07-20-09 | The War on Science Didn’t Damage Support for Research

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 [...]

06-12-09 | NIH By the Numbers: Challenge Grants, Stem Cell Comments, and Conflict of Interest Rules

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 [...]

05-28-09 | Would You Like Some Data With Your Safer Food?

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 [...]

05-20-09 | Data Bank: Health Information Technology

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 [...]

03-05-09 | Open Source, Open Data

The open source development community is ready to help Washington open up. But first they need the data in an open, structured form.

03-02-09 | Data Bank: Consumer Genetic Testing and Cases of Genetic Discrimination

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 [...]