February 26, 2024
(STAT News) – If UCSF is known for birthing the field of fetal surgery, UC Berkeley, located a short drive across the Bay Bridge, is famous in biomedical circles for pioneering CRISPR gene editing, the most powerful DNA-manipulating tool ever … Read More
February 20, 2024
(KFF Health News) – The Catholic Church’s directives are often at odds with accepted medical standards, especially in areas of reproductive health, according to physicians and other medical practitioners. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ clinical guidelines for managing … Read More
February 15, 2024
(New York Times) – There is a lot going on for Father Benanti, who, as both the Vatican’s and the Italian government’s go-to artificial intelligence ethicist, spends his days thinking about the Holy Ghost and the ghosts in the machines. … Read More
February 14, 2024
(The Atlantic) – Death reminds us of the limits of romantic love, but it also sets romantic love free. It allows love to take its place alongside other goods, some that last and others that are fleeting. Death brings a … Read More
February 13, 2024
(New York Times) – Brooke Ellison, who after being paralyzed from the neck down by a childhood car accident went on to graduate from Harvard and became a professor and a devoted disability rights advocate, died on Sunday in Stony … Read More
February 8, 2024
(Public Discourse) – Despite the lip service given to the “all are welcome” ethos of medical education, the culture of the medical profession typically implies that there is actually a very narrow set of “acceptable” anthropological perspectives that a physician … Read More
February 6, 2024
(Commonweal) – In December, the AI Research Group for the Vatican Centre for Digital Culture released Encountering AI: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations, a study of artificial intelligence and its role in human life and society. The result is a book … Read More
February 5, 2024
(BBC) – King Charles has been diagnosed with a form of cancer, says Buckingham Palace. The type of cancer has not been revealed – it is not prostate cancer, but was discovered during his recent treatment for an enlarged prostate. … Read More
February 2, 2024
(Nature) – A row over a building once used by chemist Marie Sk?odowska-Curie has been resolved following negotiations between the French culture ministry and a group of scientists who want to demolish the site to build a leading cancer-research centre. … Read More
January 25, 2024
(Associated Press) – Almost 80 years after the Holocaust, about 245,000 Jewish survivors are still living across more than 90 countries, a new report revealed Tuesday. Nearly half of them, or 49%, are living in Israel; 18% are in Western … Read More
January 24, 2024
(New York Times) – Maximila Imali, a top Kenyan sprinter, did not lose her eligibility to compete in the Paris Olympics because she cheated. She did not fail a doping test. She broke no rules. Instead, she is set to … Read More
January 24, 2024
(Gallup) – Americans’ ratings of nearly all 23 professions measured in Gallup’s 2023 Honesty and Ethics poll are lower than they have been in recent years. Only one profession — labor union leaders — has not declined since 2019, yet … Read More
January 22, 2024
(Ars Technica) – Elizabeth Holmes—the disgraced and incarcerated founder of the infamous blood-testing startup Theranos—is barred from participating in federal health programs for nine decades, according to an announcement from the health department Friday. The exclusion means that Holmes is … Read More
January 17, 2024
(New York Times) – Among other achievements, Dr. Fagin was widely credited with overturning the common practice of strictly limiting parental visits to hospitalized children. She was inspired (and infuriated) by what happened in the early 1960s when she and … Read More
January 16, 2024
(New York Times) – There are groundbreaking surgeons and groundbreaking researchers, but very few people are both. Dr. Calne (pronounced “kahn”) was an exception: He developed and practiced many of the operating techniques involved in transplantation, while at the same … Read More
January 9, 2024
(Associated Press) – Pope Francis called Monday for a universal ban on what he called the “despicable” practice of surrogate motherhood, as he included the “commercialization” of pregnancy in an annual speech listing threats to global peace and human dignity. … Read More
January 5, 2024
(The Conversation) – In 15 years as a primary care physician, I have seen the effects of dehumanizing medical care – and the difference it makes when a patient feels they are being respected, not just “treated.” Though “relational medicine” … Read More
January 5, 2024
(Associated Press) – The family of former U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson said Thursday that the trailblazing Texas congresswoman, who died over the weekend at age 89, passed away after getting an infection and accused a Dallas rehabilitation facility of … Read More
December 28, 2023
(STAT News) – Women who had undergone disfiguring surgery for breast cancer, according to one surgeon in the 1970s, needed to “stick an old sock in their bra and get on with their lives.” It was this climate that Betty … Read More
December 14, 2023
(Wired) – Right now, though, it’s still a rarefied treatment. “It’s expensive,” Jennifer Doudna, the pioneering biochemist who won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for her work on Crispr, told WIRED’s Emily Mullin at the LiveWIRED conference this week in … Read More
December 11, 2023
(The New Yorker) – We routinely test for chemicals that cause mutations. What about the dark matter of carcinogens–substances that don’t create cancer cells but rouse them from their slumber? [Article by Siddhartha Mukherjee] (Read More)
December 11, 2023
(Associated Press) – Renowned Chinese doctor and activist Gao Yaojie who exposed the AIDS virus epidemic in rural China in the 1990s died Sunday at the age of 95 at her home in the United States. Gao’s outspokenness about the … Read More
December 6, 2023
(New York Times) – Dr. William P. Murphy Jr., a biomedical engineer who was an inventor of the vinyl blood bag that replaced breakable bottles in the Korean War and made transfusions safe and reliable on battlefields, in hospitals and … Read More
December 5, 2023
(Vox) – Despite the past two decades of research documenting the tight relationship between psychedelics and meaningful experiences, we still know surprisingly little about what’s actually going on in the brain when psychedelic-assisted meaning sets in. In a paper published … Read More
November 28, 2023
(Wired) – The lack of women in the AI field has been an issue for years; in 2018, WIRED estimated that only 12 percent of leading machine learning researchers were women. In 2020, the World Economic Forum found that only … Read More
