The US adolescents who signed up for the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) in the 1970s were the smartest of the smart, with mathematical and verbal-reasoning skills within the top 1% of the population. Now, researchers at BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) in Shenzhen, China, the largest gene-sequencing facility in the world, are searching for the quirks of DNA that may contribute to such gifts. (Nature)

Nearly two years ago, the US government office that oversees human research ethics launched the first-ever major revision to the so-called Common Rule, the 22-year-old regulation that governs the protection of human research subjects there. But the process set into motion by that agency—the Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP), a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—is dragging on. And a vocal contingent of bioethicists and researchers say the changes on the table are not enough to fix an outdated and overburdened system, advocating instead for a more fundamental rethink. (Nature)

McGill University post-doctoral fellow Spencer Phillips Hey and Prof. Jonathan Kimmelman, Biomedical Ethics, Social Studies of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine argue that some clinical trials of new drugs need to fail in order to protect study volunteers and healthcare systems. Their work is published this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine. (Medical Xpress)

In an article appearing in the May 8 edition of Science Translational Medicine, Spencer Phillips Hey, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University, and Jonathan Kimmelman, Ph.D., of the Studies for Translation, Ethics, and Medicine Group (STREAM), Biomedical Ethics Unit, McGill University point out the potential ethical and social trade-offs resulting from clinical trial reforms aimed at boosting Phase II positive predictivity. (Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News)

There is worldwide concern in the biomedical research community that enrollment in clinical trials is lagging, putting clinical research and consequent benefits to society in jeopardy. Experts explore ways to embed patient voices and values in clinical research in the current issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings. (Medical Xpress)

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Monday he had sacked his justice minister for starting a row with Germany by accusing its scientists of embryo trafficking and testing. (AFP)

Major academic medical centers in New York and around the country are spending and recruiting heavily in what has become an arms race within the war on cancer. The investments are based on the belief that the medical establishment is moving toward the routine sequencing of every patient’s genome in the quest for “precision medicine,” a course for prevention and treatment based on the special, even unique characteristics of the patient’s genes. (New York Times)

Two pioneering researchers of brain disease among athletes in violent sports recommended Saturday that investigators conduct special autopsy tests on amateur boxer Tamerlan Tsarnaev to determine whether the Boston Marathon bombing suspect could have been affected by boxing-related brain damage. (Boston.com)

Yesterday, on the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum, Carl Elliott pondered the question of why a petition asking the governor of Minnesota to investigate ethically problematic research at the University of Minnesota has gathered hundreds of signatures from scholars in bioethics, clinical research, medical humanities, and related disciplines — but only a handful of signatures from scholars and researchers at the University of Minnesota. (Scientific American)

Australian doctors are using radical gene therapy to help treat a rare and aggressive childhood brain cancer, offering hope to young sufferers and their families. (ABC.net)

US institute launches effort to probe exceptional treatment responses. (Nature)

The FDA in 2011 announced years’ worth of studies from a major drug research lab were potentially worthless, yet it has yet to pull any of the drugs from the market and has yet to name the drugs. (Scientific American)

A team of researchers from the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine are currently under fire for allegedly altering research data for favorable results, and possibly doing clinical stem cell trials on humans without the required animal testing phase. (Japan Daily Press)

Brain studies are  the current darling of the sciences, research capable of garnering  tens or even hundreds of millions in new funding for ambitious new projects, the kind of money that was once reserved only for big physics projects. (Scientific American)

When a former stem cell researcher at the Joslin Diabetes Center was found to have committed scientific misconduct last year, the report detailing her wrongdoing was brief and succinct. An investigation had revealed that Shane Mayack reused images from unrelated experiments in two scientific papers, according to a note government authorities published in the Federal Register in August. (Boston.com)

A series of recent scientific results suggest that, in the not-too-distant future, it will be possible to create viable human gametes from human stem cells. This paper discusses the potential of this technology to make possible what I call ‘in vitro eugenics’: the deliberate breeding of human beings in vitro by fusing sperm and egg derived from different stem-cell lines to create an embryo and then deriving new gametes from stem cells derived from that embryo. (J. Med. Ethics)

The astonishing story of Henrietta Lacks, who died of cancer in 1951 but whose still living cells are now the basis for much medical research, has captivated the U.S. for the past two years — and there is no sign of the debate, or its controversies, abating. (Japan Times)

According to China’s health ministry, 336 million abortions have been performed since the country instituted its one-child policy in 1971. How do researchers count abortions? (Slate)

Health research projects are increasingly being conducted that do not fit the standard picture of biomedical research…Such participant-led research (PLR) is gaining popularity and attention, especially as its outcomes have started infiltrating peer-reviewed scientific journals. (The Scientist)

Nina Desai, Ph.D., a researcher at the Cleveland Clinic, says with the EmbryoScope, “You’re looking at real-time imaging of embryos as they develop. You can look at 12 embryos at a time without removing the embryo from the safety of the incubator itself.” (NBC News)

A new issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (February 28, 2013) is now available online and in print.

There is an extended debate on Open Access, Patient Privacy, and the future of medical publishing including:

• Protecting Patient Privacy and Data Security by JK Taitsman, CM Grimm, and S Agrawal
• For the Sake of Inquiry and Knowledge — The Inevitability of Open Access by AJ Wolpert (Free Full Text)
• The Downside of Open-Access Publishing by C Haug (Free Full Text)