August 16, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – The US government just hired a researcher who thinks we can beat aging with fresh cloned bodies and brain updates. A US agency pursuing moonshot health breakthroughs has hired a researcher advocating an extremely radical plan … Read More
August 16, 2024
(The Conversation) – I’m a medical anthropologist and bioethicist who studies the values and experiences driving prenatal gene therapy developments, including genome editing. Human prenatal genome editing has not happened yet – as far as we know. Prenatal genome editing … Read More
August 16, 2024
Journal of Bioethical Inquiry (vol. 21, no. 2, 2024) is available online by subscription only. Articles include:
August 15, 2024
(Wired) – After the FDA rejected its proposed MDMA treatment, Lykos Therapeutics is laying off 75 percent of its staff and its founder has left the company. The FDA decision underscores the difficulty of getting regulatory approval for a psychedelic-based … Read More
August 15, 2024
(The New Yorker) – Most new diseases have their origins in animals. So why aren’t we paying more attention to their health? Diseases cross over very rarely, with less than a tenth of one per cent of animal viruses ever … Read More
August 15, 2024
(Axios) – Osteopathic physicians have similar jobs and training to M.D.s. But they say they’re lagging far behind when it comes to representation on federal panels that make key recommendations on medical research funding and policy. Why it matters: The … Read More
August 15, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – Black men and women are at least two times as likely as white Americans to die from strokes. Hospitals around the country have long sought to bring those numbers down. Now, the Cleveland Clinic, a prestigious … Read More
August 15, 2024
(Wired) – In a world first, Harvard biologists worked with Google to diagram a cubic millimeter of human cerebral cortex at the subcellular level, paving the way for the next generation of brain science. This image could be hung in … Read More
August 14, 2024
(STAT News) – STAT spoke with Mariska Vansteensel, a neuroscientist at University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands and president of the international BCI Society, about the field and about a new study that she and her colleagues just published … Read More
August 13, 2024
The New England Journal of Medicine AI (vol. 1, no. 8, 2024) is available online by subscription only. Articles include:
August 12, 2024
(New York Times) – The psychedelic treatment, for PTSD, was rejected last week by government regulators. The journal Psychopharmacology has retracted three papers about MDMA-assisted therapy based on what the publication said was unethical conduct at one of the study … Read More
August 12, 2024
(MedPage Today) – The FDA declined to approve midomafetamine (MDMA) capsules for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), calling for another trial to evaluate the drug’s efficacy and safety, developer Lykos Therapeutics announced on Friday. Lykos said the agency determined that the … Read More
August 9, 2024
(Nature) – An age ‘clock’ based on some 200 proteins found in the blood can predict a person’s risk of developing 18 chronic illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. The clock’s accuracy raises the prospect of developing … Read More
August 9, 2024
The New England Journal of Medicine (vol. 390, no. 23, 2024) is available online by subscription only. Articles include:
August 7, 2024
(Aeon) – When providers and researchers are able-bodied while patients are disabled, the chasm in lived experience, motivation and immersion in every last nuance of a condition can often be vast. In medicine, the traditional model for researching disabilities repeats … Read More
August 5, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – Participants in studies of the psychedelic, which is up for U.S. approval, tell WSJ they felt pressure to report positive outcomes. Studies being used to decide whether the U.S. should authorize an ecstasy-based drug for traumatized … Read More
August 5, 2024
(Reuters) – Neuralink has successfully implanted in a second patient its device designed to give paralyzed patients the ability to use digital devices by thinking alone, according to the startup’s owner Elon Musk. Neuralink is in the process of testing … Read More
August 5, 2024
(The New Yorker) – A mysterious neurological condition makes faces look grotesque—and sheds new light on the inner workings of the brain. In May, 2021, Duchaine interviewed Werbeloff via Zoom. Had Werbeloff suffered any traumatic brain injuries? (No.) Did he … Read More
July 31, 2024
(New York Times) – Kevin Hall, a senior investigator at the N.I.H. who is leading the trial, said that there is a “mountain of epidemiological data” linking ultraprocessed foods to poor health — including 32 health concerns like heart disease, … Read More
July 31, 2024
The Journal of Medicine & Philosophy (vol. 49, no. 4, 2024) is available online by subscription only. Articles include:
July 30, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – Medical tests using small amounts of blood are being rolled out, achieving what the Silicon Valley startup couldn’t The rise and fall of Theranos—the Silicon Valley startup that promised to revolutionize blood testing but ended dissolved, … Read More
July 26, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – He Jiankui, the Chinese biophysicist whose controversial 2018 experiment led to the birth of three gene-edited children, says he’s returned to work on the concept of altering the DNA of people at conception, but with a … Read More
July 25, 2024
(Undark) – Few experts dispute that long Covid can be debilitating, or that it warrants careful study. But in interviews with Undark, a number of experts said that it is misleading to frame long Covid as an increasing threat. The … Read More
July 24, 2024
(New York Times) – Progress in the quest to help progeria patients suggests that gene editing techniques may help treat other ultrarare conditions. A cure for an ultrarare disease, progeria, could be on the horizon. The disease speeds up aging … Read More
July 22, 2024
(Associated Press) – Wide-eyed piglets rushing to check out the visitors to their unusual barn just might represent the future of organ transplantation – and there’s no rolling around in the mud here. The first gene-edited pig organs ever transplanted … Read More
