Medical Regs & Ethics
Humans’ love for simple stories and status quo make opinions intractable in face of fact
Popular opinions about complex issues in science and technology are often held to even when facts and experts are presented ...
Cystic Fibrosis is a simple genetic puzzle, but finding a cure remains difficult
On the face of it, CF is a perfect candidate for gene therapy. It’s literally a textbook genetic disease – ...
Total Recall: Are we nearing the era, for better and worse, of reprogramming memories?
Scientists are edging closer to a time when we can enhance good memories and banish paralyzing ones. While that offers ...
Richard Dawkins’ moral policing aside, new era of fetal diagnostics underway
What would you do if you were pregnant with a fetus affected by a severe disorder? Abortion is often the ...
HIV drug trials disproportionately include white patients, to detriment of African Americans
Many African-Americans may not be getting effective doses of the HIV drug maraviroc, a new study from Johns Hopkins suggests ...
IBM’s Watson will be key tool in genetic analysis
International Business Machines Corp., on Wednesday launched a computer system that can quickly identify patterns in massive amounts of data, ...
Riken institute scales down stem cell research following scandal
A scandal that started with a few suspicious images has led Japan's most prestigious research institute to slash its stem-cell ...
Personal genomics: Care to update your haplogroup status page?
Personalized genomics offers the opportunity to revolutionize medical care and our understanding of disease. But many first adopters won’t wait ...
Former director at UCLA School of Medicine Gregory Stark debates anti-GMO activist Jeffrey Smith
The Vail Symposium held a debate on GMOs and the future of food. The debaters: Gregory Stock is a biophysicist, best-selling author, and the ...
Britain to scrutinize U.S. follow-up on individuals conceived through ‘three-parent’ IVF
A private fertility clinic in the United States has launched an investigation into the health of 17 teenagers who were ...
Ebola drug ‘ZMapp’ shows potential of biopharmed medicine
A handful of patients in the largest-ever Ebola outbreak have been treated with an experimental drug called ZMapp. American missionaries ...
Genome sequencing is getting cheaper, but might make healthcare more expensive
Cheaper genomic sequencing will give more patients and their physicians access to genetics in the healthcare system. But will that ...
Reprogrammed cells create whole, fully functioning organ
Laboratory-grown replacement organs have moved a step closer with the completion of a new study. Scientists have grown a fully ...
Economics of genetic testing and medicine
The first time scientists sequenced a person’s entire genome, it took more than a decade and cost hundreds of millions ...
Should Down syndrome fetuses be terminated? Abortion, Richard Dawkins & morality
Richard Dawkins tweeted that abortion is the moral choice for a Down syndrome fetus. As usual, vilification ensued. But the ...
Where we are in the battle against Ebola
With hundreds of cases of Ebola in Africa, a panel of World Health Organization (WHO) experts has declared it is ...
Beyond autopsies: Using post-mortem brain scans to understand stroke, head injury and death
Besides their ability to lie completely still in MRI scanners, making them excellent patients, corpses have a lot of offer ...
Ten years in, first trial treatment from California’s stem cell initiative approved
It’s been ten years since California voters approved their state-funded stem cell initiative. Critics have charged that the initiative as ...
Efficacy of treatments and the rise of personalized medicine
Personalized medicine is the ability to tailor therapy to an individual patient so that, as it’s often put, the right ...
I’m more afraid of my kids’ genomic data NOT being sequenced than how it might be misused
The era of precision genomics is upon us, and as with GMO foods, that scares some people. But not GLP ...
Human and dogs’ relationship based on dominance hierarchy
For dog lovers, comparative psychologists Friederike Range and Zsófia Virányi have an unsettling conclusion. Many researchers think that as humans ...
Genome sequencing promising for curing lupus, personalized medicine
Medical researchers have used DNA sequencing to identify a gene variant responsible for causing lupus in a young patient. The ...
Interplay of genes, gender, and environment crucial to developing addiction
Studies of substance abusers have long hinted that some people are at least partially genetically predisposed to addiction. This certainly ...
How much can we actually tell from a genome scan?
On August 6, researchers announced in The New England Journal of Medicine that they had found that mutations in a ...
23andMe moves to mend fences with FDA, seeks Bloom syndrome test approval
Seven months after the FDA forced 23andMe to stop reporting health results to its customers, the personal genomics company is ...
Alzheimer’s: Epigenetics and the APOE gene offer new reasons for hope
The genetics of Alzheimer's disease is complicated and still somewhat mysterious. But in the last week, researchers reported on two ...
Genetic empowerment: Extreme athlete probes own genetics to streamline diagnosis
When extreme athlete Kim Goodsell discovered that she had two extremely rare but ostensibly unrelated genetic diseases, she taught herself ...
