Archive for June, 2009
The National Cancer Institute funds a lot of important research aimed at treating cancer, but some experts would characterize very little of it as transformative work. Gina Kolata’s article in the Sunday New York Times describes a system geared towards incrementalism rather than high-risk, high-return science.
But a dearth of transformative work isn’t the only thing [...]
Policy must protect not just genetic information itself, but also access to care that is critical for prevention, early detection, and treatment—and to the support systems that help individuals care for themselves and their families when serious illness strikes.
According to the recent report from the United States Global Change Research Program, rising greenhouse gas emissions will damage human health and welfare in regions across the country. Among the many changes climate change will bring are more frequent heat waves, greater risks for the spread of disease, and damage to the marine life and [...]
The Food and Drug Administration Transparency Task Force held the first of its two public meetings for public recommendations on how to increase transparency in decision making yesterday. At the meeting, Kristi Zonno, Director of Genetics and Health Policy at the advocacy group Genetic Alliance called for FDA to create a public registry of “genetic, [...]
The Waxman-Markey bill’s progress to a first historic vote hasn’t been pretty—but it has been progress.
Federal funding for biomedical research saves lives. Not only that, but investment in research through the National Institutes of Health stimulates the economy by helping people stay healthy and productive. So says a new report published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access).
Lead author Kenneth Manton at Duke University and [...]
Will access to our own genetic information make us healthier? That’s the idea, but there’s a lot to learn as we share and interpret it. Meanwhile, questions remain about proper oversight of an industry that blurs the line between consumer and research participant.
Maybe you remember this cartoon. It won the Union of Concerned Scientists 2007 Science Idol competition for editorial cartoons about scientific integrity. At the time, the Bush administration was actively diluting, distorting, downplaying, or denying scientific research on global climate change and its impacts on human health and welfare. But in an essay published last [...]
Better management and conservation efforts are needed to stave off a worsening water crisis.
The latest report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program is a comprehensive overview of climate change science, but it is also a clear warning about how global warming will make life harder for millions of Americans. The agricultural sector and water resources are two of the interlocking sectors singled out by the report, and [...]
Last week, the White House sent letters to the members of the President’s Council on Bioethics informing them that their services were no longer needed. According to a report today from Nicholas Wade in The New York Times, a spokesperson said that the mandate of a new council would be to offer “practical policy options,” [...]
Abel Real attributes his transformation from likely high school dropout to nursing student at East Carolina University to classroom technology. Real, a self-proclaimed success story from poverty-stricken Greenville, North Carolina, shared his experience with a school laptop program that introduced him to the power of technology before the House Committee on Education Labor yesterday [...]
The latest report from the Global Change Research Program tells us a lot about climate science, but it also tells us a lot about a government that is finally managing science for the benefit of its citizens.
Climate change knits energy and water policy together—a fact western states discover as reservoirs drop and rivers dwindle. The newly confirmed head of the Bureau, Michael Connor, steps into a job that no longer focuses on building dams, but now centers on river restoration and climate change adaptation.
Is pathbreaking science the product of interdisciplinary groups or the interdisciplinary thinking of foresighted individuals? In a commentary in PLoS Computational Biology, Sean Eddy, a Howard Hughes investigator, argues that “roadmap” thinking from the National Institutes of Health for building teams of specialists to tackle complex problems in modern research is flawed, because it encourages [...]
Advances in genomics may yield profound medical, scientific, and social advances. But if we are not careful, commercial and forensic applications may resuscitate harmful ideas about race.
A flood of grant applications for Recovery Act funds, a heap of comments on the proposed stem cell policy, and feedback on how to manage conflicts of interest among researchers—here’s a look at some of the key numbers related to the big policy stories at the National Institutes of Health:
20,894: The total number of Challenge [...]
Getting a piece of the biotechnology industry to boost a state economy is a great idea, but it’s complicated. Successfully incubating a regional biotech cluster requires more than building million-dollar laboratories and hoping top researchers appear, Shaila Dewin reports in the New York Times.
Despite the challenges, 27 states paid up to $100,000 for a spot [...]
We need not be shy about expressing our ethical predilections in the realm of caring for animals but we should be cautious in presuming that those predilections are supported by science.
Salmonella outbreaks from peanuts and tomatoes are scary enough, but consider the repercussions of contaminated medications people take several times a day. The Food and Drug Administration reported that 95 Americans died from ingesting tainted blood-thinning medication last year. The FDA believed the drug, heparin, was “intentionally contaminated” in China—a main source of counterfeit medicines.
The [...]
GQ’s new “Rock Stars of Science” campaign should give not just disease sufferers, but America’s scientists, hope.
ScienceInsider reports that the World Health Organization is couching its language so carefully that at a press briefing yesterday, a spokesperson said it is now “really very close” to calling the international H1N1 influenza outbreak a “pandemic.” At issue is the need to communicate disease risk without triggering unnecessary panic. The WHO pandemic alert system designed [...]
The Integrated Risk Information System is an Environmental Protection Agency database of information on the human health effects of exposure to environmental contaminants. Before getting cataloged in the system, a contaminant must go through the IRIS process, a set of steps to evaluate the substance that include EPA review, interagency science consultation, and external peer [...]
“Ghostwriting” is the ethically fraught practice of intentionally excluding major contributors of an article from its byline or acknowledgements, and instead hiring respected experts in the field as named authors to give the appearance of credibility and neutrality. The problem has been around in scientific journals for decades, and industries may use it as [...]
From a biological standpoint, socially cooperative behaviors could be an end in themselves, as far as your unconscious brain is concerned. But financial systems and policies ignoring the often-unconscious human social instincts do so at their peril. The authors offer a few practical steps for reinforcing the “social contract” that might alleviate the growing rift between the financial markets and society.
Just last week, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would ramp up its transparency efforts, beginning with the creation of a task force focused on the issue. In keeping with other transparency efforts within the the new administration, the FDA now has its own transparency blog.
Paul Blumental explains the importance of the task [...]
In order to feed a growing, hungry world amidst a warming climate, we have to produce more food. Solutions to the problem of how to increase crop yields include both ecology-based farming and biotechnology approaches. But how do we define biotechnology? And can it support progressive approaches to improving prospects for the poor farmers of [...]
Crops yields must improve to feed a hungry planet amid global warming, but that will require more ecology-based farming and less biotechnology.
Biotechnology can help the poor, but whether it will depends on people of good will taking the time to understand and consider the arguments in some detail.
With more attention to the empirical applications of modern neuroscience, we can better understand the connections between predictors of success and individual variability in training and learning. Equivalence may not be the key to preparing the modern soldier.
Cutting back on smoking could reduce U.S. health care spending by nearly $100 billion a year, thanks to the reduction in costly tobacco-related maladies, reports the Associated Press. The Congressional Budget Office expects the Family Smoking and Tobacco Control Act (H.R. 1256) to cut the use of tobacco products among underage users by 11 percent [...]
Recent studies have built on research showing that climate change will have damaging consequences for human health. In his article today, “Global Ailing,” contributor Jeremy Jacquot looks back over existing work and outlines the latest science, stressing the importance of past warnings about the impact of global warming on public well being.
Here’s a look at [...]
Research begun in the 1990s is relevant now more than ever, and what we know about the relationship between health and climate will be crucial as communities adapt to a warming world.
The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season begins this week—but forecasts of a tamer year should make us raise our guard, not lower it.
A report released last Thursday by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse found that smoking, alcohol abuse, and illegal drugs cost federal, state, and local governments $467.7 billion in 2005. Reporter Erik Echolm described the stunning numbers in The New York Times. Federal expenditures alone amount to $238.2 billion, or 9.6 percent of [...]
One Thursday in May, a State Department staffer suggested a simple idea to get U.S. citizens involved in the government’s relief efforts in Pakistan. The following Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a simple text donation program. Sending the word “Swat,” the name of a valley in the relief area, to 20222 sends a [...]
The Center for American Progress, in partnership with the National Academies, is sponsoring a conference this Wednesday, June 3rd on the role of innovation clusters in spurring economic development, creating new jobs, and building a competitive American economy for the 21st century.
“Growing Innovation Clusters for American Prosperity” will convene academics, business leaders, policymakers, and [...]
We’ve made some recent improvements behind the scenes here at Science Progress that readers may have noticed. But because today’s big Center for American Progress event focuses on the power of New Media technologies, I wanted to make sure that all our social media channels (some still in development) were visible.
Podcasts
Over the past week, we’ve [...]
It’s not the campaign anymore. Some of the best tools for getting the President’s message out and getting the administration’s work done require special consideration on WhiteHouse.gov. Swire explains the laws that constrain and the rules that advance new media for the government.
