Author Posts Archive: Rick Weiss
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 [...]
A recent conference examining the legal protections corporations are taking to defend themselves in the event their products turn toxic should raise regulatory questions.
Several science budgets fared well in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act compromise, but cross your fingers that we won’t need additional resources to combat bird flu.
While pandemic flu is off the media radar, public health officials are busy tracking what they call the number one infectious threat in the world—and are preparing for the worst-case scenario. Above: A scientist works at the U.S. Naval Medical Research in Jakarta, Indonesia.
The Food and Drug Administration gave a thumbs up today for ATryn, a blood-thinning drug produced in the milk of genetically engineered goats. As we’ve previously described, it’s the first drug made in the milk of a farm animal to get U.S. marketing approval. (Most meds are made in chemistry labs or inside genetically engineered [...]
Cutting science out of the stimulus bill is like killing the goose that lays the nation’s golden eggs. How else is the United States going to cut healthcare costs, reduce energy dependence and ensure sustainable security except through the waves of technological innovation that, according to the National Academies and other independent sources, have accounted [...]
A lot has changed in five decades for the venerable committee. (UFOs are no longer on the agenda.) But our 21st-century Representatives still have some Cold War priorities.
Members of Congress and others are calling for independent investigations into the federal oversight system for food production facilities in light of new revelations about chronic problems at the Peanut Corp. of America peanut-processing plant in Blakely, Georgia. Those calls are on target, and the matter deserves the attention of both the Justice Department and [...]
Part of the problem behind the recent spread of
Salmonella-infected peanut paste products is a disastrously underfunded FDA.
The United States boasts a huge corps of public-servant scientists devoted to going where the evidence takes them and who, as of Wednesday, will for the first time in years be respected by the highest officials in the land for what they do.
A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel has deemed a drug from a genetically engineered animal to be safe and effective even though the agency has not yet decided what the rules for such approvals should be.
Scientific research and technological development have long been mainstays of American economic and military strength. Today more than ever, the global economic crisis and the prospect of a long and deep U.S. recession call for a reinvigoration of America’s scientific, engineering, and manufacturing enterprises.
A thumbnail of advances in science that will have long-lasting impacts on science policy—or advances in science policy that we predict will have long-lasting impacts on science.
Proponents of nanotechnology—along with federal regulators—have some serious work to do beyond public education if the field is to break through safely to commercial success.
AAAS Science and Human Rights Program Director Mona Younis talks with Rick Weiss about how scientists have protected the rights of their colleagues, helped bring Balkan war criminals to justice, and safeguarded vulnerable populations in Darfur. The program’s new initiatives aim to spur a pro-bono movement within the research community to support human rights work, just as exists within legal circles.
Genetic screening for newborns can spot devastating disorders, but false positives and research-driven mission creep are cause for concern. Knowledge is nothing to fear, but parents should have the right to decide what they want to know about their kids.
Whether by DNA manipulation or old-fashioned selective breeding, we engineer our food. Is it time to get over it?
Researchers are eager to see the new administration move away from President Bush’s policies on human embryonic stem cell research funding. But what will it take to get to the first clinical trials?
It will be an uphill battle to justify some of the upfront costs of the personalized medicine revolution, given the technical, political, and educational hurdles that stand between where we are and where we want to get: to a place with better care that costs less.
The Washington rumor mill is buzzing with names of possible science appointees—and there are dozens of major science-related positions to fill. The questions appointees will face are an opportunity for a clear break with past approaches.
Keeping hands clean—literally and figuratively—saves money and lives. The point is worth considering as the country closes the door on an era of regulatory slumber and considers anew how to get people and institutions to behave in more socially responsible ways.
There are a growing number of cases in which technologies developed for routine scientific and medical uses are finding unexpected application in the shrouded world of genocide, torture, and political oppression.
As different as Singapore is from America politically and culturally, the way it is tackling its economic challenges through big investments in science and technology deserves attention from Washington insiders and the American public.
To the pharmaceutical companies out there pushing spurious claims about their medications with millions in marketing dollars: Stop. Now. And please submit your data to the FDA for review.
Merril Goozner, a longtime Washington health and science gadfly who hosts the respected website gooznews.com, responded yesterday to my Monday posting about the negligent flat-funding of the National Institutes of Health. He makes the point that, bad as that policy has been, we should not forget that other important drivers of biomedical research and improved healthcare delivery have similarly suffered under recent Bush budgets.
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Congress last week passed a continuing resolution that will keep the National Institutes of Health budget flat-out flat for the fifth year running. The policy is flat-out wrong, as Americans who have diseases that five or ten years from now should be curable are going to have to wait a lot longer.
The face of stem cell research is changing as research moves towards the clinic and commercialization, and as patients demand access to experimental treatments.
Since April, researchers publishing work done with NIH support must submit manuscripts for access in a free database. The experiment is working, but large journal publishers aren’t satisfied with the results.
Today the FDA released its long-awaited—and in some quarters, long feared—proposed new rules for marketing foods from animals that have been genetically engineered to have particular traits.
How can FDA reasonably protect public health in the interim period before researchers completely understand the science of nanotechnology?
The battle over teaching evolution is still far from won in this country, despite the overwhelming mass of scientific evidence that supports this model of how the biological universe works.
Three recent studies propel regenerative medicine forward, but don’t yet move it to the clinic. There is still no better venue for studying cell processes than embryonic stem cells.
There are lots of righteous rationales for being against doping, but only one stands up to real scrutiny: the rules say it is not allowed.
A new report from the National Research Council argues that the military should harness the power of neuroscience to amplify the cognitive prowess of U.S. personnel and make foreign soldiers, um, less smarter.
Unproven and experimental fertility treatments, combined with an ill-conceived presidential policy on stem cells, have created an industry that needs corralling.
With a concerted push by policymakers on research, development and deployment of solar technologies, solar renewable energy could dot our landscape.
An expert panel at Stanford University has determined that nearly one quarter of the colonies of human embryonic stem cells that the Bush administration had approved as ethically derived and eligible for study with federal funds do not meet Stanford’s ethics standards and should no longer be available to researchers there.
Medicines delivered in nanoparticle form, more potent than their ordinary counterparts, are on deck for regulatory approval. The agency has some catching up to do before it can determine the safety of these cutting-edge products.
Resent research concludes that even if scientists were to score a complete home run by finding a “cure” for any single chronic disease such as cancer or stroke, life spans in developing countries would hardly grow longer.
Creationist groups are turning to the Louisiana legislature with a new approach to challenge the teaching of evolutionary theory in schools.
A lack of federal leadership on the regulation of genetic testing could undermine the benefits of the next medical revolution.
Elderly Americans are growing in number, which means we need to act quickly to improve the quality of long-term care in our country.
Rick Weiss argues that the orderly and unbiased testing of reality to see how things actually work—the art and science of science—has ever been the engine of better health, higher productivity and greater economic power, not to mention enhanced entertainment and leisure-time options. It is something of a wonder, he writes, that so many today eschew it, and so openly.
