Archive: Life Sciences and Public Health

Features

03-03-10 | Embryonic Stem Cells: Hopes for Turning Darkness into Light

By Jonathan D. Moreno
News marks an important step in normalizing the field as a regulated scientific activity. It also speaks to the sometimes-unpredictable ways that experimentation can address sources of human suffering.

02-25-10 | Bank On It

By Eric M. Meslin, Ph.D. and Kenneth W. Goodman, Ph.D.
In the early days of bioethics, the dominant paradigm was about finding ways to slow down the application and use of emerging technologies. While some still cling to this paradigm, the ethics of information technologies applied to biobanks and electronic health records is producing a major shift in thinking.

02-22-10 | Ribosomes Rising

By Jonathan D. Moreno
Advances in basic science and in engineering education are propelling the field forward at breakneck speeds. The progressive response is more, not less, science.

02-16-10 | China’s Recipe for Stem Cell Success

By Dominique S. McMahon, Halla Thorsteinsdóttir, Peter A. Singer, and Abdallah S. Daar
Stem cell science has advanced rapidly in China, but the field suffers from a lack of adequate regulation for clinical applications in the country. The time is ripe for international collaboration.

02-09-10 | Up Next: Outsourcing for Sequencing

By Jeanne F. Loring
The Chinese government is currently investing in stem cell research. But a separate expansion in genome sequencing capabilities could shift the center of gravity for biomedical science across the Pacific.

02-03-10 | Will the Vaccine-Autism Saga Finally End?

By Chris Mooney
A single, small study stirred a mass anti-vaccine movement that threatens public health. Now that the paper has been declared totally invalid, advocates and the medical establishment need to talk.

01-19-10 | To Market! To Market!

By Valerie Imbruce
New policies are in the works to contain food safety problems after they appear, but we need a comprehensive federal policy that helps get safe, fresh food from farms to local markets.

01-06-10 | Condoms, Malt Liquor, and Good Research

By Chris Mooney
Two conservative senators have teamed up in a fleece war on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, targeting 100 of its projects, many of them scientific in nature, as examples of wasteful spending.

12-18-09 | Public Relations and Public Health

By Saheli Sadanand
The vaccine, while safe and effective, has provided a vehicle for the anti-vaccine movement to launch attacks on some of our most vital tools for protecting public health.

12-18-09 | The Areas of Our Expertise

By Eric M. Meslin
Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously suggested that science and religion deal with non-overlapping areas of knowledge. The idea is useful for quelling debates about creationism, but it’s a mistake when developing public policy for the life sciences.

12-01-09 | Get a Life

By Dr. Rebecca Bushnell
Researchers with families need more than childcare. They need a culture of professional assessment that looks for their contributions as teachers, scholars, and citizens—not just an unrelenting rate of work.

11-23-09 | In Stem Cell Research, Evidence Trumps Ideology

By Jonathan D. Moreno
One of the less attractive features of the political debate about human embryonic stem cells has been a tone of triumphalism when one side or the other can register a “victory.”

11-20-09 | Genetic Testing 101

By Michael Rugnetta
With new opportunities come questions about how to interpret the avalanche of genetic information and how to protect it from improper use.

11-10-09 | Time for Family, Time for Science

By Andrew Plemmons Pratt, interviewer
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.

11-02-09 | DNA Confidential

By Natalie Ram
Most states refrain from prescribing rules governing partial match reporting or familial searching in statute, regulation, or well-publicized memoranda. This report represents the first effort to catalog in a comprehensive manner state policies and practices regarding partial match reporting and familial searching.

11-02-09 | The Terms for a Search

By Natalie Ram
State crime labs can collect and analyze DNA evidence, comparing results to profiles stored in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System. Here’s how the process works.

11-02-09 | Interactive Map: State Policies for DNA Crime Databases Vary Widely

By Natalie Ram
Certain “partial” and “familial” matches found in DNA databases can implicate an offender’s close genetic relatives as possible perpetrators of a crime. But there are no consistent federal rules on how to conduct such searchers and report findings.

10-29-09 | Do Gene Patents Hurt Research?

By Timothy Caulfield
Controversies over gene patents often ignore the lack of evidence that they impede basic research. The more important concern may be the negative impact of the push to commercialize science.

09-29-09 | Continuing Medical Education

By Wayne C. Shields
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.

09-21-09 | When Less Paperwork Means No Science

By Michael B. Blank, Patrick S. Sullivan, Paul A. Lombardo
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.

09-15-09 | Battling Back Bacteria

By Nancy Scola
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.

09-14-09 | Paving the Way for Personalized Medicine

By Michael Rugnetta and Whitney Kramer
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.

09-01-09 | History Seen Through a Test Tube

By Eli Y. Adashi
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.

08-30-09 | How Did the Vaccine Cross the Road?

By Ricardo Rossello, PhD
Vaccines grown in cell cultures, virus-like particles that stimulate the immune system without threat of infection, and antibodies that could attack any flu strain are all promising routes to slowing pandemics.

08-30-09 | Supporting Health Care Reform Is the Right Thing to Do

By Ruth R. Faden and Jonathan D. Moreno
In supporting health care reform, we can be good citizens and morally responsible neighbors, and still do right by those we love.

08-24-09 | Autonomous Contraception

By Lisa Campo-Engelstein
A recent discovery might open the door to an effective male contraceptive drug, a technology that could have been developed decades ago, were it not for social factors that enable women but not men to effectively regulate their fertility outside of sexual activity and without their partner’s participation or knowledge.

08-21-09 | Science the Way It Should Be

By Andrew Plemmons Pratt, interviewer
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.

08-19-09 | Lab Bench Ethics

By Science Progress
The ethics of data selection, the potential conflicts of peer review, the “soft money lifestyle” of grant recipients, and other issues facing researchers.

08-18-09 | Protectors of the Human Race

By Science Progress
So what’s the appropriate progressive response to the recent under-the-radar attempts from conservatives to ban the creation of animal-human hybrids? Caricature.

08-17-09 | What Kind of Bioethics Council Do We Need?

By Marcy Darnovsky
Many genetic, reproductive, and biomedical technologies now in development pose new societal challenges, raising questions about how we understand and uphold social justice, human rights, and even our shared humanity.

08-17-09 | Commissions on a Mission

By Michael S. Peroski
If the Obama administration hopes to move a new bioethics commission beyond the culture wars that embroiled much of the Bush council’s work, substantial efforts will be necessary to bring together now-divided bioethicists for pragmatic discussion.

07-29-09 | All Together Now

By Andrew Plemmons Pratt, Vivian Cheng
How many bioethics subfields do we really need to grapple with the issues at the cutting edge of contemporary science? Maybe just one.

07-27-09 | Searching for Outbreaks

By Bryce Hall
Digital technologies are changing the world of public health, and officials are just now exploring the best ways to incorporate these new tools into older systems of disease detection and medical research. Looking ahead, the nationwide switch to digital health records has enormous implications for public health—but not just for the reasons most people are talking about.

07-24-09 | Manimal Planet

By Jonathan D. Moreno
In 2006, President Bush called for a ban on the creation of animal-human hybrids. This month, Sen. Sam Brownback returned with a bill to stop the monsters.

07-24-09 | Progressive Stem Cell Policy 101

By Science Progress
Embryonic stem cell research is good science, and it needs to be part of our federally funded biomedical research enterprise if the United States is to retain its status as a global scientific leader. That’s why it must be conducted responsibly and ethically.

07-20-09 | Financial Conflicts of Interest 101

By Vivian Cheng
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.

07-17-09 | Connected Health, Connected Reform

By Joseph C. Kvedar, MD
Experience at the Center for Connected Health presents policymakers with clear evidence that comprehensive health care reform can deliver better quality care at a lower cost.

07-10-09 | Science and Values In One Nominee

By Science Progress
Jonathan Moreno applauds President Obama’s intended pick for NIH director: Dr. Francis Collins, a researcher and leader who embraces science and ethics.

07-08-09 | Stemming the Controversy

By Chris Mooney
Human embryonic stem cell research has been embroiled in political controversy for much of its short existence. Now, at last, we have a policy with ethical and scientific authority.

07-06-09 | Back to the Future

By Jonathan Moreno
After eight years of doing research (in the words of the former NIH director), with one hand tied behind their backs, scientists now have ethical guidelines for embryonic stem cell research that will channel federal support to the science that makes the United States a leader in regenerative medicine.

06-29-09 | Your Genes Aren’t Covered for That

By Susannah Baruch
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.

06-23-09 | Personal Profiling

By Andrew Plemmons Pratt, interviewer
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.

06-15-09 | The Color of Our Genes

By Osagie Obasogie
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.

06-09-09 | The Sunny Side of an Underwater Mortgage

By Arthur Robinson Williams and Daniel D. Langleben
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.

06-05-09 | Neuroscience Goes to War

By Jonathan D. Moreno
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.

05-28-09 | What Works and What Doesn’t

By Interview by Jonathan Moreno
It’s the very simple health care concept with the very fancy name. Comparative effectiveness research examines the benefits of different procedures used to treat the same illness, allowing health care providers to make the best decisions about options for patients.

05-26-09 | Can We Bank on Objectivity?

By Patti Tereskerz
Managing financial conflicts of interest is a complicated policy matter, as researchers and their institutions often receive both public and private funding to support research that leads to new treatments. But research also indicates these conflicts are widespread and ingrained. How far should we go in addressing the issue?

05-19-09 | Cure Cancer? Not Without a Course Correction

By Merrill Goozner
The “war on cancer” devotes too much in search of new cures and too little to understanding the results of existing oncology therapies.

05-08-09 | What My 91-Year-Old Mother Wants for Mother’s Day

By Jonathan D. Moreno
Smart government can and must deliver a reasoned, evidence-based health plan for all. Compassion demands it. Is that so much to ask for this holiday?

05-05-09 | The Baby Business and Public Policy

By Marcy Darnovsky, PhD
Drawing lessons from other countries’ regulatory successes could help temper the commercial pressures in the U.S. assisted reproduction sector, without in any way diminishing reproductive rights.

05-05-09 | Throwing the Baby Out With the Amniotic Fluid

By Michelle N. Meyer
One important distinction that is not made often or clearly enough by either ethicists or lawyers is that between decisions to procreate and decisions not to procreate. Witness, for instance, the reaction to Nadya OctoMom™ Suleman.

04-30-09 | When Drugs Aren’t the Answer

By Jason L. Schwartz
Public health measures that reduce the potential for spreading disease through groups of people present a strong defense in the face of an outbreak. We should have been talking about them earlier.

04-29-09 | Flu Farms?

By Aysha Akhtar, MD, MPH
Controlling infections once they reach the human population is crucial, but the origin of many pathogens may lie in factory farming operations, where potent diseases develop.

04-27-09 | Intelligent Solutions

By Michael Rugnetta
A raft of scientific evidence in recent years, along with a recent book, demonstrates that environment has a very strong impact on an individual’s brain development. The work effectively rebuts most of the lingering arguments over the controversial Bell Curve hypothesis.

04-27-09 | Reprogramming Cells With Protein Power

By Jeanne F. Loring
Using specially engineered proteins instead of DNA to coax mice cells back into an embryonic state is promising, but doesn’t resolve many potential problems. For regenerative medicine research in humans, embryonic stem cells remain the gold standard.

04-23-09 | Reading the Mindreading Studies

By Justin Masterman
Increasingly complicated fMRI research demands increasingly sophisticated evaluations of its validity. We should neither ignore the serious problems with fMRI, nor dismiss its potential to make important scientific discoveries.

04-20-09 | Serving Twinkies While Rome Burns

By Ross Wiener
The answer is a mix of politics and profits, two things that should not get in the way of national standards for school nutrition to help better educate our youngsters.

04-17-09 | Ethics Triumph

By Michael Rugnetta
The new rules on embryonic stem cell research weigh ethical considerations and sound science. Now that’s progressive.

04-13-09 | How Genes Are Like Plutonium

By David Koepsell
Patenting unmodified genes rewards discovery, not invention. We must prohibit the process and invalidate all claims to unmodified genes to facilitate more open science.

04-01-09 | Our Textbook Problem

By Chris Mooney
Don’t fall for the optimistic spin that some are putting out: What happened in Texas last week was bad, bad, bad for science education.

03-30-09 | Stem Cell Fairy Tales and Stem Cell Fables

By 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.

03-30-09 | Bioethical Transparency

By Sujatha Jesudason
Transparency, trust, and diverse community participation are critical to proper ethical use of biotechnologies. Full disclosure of the policymaking process and extensive public engagement are a must.

03-24-09 | Scientific Integrity Makes a Comeback

By Lisa Ikemoto
A federal court ruled Monday that an FDA decision to limit access to emergency contraception was based on politics and ignored scientific advice. The move highlights the importance of Obama administration directives to protect scientific integrity in the policymaking process.

03-23-09 | No Bailout for Biodiversity

By Rick Weiss
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.

03-19-09 | Reproductive Freedom

By Kavita R. Shah and Frances R. Batzer
Patients should have the autonomy to make their own medical decisions such as whether to have or not have a child. And physicians should have the freedom to refuse a request if they feel the patient would be compromising the quality of life of the resulting child.

03-18-09 | New Stem Cell Policy Founded on Ethics and Expertise

By Jonathan D. Moreno and Michael Rugnetta
Predictably, President Obama has run into some political pushback on last week’s Executive Order. The complaints have arisen primarily over two issues, neither of which is substantial and both of which deserve to be countered.

03-17-09 | Our Inequitable Immigrant Vaccination Policy

By Aysha Akhtar, MD, MPH
Vaccine policy in the United States is riddled with inconsistencies that are prejudiced against those coming into the country and which undermine the system as a whole.

03-16-09 | Snack Shelf Epidemic

By Rick Weiss
The peanut product recalls continue, revealing more cracks up and down the food safety system. And people keep getting sick.

03-10-09 | Designing Baby Neanderthals

By Gregory E. Kaebnick
Researchers recently reported reconstruction of the Neanderthal genome, which raises the possibility of reconstructing the species. The problem here concerns what we do to sentient creatures, not what we do to nature.

03-09-09 | Obama Lifts Stem Cell Restrictions

By Science Progress
With the stroke of a pen, President Barack Obama today erased the Bush administration’s eight-year-old restrictions on federal funding of research involving human embryonic stem cells, reaffirming his commitment to evidence and biomedical hope over his predecessor’s ideological distortion of science.

03-06-09 | New Era for Stem Cell Research

By Jonathan D. Moreno and Rick Weiss
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.

03-03-09 | Cheaper by the Dozen

By Nancy Scola
The salmonella-contaminated peanut outbreak is raising alarm over the U.S.’s fractured food system—a system “organics” and conventional mass-market foods often travel through side-by-side.

03-02-09 | Age, Race, Religion, Sex, Disability…and DNA

By Rick Weiss
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.

02-23-09 | Multiple Choice

By Jessica Arons and Shira Saperstein
Questions about whether to regulate fertility treatments differ in distinct ways from debates over the regulation of abortion care.

02-23-09 | The Big Business of Nano Litigation

By Rick Weiss
A recent conference examining the legal protections corporations are taking to defend themselves in the event their products turn toxic should raise regulatory questions.

02-18-09 | Is Sunlight Always the Best Disinfectant?

By Michael J. Werner and Ari Stern
If the end goal is to encourage high quality science, we need to better understand the impact of financial conflicts of interest and get more information about whether existing policies to manage them are effective.

02-17-09 | Vaccines Are Safe and Vital

By Mike Pazos
Last week, the British Sunday Times reported that the original study which sparked a ten-year debate about vaccine safety and autism was based on faulty data. Days later, a special U.S. court ruled that there is little to no evidence linking vaccines to autism. Together, the two events may cool a simmering debate about how to protect young children’s health.

02-13-09 | Baby Bailouts and Benetton Babies

By Jonathan D. Moreno
Two stories in the news this week call for the establishment of international standards for reproductive services that draw a line between procedures that are medically appropriate and scientifically compelling.

02-12-09 | Darwin’s Dangerous Descendant

By Chris Mooney, interviewer
Screenwriter Matthew Chapman, the great-great grandson of the great great scientist, reflects upon science, politics, and culture 200 years after Darwin’s birth.

02-09-09 | Does Science Threaten Democracy?

By Erik Parens
A recent book examining the errors of progressives and conservatives in scientific debates provides a fruitful accounting of the arguments. But grouping the left with science and the right with tradition is a flawed approach to talking about science policy.

02-09-09 | Readying the Global Flu Shot

By Rick Weiss
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.

02-03-09 | Web of Care

By Joseph J. Fins
A physician and ethicist observes that electronic medical records can act as public documents in the context of the local medical community where one’s local reputation as a clinician is forged. With them, all care is now witnessed, open to local peer review: others can read what I write and assess its content, clinical judgment, and quality.

02-03-09 | Harnessing Complex Hospital Care

By Evan G. DeRenzo, PhD, Jack Schwartz, JD, and Steven Selinger, MD
Our health care system needs a systems-based approach to excellence in the care of hospitalized patients to ensure efficiency, empathy and the highest quality medical treatments.

01-30-09 | Change Young Scientists Can Believe In

By Beryl Lieff Benderly
Increased federal funding of basic research must be accompanied by thoroughgoing reform of the grant process to create a new generation of American researchers.

01-26-09 | Unsavory Snacks

By Rick Weiss
Part of the problem behind the recent spread of Salmonella-infected peanut paste products is a disastrously underfunded FDA.

01-14-09 | Eugenic Statecraft in the Operating Room

By Jonathan Moreno, interviewer
In his recent book, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell, Lombardo investigates the history behind the 1927 Supreme Court ruling that upheld a Virginia law allowing state-mandated sterilizations for citizens deemed “socially inferior.”

01-12-09 | Speedy FDA Process Gets Observers’ Goats

By Rick Weiss
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.

12-19-08 | Not Up to Standards

By Jessica Arons
The new regulation disrupts the careful balance established by medical codes of conduct and standards of care, placing the health, well-being, and dignity of patients at risk.

12-16-08 | Next Steps for Progressive Stem Cell Politics

By Marcy Darnovsky, PhD
In the wake of the Bush administration’s policies, we will have the political space to craft a pro-research stand that simultaneously highlights the need for consistent and enforceable regulation, for hope without hype, and for developing human biotechnologies according to principles of social justice and human rights.

12-15-08 | Public Nano-tudes

By Rick Weiss
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.

12-12-08 | How Reducing Negligible Risks Drives Up Health Costs

By Donald Light
The over-prescription of statins is costing Americans billions, and the media is complicit with the problem. An independent national institute that compared the effectiveness of treatments could reduce unnecessary spending.

12-08-08 | Screening Newborn Screening

By Rick Weiss
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.

12-02-08 | Deciphering Today’s Signature War Injury

By Beryl Lieff Benderly
Traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder are major clinical challenges for doctors treating soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Although very different in nature, the symptoms of the two conditions overlap, making diagnosis and treatment difficult.

12-01-08 | Building a Better Bird

By Rick Weiss
Whether by DNA manipulation or old-fashioned selective breeding, we engineer our food. Is it time to get over it?

11-25-08 | Medicare Costs and the Income Trap

By Peter Ubel
Biomedical research cannot solve all the problems of public health. An effective overhaul of the current system won’t happen without attention to some basic psychology and economics.

11-24-08 | Entrance Strategy

By Rick Weiss
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?

11-19-08 | No Virtue In Fatalism

By Adrienne M. Martin
Refusing to pursue recent and possible future developments in medical research is itself a morally momentous decision—and that inaction has consequences Cohen and other right-wing thinkers refuse to acknowledge.

11-18-08 | The Revolution Will Be Personalized

By Rick Weiss
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.

11-12-08 | Synthetic Biology

By Denise Caruso
Synthetic biology is on the brink of two noteworthy accomplishments: to be able to “streamline” and redesign the genetic material of living organisms to make them operate more efficiently; and to design and assemble entirely new, artificial life forms from scratch. But a lengthy list of potential risks, as well as broad scientific and social concerns, are largely unaddressed.

11-10-08 | A Taxonomy of Scientific Appointments

By Rick Weiss
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.