Services should do is take the extra step [...]
President Obama puts John Holdren in charge of a government-wide scientific integrity project—if he can ever assume his post at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, that is.
Researchers recently reported reconstruction of the Neanderthal genome, which raises the possibility of reconstructing the species. The problem here concerns what we do to sentient creatures, not what we do to nature.
CAP Senior Fellow and SP Editor-in-Chief Jonathan D. Moreno explains the significance of President Obama rescinding the limits on human embryonic stem cell research put in place by George W. Bush, after the jump:
Since the isolation of human embryonic stem cells, or hESCs, in 1998 (see the timeline: A Brief History of Stem Cell Research), scientists around the country have made significant strides laying the groundwork for clinical treatments. In January, the FDA approved the first clinical trial for a potential therapy, a treatment for spinal cord injuries. [...]
With the stroke of a pen, President Barack Obama today erased the Bush administration’s eight-year-old restrictions on federal funding of research involving human embryonic stem cells, reaffirming his commitment to evidence and biomedical hope over his predecessor’s ideological distortion of science.
When President Obama signs an executive order reversing Bush’s policy on Monday, it will help the United States retain and reclaim worldwide leadership in the fast-moving and promising field of regenerative medicine.
Jake Tapper, Brian Hartman and Lisa Stark report:
ABC News has learned that on Monday morning President Obama will hold an event at the White House in which he signs an executive order overturning the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
Various groups have been clamoring for this announcement since innauguration day, when the [...]
The Obama administration’s proposed FY2010 budget reflects a sweeping re-thinking of priorities for the U.S. government. A welcome change from previous budgets, the administration makes a significant investment in developing regional centers of innovation, business incubators, and other strategies to encourage entrepreneurship and high-tech development.
The importance that the Obama administration places on strong government support [...]
The NIH has about $10 billion from the Recovery and Reinvestment Act to pour into job-creating grants and research infrastructure. The Scientist reports that the new Challenge Grants program will direct $200 million of that money towards areas of high-priority research. One opportunity here, as Abel Pharmboy points out at Terra Sigillata, is for those [...]
The open source development community is ready to help Washington open up. But first they need the data in an open, structured form.
In the Dining & Wine section yesterday, a story on the fractures in the food safety system that led to contaminated peanut products in organic brands. Kim Severson and Andrew Martin note:
Organics has grown from an $11 billion business in the United States in 2001 to one that now generates more than $20 billion in [...]
Governor Jindal’s assault on volcano-monitoring research is just the most recent swipe at federal funding for an important area of study.
As Nancy Scola explains, it has taken many people by surprise to learn that several of the foodstuffs involved in the peanut product recall are in fact organic brands. “Organic” means safe, right? Well, her investigation reveals, it’s not as simple as that.
Over the course of the current Salmonella Typhimurium outbreak, the Centers for Disease [...]
The salmonella-contaminated peanut outbreak is raising alarm over the U.S.’s fractured food system—a system “organics” and conventional mass-market foods often travel through side-by-side.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has announced that it will investigate CIA detention and interrogation practices during the Bush administration. Though some observers will surely find fault with officials’ behavior, the goal is to find the facts rather than place blame. An obvious and already much-debated question is the extent of practices like waterboarding and how [...]
Juliet Eilperin reports that Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) has placed a hold on votes to approve John Holdren’s appointment as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Jane Lubchenco’s appointment as leader of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Despite speculation that the secret hold was on account of disagreements over matters of science policy, [...]
The government transparency movement is waiting for a deluge of public data from Congress and the Obama administration. Developers are ready with open-source software and protocols for structuring data on everything from lobbying disclosures to pending legislation to stimulus allocations. And once the data is free and flowing through RSS feeds, Application Programming Interfaces, and [...]
The National Institutes of Health announced in late February that it will soon begin a clinical trial that will prescribe the anticoagulant drug warfarin based on genetic data collected by an international consortium that the NIH spearheaded. The decision and certainly the outcome could have enormous implications for personalized medicine, a new medical field where [...]
Rick Weiss reports today on the Equal Opportunity Commission’s proposed rule making for the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act. When the rule is final, it has the forward-looking potential to prevent workplace discrimination based on personal genetic data.
Documented instances of employer discrimination based on DNA are at the moment rare (details on two cases below), but [...]
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission just proposed rules to implement the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. But that still leaves several agencies to sort out how to protect consumers from insurance discrimination.
Canadian researchers announced Sunday that they have developed a new way to transform human skin cells into cells that are apparently equivalent to embryonic stem cells. The work points to a day when scientists may be able to make personalized, therapeutic human embryonic stem cells for patients without having to destroy embryos in the process [...]
