Archive for September, 2009
“We are very grateful to have a president who respects science,” said Director Francis Collins this morning, addressing staff and leaders of the National Institutes of Health. Collins was introducing the man he referred to as “our scientist in chief,” Barack Obama.
The president paid a visit to the NIH campus in Bethesda to announce what [...]
More Americans know about synthetic biology, according to a survey from the Wilson Center Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies. Some 22 percent of adults indicate they have heard a lot or some about synthetic biology—that’s up from only 9 percent last year. But nearly half, 48 percent, have heard nothing at all about the technology.
So if [...]
With a bold investment of federal resources into clinician education during their academic training years and throughout their careers, we can improve reproductive health care.
At the end of the month, the agreement between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, and the U.S. Department of Commerce expires. Hopefully, not much will change.
So who is speaking here, an ethicist, a scientist, or a policymaker?
It’s very hard for me to have a conversation about these issues, because people adopt incredibly defensive postures…The scientists on one side and civil-society organizations on the other. And, to be fair to those groups, science has often proceeded by skipping the dialogue. But [...]
Investing in research and innovation can unleash Americans’ talents for discovery and entrepreneurship, says Congressman Holt.
Multiple blue-ribbon reports from the past few years have concluded what hundreds of post-doc researchers know: landing that first NIH grant is a daunting task. So daunting, in fact, that many younger scientists conclude that they’d rather move on to other careers than wait, on average, until their early 40s to win that first crucial [...]
The National Institutes of Health announced the launch of a new website this morning where researchers can submit approval requests for human embryonic stem cell lines. Accepted lines will be eligible for use in federally funded research.
The site is the next step in the implementation of the Obama administration’s stem cell policy, announced in March, [...]
Office of Management and Budget review can be a good thing, but not when it duplicates peer review and delays generation of critical pubic health data.
Francis Collins took the reigns of the National Institutes of Health as director in August. Shortly thereafter, he invited a Kathy Hudson, a former colleague from the National Human Genome Research Institute, to serve as his chief of staff, a new role within the director’s office. This week, they each shared some of their thinking [...]
Fifty years after we figured out how to keep astronauts’ food from making them sick, the time has come to commit to keeping the rest of us as safe.
Researchers running clinical trials are required to submit information to the NIH-run ClinicalTrials.gov database. But two recent reports indicate that compliance with this transparency mandate is spotty at best for trials that lead to published biomedical research. What’s more, many registered trials never lead to published studies, resulting in selective publication and outcome reporting that [...]
There are promising developments heralding the arrival of personalized medicine, a new medical field where the results of genetic tests or other biomarker assessments are used to tailor drugs and treatments to individual patients.
The federal government can assume a vital role in which it frames critical national challenges, facilitates the flow of information and expertise to and between regions, and helps finance, in a competitive and leveraged fashion, valuable activities that innovation clusters would otherwise be unable to undertake.
In spite of the issues raised by the birth of Nayda Suleman’s octuplets, we should not lose sight of the pioneering IVF research that laid the ground work for a scientific triumph that has helped millions of infertile couples for over 30 years.
