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)]

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)

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)

For a while there, things didn’t look too good for British writer Simon Singh. The best-selling author of the science histories Big Bang and Fermat’s Enigma knew he was heading into controversial territory when he switched tracks to cowrite a book investigating alternative medicine, Trick or Treatment? What Singh didn’t count on, however, was that writing a seemingly innocuous article for London’s The Guardian newspaper about especially outrageous chiropractic claims—one of the subjects he researched for the book—would end up threatening his career. The British Chiropractic Association sued Singh, hoping to use Britain’s draconian libel laws to force him to withdraw his statements and issue an apology. Losing the case would have cost Singh both his reputation and a substantial amount of his personal wealth. Such is the state of science, where sometimes even stating simple truths (like the fact that there’s no reliable evidence chiropractic can alleviate asthma in children) can bring the wrath of the antiscience crowd. What the British chiropractors didn’t count on, however, was Singh himself. Having earned a PhD from Cambridge for his work at the Swiss particle physics lab CERN, he wasn’t about to back down from a scientific gunfight. Singh spent more than two years and well over $200,000 of his own money battling the case in court, and this past April he finally prevailed. In the process, he became a hero to those challenging the pseudoscience surrounding everything from global warming to vaccines to evolution. It’s not necessarily a role he sought for himself, but it’s one he has embraced—he’s currently touring the world, talking about his case, libel reform, and how important it is to make sure scientists can speak truthfully and openly. Wired spoke with Singh about his case and the struggle against the forces of irrationality. (Wired Magazine)

The Obama administration is rewriting new rules on medical privacy after an outpouring of criticism from consumer groups and members of Congress who say the rules do not adequately protect the rights of patients. (New York Times)

According to a recent Léger Marketing survey, an extraordinarily high proportion of Quebeckers – 71 per cent – favour decriminalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide. This, in a province that’s been the major bastion of Catholicism in North America for so many decades. The question is so complex, and so deeply fraught with moral issues and potential abuses, that it’s difficult to understand why so many people can opt for a radical solution without being, at least, a little anxious about the consequences of their choice. The Globe and Mail

When the geneticist Francis Collins was named director of the National Institutes of Health, last summer, he became the public face of American science and the keeper of the world’s deepest biomedical-research-funding purse. He was praised by President Obama and waved through the Senate confirmation process without objection. There also came a peer review of a sort that he’d never experienced, conducted in the press and in Internet science forums. Collins read in the Times that many of his colleagues in the scientific community believed that he suffered from “dementia.” Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, questioned the appointment on the ground that Collins was “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.” P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris, complained, “I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.” (The New Yorker)