Cross posted from Nature’s news blog blog on behalf of Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib.
In the wake of the 2010 discovery that U.S. government-funded scientists intentionally infected unknowing Guatemalan citizens with syphilis in the 1940s, President Obama has asked his Commission on for the Study of Bioethical Issues to take a good hard look at whether human subjects today are adequately protected in federally funded research.
At the commission’s 5th meeting on 18-19 May in the Warwick New York Hotel, an invited panel’s words rang loud and clear: the system may provide adequate protection, but it’s a mess.
“What began as a venture in confronting the misuse and abuse of research subjects has become a bureaucratized system of regulation that often misses the core of what the mission had begun to do,” says Ronald Bayer, a professor and co-chair of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University in New York City. He adds that regulation plays a crucial role, especially in light of history, but the core issues have fallen by the wayside.
Continue reading on the Nature news blog.
Each year, an estimated 30,000 people in Africa are diagnosed with the crippling muscle wasting disease known as sleeping sickness. But the problem is far worse for the dairy and meat-producing cattle upon which their lives depend, as an estimated 5 billion cows die of Nagana, the animal form of the disease. Now, scientists hope to generate heartier, disease-resistant cattle — and the discovery of two new genes reported this week could help with that goal.
On 3 April, Qatar unveiled its first National Health Strategy (
Singapore, the fastest growing economy in Asia last year, has enjoyed a decade of free-flowing research funding. Money is still pouring in, but the question remains whether money can buy international-class science, especially after the sudden attachment of strings to grant money starting last fall. Perhaps the best person to answer this question is Sir George Radda (he received his knighthood in 2000). Radda was the chief executive of the UK’s Medical Research Council (
In Kettleman City, California, a town of 1,620 people, 11 babies were born with severe birth defects in the last three years. Meanwhile, at least 60 men who lived on the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base in North Carolina from the late 1950s into the 1980s have developed breast cancer. And residents in Wellington, Ohio are three times more likely to develop multiple sclerosis than in the rest of the country.
