September 3, 2015
(Scientific American) – Although racial disparities continue to plague the health care system there is one bright spot: the gap in kidney transplants appears to have closed. For the first time rates of such transplants among white and black patients … Read More
August 28, 2015
(The Guardian) – Do a quick survey of recent stories, for example, and you will find research that claims “intelligence, creativity and bipolar disorder may share underlying genetics” and a much-reported story that found that Holocaust survivors may have passed … Read More
August 24, 2015
(The New York Times) – Hospice use has been growing fast in the United States as more people choose to avoid futile, often painful medical treatments in favor of palliative care and dying at home surrounded by loved ones. But … Read More
August 21, 2015
(NPR) – Even as the health of Americans has improved, the disparities in treatment and outcomes between white patients and black and Latino patients are almost as big as they were 50 years ago. A growing body of research suggests … Read More
August 10, 2015
(The Telegraph) – The Edinburgh Fringe 2015 has only just begun. And yet, were there a prize for the most lamentable slab of self-publicity masquerading as a bona fide show, you could already, with considerable confidence, hand it to Dicing … Read More
August 7, 2015
(The Guardian) – A controversial Edinburgh fringe comedy by euthanasia advocate Dr Philip Nitschke, which explores ways to skirt around laws on assisted suicide, is to go ahead after being threatened with closure over safety concerns. The show, titled Dicing … Read More
August 3, 2015
(Los Angeles Times) – UC Irvine has put out a call for artists who want to manipulate the building blocks of life as we know it to create art as we’ve never known it – works made of living organisms … Read More
June 2, 2015
(Politico) – Americans are increasingly taking their laissez-faire attitude outside of the marketplace and into the moral arena. A new Gallup poll released Monday found the numbers of Americans that believe cloning humans, polygamy, having extramarital affairs, and suicide are … Read More
May 27, 2015
(Discover Magazine) – Furiosa has already been hailed by many as one of the strongest female action heroines to grace the silver screen in years. But “Mad Max: Fury Road” is also drawing praise for how it depicts Furiosa as the wearer of an artificial limb without … Read More
April 23, 2015
(Medical Xpress) – Most doctors balk at talking with seriously ill patients about what’s important to them in their final days, especially if the patient’s ethnicity is different than their own, according to a new study by researchers at the … Read More
April 21, 2015
(The Atlantic) – The simple, but profound, point is social inequalities largely determine who lives to grow old and who dies before having the chance. But what about the robust survivors who manage to make it to their “golden years?” … Read More
April 17, 2015
(The New Yorker) – Genetic research has lately progressed so far that, this year, a group of scientists and practitioners gathered in Napa, California, to urge a ban on modifying the genetic material of human sperm, eggs, and embryos, a … Read More
March 25, 2015
(U.S.A. Today) – The conventional wisdom is that young people are strongly pro-choice. While it is not surprising that Baby Boomers and Gen Xers eventually grew more skeptical over time, when they were teenagers and young-adults, they too were all-in … Read More
March 18, 2015
(Nature) – The portrayal of mental-health conditions (or, to be less semantically guarded, mental illnesses) in the media and popular culture has a significant influence on the way that many people view both the conditions and those who have them. … Read More
March 12, 2015
(Medical Xpress) – Their analysis of media coverage showed that most news reports were highly optimistic about the future of stem cell therapies and forecasted unrealistic timelines for clinical use. The study, published in the latest issue of Science Translational … Read More
February 10, 2015
(BBC) – Mr Ngure wa Mwachofi, an expert in social behaviour and communication, says religious and cultural beliefs are to blame for the negative attitude towards organ donation. “Culture is what people have been conditioned to do from the time … Read More
February 10, 2015
(The Guardian) – Pincus, Rock, and two remarkable women – the birth control pioneers Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick – are at the heart of this brilliant book by American journalist Jonathan Eig. It opens with a meeting in New … Read More
January 16, 2015
(ABC News) – On her 50th birthday, Sandy Oltz sat on the film set of “Still Alice” and listened to actress Julianne Moore speak a line that Oltz, an early onset Alzheimer’s patient, had struggled to write. “Please do not … Read More
January 5, 2015
(Tech Times) – A widow is suing ABC television and a New York hospital, saying the network, without her permission, aired footage of her husband’s death in the hospital emergency room where frantic treatment failed to save him after he … Read More
December 19, 2014
(Medical Xpress) – And technologies such as IVF, egg donation and egg freezing allow women to beat the biological clock, freeing them from the tyranny of their own biology. A recent Newsweek headline, for example, announced that women can now … Read More
December 18, 2014
(NPR) – Years of efforts to reduce the racial disparities in health care have so far failed to eliminate them. But progress is being made in the western United States, due largely to efforts by managed care plans to identify … Read More
November 14, 2014
(New York Times) – But if the show had its flaws, the medical themes it raises are much the same as those I encounter as a physician: Are primary-care doctors more true to their profession than specialists? How bad is … Read More
October 27, 2014
Science as Culture (Volume 23, No. 4, December 2014) is now available online by subscription only. Articles Include: “The therapeutic promise of pluripotency and its political use in the Italian stem cell debate” by Lorenzo Beltrame “Fighting fat: the role of ‘field … Read More
October 22, 2014
The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics (Volume 42, No. 3, Fall 2014) is now available online by subscription only. Articles include: “Where do we go from here? An inside look into the development of Georgia’s youth concussion law” by Amanda … Read More
October 21, 2014
(New York Times) – When the Ebola outbreak in West Africa began to escalate a few months ago, the writer Richard Preston was working on a children’s fantasy novel. He dropped that and called David Remnick, the editor of The … Read More
