The two scientists behind the lawsuit that has temporarily blocked federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research said Wednesday they were motivated by ethical objections to destroying human embryos for medical research. (Wall Street Journal)

Some months ago, the receptionist in my clinic handed me a registered letter. The name of the sender seemed familiar. “Dear Sir,” the letter read. “Please be advised that this letter serves as official notice that I am considering a potential claim against you in a medical Malpractice claim in regard to my husband. . . .” I stood, stunned. My white coat, which held the daily tools of my profession — my list of patients, the Sanford antibiotic manual, a black stethoscope — felt extraordinarily heavy. (Washington Post)

Allergan Inc., the maker of wrinkle-smoothing Botox, has agreed to pay $600 million to settle a years long federal investigation into its marketing of the top-selling, botulin-based drug. (GazetteXtra)

If attendees at the Minnesota State Fair aren’t too busy revelling in the performances of Kiss or “Weird Al” Yankovic, or enjoying a celebrity cow-milking contest, they might just try spitting for science. (Nature News)

Australians are helping fuel a predatory international transplant trade by travelling overseas to buy organs illegally.

The Transplantation Society says there are still Australians willing to ignore health and ethical considerations to source organs on the overseas market. (ABC News)

Over the past few years, pharmaceutical research has become more commercialized and market-driven. For two bioethicists, that raises questions about the quality of the data in drug trials, and the safety of the participants in those trials. (Minnesota Public Radio)

Looks like the brave new world has finally arrived. The website BeautifulPeople.com reportedly “booted out 5,000 people who gained weight and were deemed too ugly to remain members”. (R & D Mag)

A federal decision not to fund clinical trials for an experimental multiple sclerosis treatment cannot stop Saskatchewan from going ahead, but the province would have other scientific and ethical hoops to jump through first. (Healthzone.ca)

The US National Nanotechnology Initiative has spent billions of dollars on submicroscopic science in its first 10 years. Corie Lok finds out where the money went and what the initiative plans to do next. (Nature News)

ALL TOO often, patients with terminal illnesses turn to the pain medication and counseling of palliative care only after enduring wrenching treatments that have little chance of extending their lives. But what if palliative care began immediately after the diagnosis and while the disease is still being treated? The answer, according to a study at Massachusetts General Hospital, is that patients treated this way enjoy a higher quality of life and live longer. In addition, they are more likely than patients not receiving palliative care to forgo 11th hour therapies. (The Boston Globe)

As counsel for the researcher plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) on experiments using human embryonic stem cells, I write to correct your assertion that the progress of the suit poses a threat to “the very framework of federal funding for science” [Premium (Nature)]

The Obama administration asked a federal judge Tuesday to allow the government to continue funding embryonic stem-cell research while a case challenging the program makes its way through the courts. (Wall Street Journal)

Tens of millions of people in low and middle income countries would be pushed below the poverty line by buying common but vital medicines which are already unaffordable to hundreds of millions more, a study has found. (Reuters)

The old stereotype of the gold-digging hussy who gets pregnant to trap a man into marriage seems to have faded, probably because women are not as economically dependent on men as they once were. But that’s not to say that pregnancy is no longer being wielded as a weapon: researchers who work in family planning and with victims of domestic violence say it is women who are now being threatened with pregnancy by their partners. (TIME)

Brazilians endlessly repeat the old saw that the world thinks of only three things when it thinks of Brazil: samba, carnivale and football. But its healthcare industry would like to add a fourth–surgery. As part of Brazil’s efforts to leverage both the tourists and the infrastructure investments expected in the wake of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, the country hosted its first medical tourism conference last week in São Paulo. (Fast Company)

round 12,000 Germans are waiting for an organ donation. Some politicians think that a model where everyone is presumed to be a donor unless they have said otherwise could give a much-needed boost to organ donation. (Deutsche Welle)

Illegal organ harvesting has become worse under reforms put in place by the Chinese leadership to stop it, says a Canadian human rights lawyer. (Epoch Times)

The New England Journal of Medicine (Volume 363, August 2010) is now available by subscription only.

Articles include:

• “Suicide-Related Events in Patients Treated with Antiepileptic Drugs” by A. Arana, C. E. Wentworth, J. L. Ayuso-Mateos, and F. M. Arellano, 542-551.

The American Journal of Bioethics (Volume 10, Issue 8, 2010) is now available by subscription only.

Articles include:

• “Patient Willingness to be Seen by Physician Assistants, Nurse Practitioners, and Residents in the Emergency Department: Does the Presumption of Assent Have an Empirical Basis?” by Gregory L. Larkin and Roderick S. Hooker, 1-10.
• “Striking the Right Balance in Research Ethics and Regulation” by Franklin G. Miller, 65.

Journal of Applied Philosophy (Volume 27, Issue 3, 2010) is now available by subscription only.

Articles include:

• “Emergency Contraception and Conscientious Objection” by J. Paul Kelleher, 290-304.

• “A Puzzle about Consent in Research and in Practice” by Eric Chwang, 258-272.

That science and politics are nonoverlapping magisteria (vide Stephen Jay Gould’s model separating science and religion) was long my position until I read Timothy Ferris’s new book The Science of Liberty (HarperCollins, 2010). Ferris, the best-selling author of such science classics as Coming of Age in the Milky Way and The Whole Shebang, has bravely ventured across the magisterial divide to argue that the scientific values of reason, empiricism and antiauthoritarianism are not the product of liberal democracy but the producers of it. (Scientific American)