February 16, 2015
(The Telegraph) – Mary Portas has disclosed how her own brother helped her become a mother for the third time, after becoming a donor for an IVF procedure. Portas, nicknamed the “Queen of Shops”, has told how her wife Melanie … Read More
February 11, 2015
(The Wall Street Journal) – J. Craig Venter is in the life business. The co-founder and chief executive of Human Longevity Inc. has had his hand in any number of projects related to the nuts and bolts of existence—from sequencing … 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
February 5, 2015
(New York Times) – Dr. Margaret Hamburg, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, who led the agency for nearly six years through a period of rapid change in medical science, announced Thursday that she is stepping down.
February 3, 2015
(Time) – The father of the birth control pill — who died Jan. 30 — was part of the extensive history of people trying to prevent pregnancy. Writing in the New York Review of Books last year, Carl Djerassi declared … Read More
January 27, 2015
(Slate) – Answer by Kiel Majewski, executive director, CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center, the only organization dedicated to the memory of the twin victims and survivors of medical experimentation at Auschwitz: In my analysis of Josef Mengele, which I and … Read More
January 22, 2015
(Vice Sports) – After the three-month break, Engelbrecht went in for another checkup. He can rattle off the date without thinking: November 13, 2013, the day doctors told him they doubted he’d ever play soccer again; continuing to do so … Read More
January 7, 2015
(The Washington Post) – Lost in the extensive media coverage of Mario Cuomo’s recent death was mention of one of the former governor’s most enduring achievements: the New York state biomedical Task Force on Life and the Law. During his … Read More
December 3, 2014
(U.S. News and World Report) – The first major U.S. polio epidemic occurred in 1894 in Vermont, with 132 cases. New York City experienced its first large-scale outbreak in 1916, with more than 27,000 cases and 6,000 deaths. By the … Read More
December 3, 2014
(BBC) – Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain’s pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence. He told the BBC:”The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the … Read More
December 2, 2014
(Chicago Tribune) – John F. Kilner, Professor of Bioethics and Contemporary Culture and director of bioethics degree programs at Trinity International University, was recently awarded the 2015 Paul Ramsey Award for Excellence in Bioethics by The Center for Bioethics and … Read More
October 28, 2014
(Scientific American) – The first vaccine against polio, developed by Jonas Salk in 1954 while he was at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, registered a success rate of only 60 to 90 percent. Yet the incidence of polio … Read More
October 24, 2014
(Associated Press) – The whistleblower who exposed breakthrough cloning research as a devastating fake says South Korea is still dominated by the values that allowed science fraudster Hwang Woo-suk to become an almost untouchable national hero. In an interview with … Read More
October 24, 2014
(Bloomberg Businessweek) – Originally the procedure had been scheduled for Sooam’s headquarters in Seoul, where Hwang, 61, runs the only facility on earth that clones dogs for customers willing to pay $100,000. He led the team that cloned the first … Read More
October 10, 2014
(Times Higher Education) – Enter eugenics. Whereas Charles Darwin’s natural selection described what he saw in nature, his half-cousin Francis Galton’s national selection prescribed what action we should take in society. Crucially, this was a prescription for British society, since, … Read More
October 10, 2014
(The Atlantic) – When Pincus met the feminist crusader Margaret Sanger in 1950 and she implored him to go to work on the development of a birth-control pill, he knew the project carried enormous risk. Such a pill would never … Read More
October 8, 2014
(New York Times) – Thomas Eric Duncan, 42, the patient with the first case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States and the Liberian man at the center of a widening public health scare, died in isolation at a hospital … Read More
October 7, 2014
(Reuters) – British-American John O’Keefe and Norwegians May-Britt and Edvard Moser won the 2014 Nobel Prize for medicine for discovering the brain’s navigation system and giving clues as to how strokes and Alzheimer’s disrupt it. The Nobel Assembly, which awarded … Read More
September 30, 2014
(ABC.net) – Euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke has called for Australian prisoners jailed with no prospect of release to be given the option of euthanasia. The calls came after a court in Belgium granted killer Frank van den Bleeken the right … Read More
September 29, 2014
(Boston Globe) – Gerald A. Larue, an ordained minister, scholar, and eventual agnostic who, as the first president of the Hemlock Society, was an early and leading advocate of giving the terminally ill the option to end their own lives, … Read More
September 25, 2014
(The Atlantic) – In 1956, Dr. Felix Deutsch was invited to Boston to address the American Psychosomatic Society and offer reflections on Sigmund Freud’s 100th birthday. He asked the assembly to consider the following question: “How much and when shall … Read More
September 25, 2014
University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics November 14, 2014 Northrop Auditorium University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN See here for more information.
September 22, 2014
(The Atlantic) – On the second day of March 1950, Helen Keller showed up at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. There, she encountered Norbert Wiener, the mathematician and engineer best known as the father of cybernetics. It was a meeting … Read More
September 19, 2014
(BBC) – Referrals to breast cancer clinics more than doubled in the UK after Angelina Jolie announced she had had a double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer. The actress revealed in May last year she had had the surgery, after … Read More
September 18, 2014
(Daily Mail) – Sherri Shepherd has removed the newborn baby boy she had via surrogate from her health insurance, claims estranged husband Lamar Sally. The TV writer opens up about the custody battle over Lamar Jr (or as he calls … Read More
