December 15, 2023
(KFF Health News) – Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy nonprofit, reports today that between 2010 and 2022, the drug industry’s main lobbying group and member companies provided at least $6 billion in grants to more than 20,000 organizations. The analysis, … Read More
December 15, 2023
(Washington Post) – Upon their deaths, one of the Smithsonian Institution’s top anthropologists, Ales Hrdlicka, enlisted the local institutions and doctors to help him remove their brains to build a “racial brain collection.” Hrdlicka, who sought brains and other body … Read More
December 14, 2023
(New York Times) – Ms. Sato is one of thousands of fitness professionals who have sought out cadaver workshops to better understand anatomy and improve their teaching skills. Over the past two decades, at least a dozen dissection courses — … Read More
December 14, 2023
(NBC News) – As the opioid epidemic continues raging, some advocates in Kentucky are pushing the state to explore a little-known psychedelic drug called ibogaine as a possible treatment option for addiction, a move, they say, could save lives. A … Read More
December 14, 2023
(MIT Technology Review) – Vertex Pharmaceuticals has agreed to buy rights to use a dominant CRISPR patent owned by the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, avoiding a potential lawsuit over its new gene-editing treatment for sickle-cell disease. The agreement … 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 14, 2023
December 13, 2023
(Rolling Stone) – When a grieving son or daughter hands over their loved one to Harvard, they’re trusting the storied institution to handle them with respect. They’re passing over their parent or grandparent believing that they’re in safe hands with … Read More
December 12, 2023
(The Atlantic) – Just as the technology has blurred the line between human-created and computer-generated text and images—upending how people work, learn, and socialize—AI tools are accelerating and refashioning some of the basic elements of science. “We can really make … 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 7, 2023
(The Washington Times) – U.S. national security officials say they have made significant changes to their experiments on human subjects since a botched research project in 1953 led to the death of an LSD-drugged CIA scientist who fell from a … Read More
December 6, 2023
(STAT News) – Trading her chances of having children naturally for a chance at freedom from a debilitating genetic disease was a difficult choice. But at least Tornyenu was presented with the option of preserving the possibility of having biological … Read More
December 5, 2023
(STAT News) – Given the widespread acceptance that the current flu vaccines could use improvement, are mRNA shots the answer? As the scientific world waits for published data on which to formulate conclusions, STAT spoke to influenza and vaccine experts … Read More
December 5, 2023
December 4, 2023
(JAMA News) – Dozens of businesses selling unapproved stem cell treatments and exosome therapies for COVID-19 have pivoted toward targeting people with post–COVID-19 condition, or long COVID, according to an analysis of the businesses’ marketing practices. (Read More)
December 4, 2023
(New York Times) – Traumatic brain injuries have left more than five million Americans permanently disabled. They have trouble focusing on even simple tasks and often have to quit jobs or drop out of school. A study published on Monday … Read More
December 4, 2023
(BBC) – Australia’s prime minister has given a national apology to survivors of the thalidomide scandal and their families. It comes over 60 years after the morning sickness drug started causing birth defects in babies globally. (Read More)
December 4, 2023
(MIT Technology Review) – On a picturesque fall day a few years ago, I opened the mailbox and took out an envelope as thick as a Bible that would change my life. The package was from Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and it … Read More
December 4, 2023
December 1, 2023
(MIT Technology Review) – By the middle of December, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, based in Boston, is expected to receive FDA approval to sell a revolutionary new treatment for sickle-cell disease that’s the first to use CRISPR to alter the DNA inside … Read More
November 30, 2023
(Wall Street Journal) – In the quest to help people live longer, scientists and companies are turning to dogs. Humans have greater genetic similarities to dogs than other common subjects of aging research, like mice. Our species get many of … Read More
November 30, 2023
(Wall Street Journal) – Johnson & Johnson is making one of the biggest bets in the healthcare industry on using data science and artificial intelligence to bolster its work. The 137-year-old pharmaceutical and medical-device company has hired 6,000 data scientists … Read More
November 30, 2023
(MIT Technology Review) – Money can’t buy happiness, but X Prize founder Peter Diamandis hopes it might be able to buy better health. Today the X Prize Foundation, which funds global competitions to spark development of breakthrough technologies, announced a … Read More
November 29, 2023
November 28, 2023
(Nature) – Scholl is not alone in his altruism. He was among thousands of people who answered a global call for challenge-trial volunteers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The effort was spearheaded by an advocacy group called 1Day Sooner, which aimed … Read More
