Author Posts Archive: Vivian Cheng
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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.
President Obama intends to nominate worker health and safety advocate David Michaels, PhD, MPH to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, according to a statement released by the White House yesterday. Michaels, an epidemiologist, is the director of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy and a research professor in the Department of [...]
How many bioethics subfields do we really need to grapple with the issues at the cutting edge of contemporary science? Maybe just one.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides at least $200 million for the 20,894 challenge grant applications the National Institutes of Health recently received. This influx of applications comes on top of the 16,312 regular applications received for the same June-July funding cycle, which raises the question, how is the NIH deciding which applications receive [...]
Mothers exposed to significant levels of air pollution while pregnant give birth to children with lower childhood IQ scores, according to a new study released this week in Pediatrics. The study involved 249 New York City children whose mothers were exposed to varying levels of “typical kinds of urban air pollution, mostly from car, bus, [...]
Conflicts of interest are a special concern in biomedical research because they have the potential to influence the outcome of study results or clinical trials, leading to results that favor certain products or unnecessary risks for patients. New rules may curb the undue influence.
Demographic changes in recent decades are thinning out conservative views on “culture war” issues such as stem cell research, according to a new report from the Progressive Studies Program at the Center for American Progress. Among the findings: Public support for embryonic stem cell research is on the rise, as CAP Senior Fellow Ruy Texeria [...]
The United States is generally supportive of scientists and government funding for research and education, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. However, public understanding of climatic changes caused by human activity continues to lag behind [...]
There’s not enough transparency in the world of genetic testing, argue experts from the Genetics & Public Policy Center, so it’s time for a registry of the 1,700 or so currently available. “Establishing a registry is a critical first step in the development of a more transparent, quality-centered system of oversight that will better inform [...]
The recent United States Global Change Research Program report warned U.S. citizens of more frequent heat waves, greater disease risks, and damage to the marine life in this country, but we should not forget about the consequences abroad. Depending on emissions scenarios, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the average global surface temperature [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Techies who eagerly anticipated the announcement of a “cyberczar” along with the release of a 60-day cybersecurity review this week may have been disappointed today. President Obama outlined the position’s responsibilities but did not name an appointee in his remarks on securing our nation’s cyber infrastructure this morning.
The report, ordered by the President and led [...]
Shortly after being sworn in as the Commissioner of the Federal Drug Administration last Friday, Margaret A. Hamburg and her principal deputy commissioner, Joshua Sharfstein, described their plans to run the FDA as a public health agency in New England Journal of Medicine. The agency, charged with regulating much of the U.S. food supply, is [...]
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s $19 billion investment in health information technology is crucial to improving U.S. health care quality and value, as explained in a CAP report released earlier this week. But in addition to creating a business case for an improved health IT infrastructure, success depends upon patients’ trust for the system’s [...]
Yesterday, the National Institutes of Health announced the creation of its new Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases Program. TRND’s goal is to bolster drug development for rare diseases that affect less than 200,000 Americans as well as neglected diseases that lack treatments, despite being common in some regions of the world. Most neglected diseases [...]
Battlestar Galactica is hardly the only place you’ll see science in popular entertainment. Technical issues from physics to biomedicine permeate hit series like CSI, Grey’s Anatomy, and The Big Bang Theory that attract mainstream audiences. The National Academy of Sciences capitalized on the phenomenon when it created the Science & Entertainment Exchange—a program to foster [...]
As the swine flu outbreak nears a potential global pandemic, discussions about strategies to control the spread and severity of infection continue. Andrew Pollack discusses the development of a universal flu vaccine today in the New York Times. The work is especially challenging, he explains, because the proteins that do not vary from strain to [...]
