Author Posts Archive: Andrew Plemmons Pratt
There are intimate connections between the scientific advances that expanded the frontiers of human knowledge and the democratic experiments that expanded the frontiers of human liberty.
The Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration today announced a partnership aimed at speeding new medical treatments from “microscope to market,” as HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius put it. The program will help researchers conducting basic biomedical research understand the regulatory parameters for drugs and [...]
“A wait-and-see policy,” on climate change, observed Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Dr. Joseph Romm on Wednesday, “may mean waiting until it’s too late.” Romm was speaking at a CAP event on “The Science of Climate Change,” and was joined by Dr. Chris Field, the director of the department of global ecology at the [...]
The budget request for fiscal year 2011 that the Obama administration released on Monday includes foundational investments that will help the United States remain the leader among innovative nations.
Investing in innovation is a critical component of long-term economic prosperity, and the president’s FY2011 budget request includes two notable provisions that will support regional science and technology clusters.
The administration is asking for $75 million “to support the creation of regional innovation clusters that leverage regions’ competitive strengths to boost job creation and economic growth,” [...]
Next Wednesday, Science Progress will co-host an event at the Center for American Progress. The guest list for The Science of Climate Change is already at capacity, but the live webstream will be available here. Full event info:
The Science of Climate Change
February 3, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:30pm
An overwhelming quantity of direct observations and analyses published by scientists in [...]
In 2009, we saw a renewed engagement with ethical questions about how we regulate biotechnology, watched the conservative war on science continue on new fronts, and witnessed renewed commitments to grow U.S. prosperity with investments in science and technology.
Timeline: A Brief History of Stem Cell Research
One of our most popular features ever, this interactive timeline [...]
From 1992 until 2001, a special group of scientists collaborated with the U.S. intelligence community to use reconnaissance satellite imagery to study environmental change around the planet. Known as Medea, Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis, the project came to an abrupt end at the beginning of the Bush administration. The detailed pictures snapped [...]
Jonathan Sallet, co-author of the report, “The Geography of Innovation: The Federal Government and the Growth of Regional Innovation Clusters,” testifies today before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation. He explains in his written testimony that Congress should support the Economic Development Administration, which can build effective collaborations between businesses, universities, and local [...]
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal editorial section, Daniel Henninger took exaggeration of the scandal over emails stolen from scientists at the University of East Anglia to new heights, arguing that the incident undermines the entire centuries-old scientific enterprise. But the column ignores both the current observable impact of climate change and scientific history, and is [...]
This weekend, federal rules enforcing the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act go into effect. From then on, there will be stiff legal penalties for hiring or employment discrimination based on genetic data, or for companies that request their employees submit to genetic testing. Rules governing genetic discrimination in group health insurance plan coverage take effect December [...]
The relationship between population and environmental sustainability is complex, and understanding the fraught history of debates on the issue is critical for scientists and advocates.
The lessons learned from the French Minitel network in the 1980s are still important as the FCC considers net neutrality today. A philosopher of technology talks about the importance of digital democratic innovation.
Earlier this week, six research universities announced a set of shared principles for increasing access to new medicines in poor countries. Boston University, Brown, Harvard, the Oregon Health and Science University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale joined the Association of University Technology Managers Monday in releasing the statement, which aims to guide licensing decisions [...]
A significant proportion of American women leave scientific careers between earning their Ph.D. and winning tenure-track positions. Many of these “leaks” in the pipeline are the result of decisions to start families. Changes to federal and university policy can stem the losses, say the authors of a new report.
A U.S. District Court judge ruled Monday that a gene patent lawsuit filed against the Patent and Trademark Office could move forward. At issue are patents exclusively licensed by Myriad Genetics for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Mutations of the genes are strongly linked to significant risks of breast cancer. The suit, lead by the [...]
Despite moving early to initiate production of a vaccine for H1N1 influenza, it’s now clear that the federal government will not have nearly has many doses ready this season as officials originally claimed. Reports in both the Washington Post and the New York Times indicate that the administration relied on production estimates provided by the [...]
Last week, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors issued a new policy for the transparent disclosure of conflicts of interest for the authors of papers published by journals in the consortium. A coalition of advocates have been pushing for the adoption of a uniform COI policy for medical journals since 2007, according to Merrill [...]
Given the Obama administration’s positive approach to science and to human rights, a new CAP report argues that now is the time to craft policies that support collaborations between researchers and advocates that stop atrocities.
Cocaine is notoriously addictive, and even users committed to kicking the habit have a tremendously hard time cutting the chemical dependency. To help break the cycle, researchers have developed a vaccine aimed at stimulating an immune response that stops the drug from working. The National Institutes of Health reported yesterday that a clinical trial of [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Sarah Arnquist, reporting for The New York Times, tells a moving personal story that captures the hope permeating some of the projects now breaking down barriers between patients, research participants, and scientists.
Her hook is the quest of Amy Farber, who found out in 2005 that she had LAM, a rare and fatal disease affecting women [...]
Washington, DC schools reopen this today, along with some Maryland districts, and officials and parents are preparing to keep influenza from returning to classrooms with students. The Washington Post reports that plans are underway for a large-scale immunization program, but there’s also a push to foster healthy habits that can stop the spread of the [...]
New guidelines from the NIH will let researchers expand on important research, and, presumably, allow them to stop color-coding equipment paid for by different funding sources.
Chris Mooney joined us at the very beginning and has been contributing to Science Progress since we launched in October 2007. He’ll be taking a break for the next school year and will head to MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. In his “Temporary Last Column,” he looks back over two years of science [...]
Science matters, and so does science communication, argue the coauthors. And while advocacy and science are not always easy bedfellows, groups with antiscientific agendas put on awfully good briefings on Capitol Hill.
How many bioethics subfields do we really need to grapple with the issues at the cutting edge of contemporary science? Maybe just one.
Last week, Chris Mooney described how the Washington Times and a cadre of right-wing bloggers have been fearmongering about John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Now FoxNews has jumped on the bandwagon with a story implying that Holdren advocated radical population control measures, a claim [...]
Science communication is a regular topic of discussion here at Science Progress, and those in DC interested in learning more about the issue can attend a workshop with seasoned professionals tomorrow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Organized by our friends at Scientists and Engineers for America, the messaging workshop will feature an [...]
Senior Fellow Ruy Teixeria takes a look at the recent Pew poll on public perceptions of science at the main CAP site today and concludes that in spite of the previous administration’s decidedly negative stance on a variety of scientific matters, the public still favors federal support of basic research. He writes: “These data suggest [...]
Researchers at Newcastle University in England have pushed cell reprogramming into uncharted bioethical territory, claiming to have transformed stem cells into human sperm. Reports in the British press from last week indicated that the work is intended as a treatment for male infertility, but the possibility of generating gametes from other adult cells raises a [...]
Some discussions of the benefits of electronic health records can sound abstract and stats-based. Only 13 percent of physicians currently use even a basic EHR; 1.5 percent of hospitals responding to a recent survey published in the New England of Medicine have a comprehensive electronic-records system; 8 to 12 percent of hospitals responding to the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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,” [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Salmonella. Downer cows. More salmonella. The past year has seen several unpleasant and dangerous incidents of widespread food contamination. Today, Lyndsey Layton reports in the Washington Post that newly introduced Congressional legislation offers a slate of remedies to ramp up Food and Drug Agency capabilities for protecting the food supply. The draft legislation introduced in [...]
Last week, the Obama administration unveiled its Open Government Initiative, a set of online tools and a process of public engagement for making its operations more transparent. This podcast takes a look at what it means for citizens and scientists, who are now asked to share their knowledge and ideas.
In today’s feature, “Can We Bank on Objectivity,” Patti Tereskerz takes a hard look at the new rules proposed by the National Institutes of Health for dealing with financial conflicts of interest in biomedical research.
Trust is paramount in the research system, she argues, and the rules could help prevent future abuses like those uncovered by [...]
Here it is: the much-anticipated online catalog of raw data gathered by the federal government, Data.gov. The site appears the same day that the Obama administration formally declares it’s ready for suggestions from the public on how to be more open and transparent.
At launch, Data.gov offers a small, diverse collection of 47 sets of “raw” [...]
The editors at Effect Measure do not mince their words, though they also do not shy away from parsing them. The word of the moment? “Pandemic.” At issue is whether or not the official declaration of a pandemic should depend upon the severity of the disease in question, in addition to its geographic scope. They [...]
Implementing meaningful, effective health information technology throughout the nation’s health care system is not a technical problem. Rather, the lack of current health IT infrastructure results from the absence of a business case for such improvements, according to Todd Park and Peter Basch in a CAP report released this week. But health IT can enable [...]
How do you feel about global warming? New public opinion research maps the connections Americans feel to the issue along a spectrum from most concerned and motivated to least concerned and motivated. The majority of those surveyed, 51 percent, say they are “alarmed” or “concerned.” Here’s a visual breakdown after the jump:
The proposed American Clean Energy and Security Act mandates a 17-percent reduction below 2005 emissions levels by 2020. That’s 1.2 billion 2.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide and the equivalent of taking half a billion cars off the road, reports CAP Senior Fellow Dan Weiss in a column just posted over on the main [...]
The same day that President Obama relaxed restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research, he issued a directive to the Office of Science and Technology director to coordinate a new set of recommendations to protect scientific integrity in federal policymaking.
OSTP used its new blog to open a comment period to accept public [...]
The eight years of the Bush administration were a bad time for scientific integrity in government research. Grifo, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says we must focus on protecting government researchers, making science-based policymaking more transparent, and monitoring potential abuses.
New research investigating the impact of climate change on western wildfires presents a bleak picture. CAP Senior Fellow Tom Kenworthy covers the latest science in an American Progress column this week, explaining the problematic feedback cycle: higher temperatures from global warming increase the risks of wildfires, and increased fires release more carbon dioxide into the [...]
Federal funding support for basic scientific research wasn’t always a focal point of government policy. In fact, President John Quincy Adams’s arguements for “internal improvements” such as the establishment of a uniform system of weights and measures, a survey of U.S. natural resources, and the construction of an astronomical observatory were “greeted with scorn and [...]
Today at from 12pm-1pm, we’ll be hosting an event to launch Science Next, informed citizens’ essential guide to science policy. If you can’t join us at the Center for American Progress offices, you can watch the event streamed live here. Full event info here.
Featured participants include Henry Kelly, President of the Federation of American Scientists; [...]
ScienceInsider posted an illuminating (albeit rather technical) interview yesterday evening with Ruben Donis, chief of the molecular virology and vaccines branch at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In it, he explains the swift work CDC has done investigating the genetics of the swine flu virus.
The detective work, still underway, indicates that the [...]
Conflicts of interest in the realm of biomedical research are nothing new. In 1984, a study found that half of the surveyed biotech companies provided financial support for university research. But as Institute of Medicine President Harvey Fineberg said yesterday morning, this old problem “seems to be coming forth with increasing force and frequency.”
Fineberg was [...]
Over at the main CAP site, P.J. Crowley and Andy Grotto ask how well public health officials have done in responding to the international epidemic. Their assessment: the systems in place to protect citizens are working well. Detection, identification, and response are the central responsibilities, and they give local and federal agencies high marks.
They also [...]
This morning, President Obama addressed the National Academies of Sciences, laying out the imperative for sustained government investment in scientific research. He said his administration would commit more funding to R&D than during the Apollo program (see Update below):
I am here today to set this goal: we will devote more than three percent of our [...]
Almost one million people died of malaria in Africa in 2006, according to the World Health Organization. Stopping this devastating disease requires a new set of tools, some of which might include mosquito-killing drugs, drugs designed to evade parasite resistance, or perhaps even mosquito-immobilizing lasers.
In an effort to halt the spread of infections, health groups [...]
The latest in cell reprogramming research is that scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California have created induced cells into an embryonic state using proteins instead of genes. The study involves mouse cells.
The process, reported in Cell Stem Cell, points towards a method of creating pluripotent cells without the significant risk of [...]
The British Independent is reporting that a fertility doctor claims he’s on the verge of creating human clones. Trouble is, the man in question, Panayiotis Zavos, said the same thing in 2001, 2004, and 2006, but was unable to produce any evidence to back up his boast.
Brandon Keim at Wired Science points out that regardless [...]
The Federal Bureau of Investigation plans to grow its DNA database, reports The New York Times. Currently 6.7 million profiles strong, the idea is to go from 80,000 new entries every year to 1.2 million in 2012.
While genetic information is certainly useful in catching some offenders and exonerating the wrongfully imprisoned, this ramp-up nevertheless raises [...]
News leaked Friday that Aneesh Chopra, Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, has been appointed the first federal CTO. President Obama made the official announcement Saturday.
While working in Virginia, Chopra lead a highly successful effort to ramp up broadband deployment around the state, which Nancy Scola chronicled in her feature, “Broadband Done Right.” Creative public-private [...]
Congressional action on climate change may be the preferred method for mitigating the impact of global warming and moving the United States to a clean energy economy, but the Environmental Protection Agency just turned up the pressure to act. Administrator Lisa Jaskson just announced that carbon dioxide is among six greenhouse gases that “contribute to [...]
Sunlight Labs, the web development shop of the Sunlight Foundation, runs an occasional series on “Redesigning the Government,” in which they offer redesign and information architecture advice for federal agencies. Today, they’ve conceived a website that doesn’t yet exist, but that Whitehouse CIO Vivek Kundra has promised is in the works: Data.gov, the central repository [...]
Nicholas Wade has an overview in the New York Times of a package of articles released this week in the New England Journal of Medicine about the limits of genomewide association studies. At issue is the fact that such studies have not revealed as many concrete links between genotype and the risk factors for common [...]
In a Washington Post editorial today, Christina Hoff Sommers argues that President Obama’s suggestion that Title IX—which requires equal funding for men’s and women’s school athletics programs—could be used to advance parity for women in science and engineering fields should give readers pause. Unfortunately, she misses both the critical point of diversity in the scientific [...]
Science Progress talks with Tandy Trower, general manager of Microsoft’s robotics group, about the future of robotics in the United States and around the globe.
Our CAP colleague Tom Kenworthy has a column up today on the SmartGridCity project Xcel Energy has set up in Boulder, Colorado. The system integrates broadband communications with power lines to allow customers to monitor power consumption, make efficient choices, and let the power company route electricty through the system to meet needs in real [...]
Science Progress is a media sponsor for the upcoming Tech Policy Summit, May 11-13 in Silicon Valley. Speakers will include a broad swath of experts from the science, technology, and transparency communities. Check out the the participants here registration is here. The focus of the event is “Accelerating Innovation and Economic Growth.” We’ll be collaborating [...]
John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, was nominated in the middle of December, but only confirmed by the senate three weeks ago. In the past, he has spoken in earnest about the importance of scientists devoting time to public communication and outreach—he suggests 10 percent of researchers’ time go towards [...]
The short newsbreak available at the moment seems like a small portion of a longer forthcoming feature, but the wire focused on the OSTP director’s comments on geoengineering:
John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme [...]
As Chris Mooney points out in today’s column, many science graduates are choosing career paths that lie outside academia. This is in part because the career paths within academic science are narrowing, but it is also because the importance of science to many other fields of work is increasing. But how well are we keeping [...]
This week, the Federal Communications Commission will begin designing a plan for improving broadband access and speeds for all Americans. The comment period for how to spend taxpayer funds on the project, which includes $7.2 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, opens Wednesday; the final plan is due next February.
But as Mark Lloyd [...]
The lone star state has been in the scientific spotlight for its school board decisions on the teaching of evolution in public classrooms, but it’s also a focus of the next round of arguments over human embryonic stem cell research.
On Tuesday, the Houston Chronicle reported that the state Senate Finance Committee passed a budget bill [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Noam N. Levey reports in the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune that the Obama administration may soon open a 30-day comment period before rolling back the Health and Human Services “conscience” rule finalized at the tail end of the Bush term. The rule, as Jessica Arons explained here on SP, “expands the right of [...]
A quick glance at a couple early takes on R&D funding in President Obama’s budget request outline for FY2010:
Science Insider: NIH details are sketchy, but include increases; NSF would see 8.5 percent bump; more for scientific facilities though DOE’s Office of Science; earth science research funding and Orion money for NASA; 37.5 percent increase for [...]
A small group of moderate Republican Congress members, according to CNN.
