EU officials plan to give the 27 member states the freedom to grow, restrict or ban genetically modified (GM) crops.
The Indian government raised the global biotechnology stakes yesterday by saying it intended to feed “nutritionally enhanced” GM potatoes to poor children as early as next year.
GENETICALLY modified tomatoes containing edible vaccine are to be used to challenge two of the world’s most lethal viruses.
When the biotech company Bayer CropScience AG requested federal permission in August to market a variety of gene-altered rice, it assured itself a small, unwanted place in history: the first to seek approval for a genetically engineered food that was already — illegally — on the market.
An ethical storm hit the University of California, Berkeley, earlier this year after it invited more than 5,000 incoming students to receive a personal genetic analysis of three genes associated with how they metabolize lactose, alcohol and folic acid.
Ruben Betancourt died on May 29, 2009. Last week, a New Jersey appellate court declined to rule on the heated dispute that had broken out between his family and a North Jersey hospital over stopping his medical care prior to his death.
“The reporting of harm is as important as the reporting of efficacy in publications of clinical trials,” a group of French researchers wrote in a study being published in Tuesday’s edition of Archives of Internal Medicine. “However, harm is frequently insufficiently reported.” How insufficiently?
Does it matter if most of the experts who are creating definitions of mental disorders, and standards for the best way to treat them, receive money from pharmaceutical companies? Critics such as Cosgrove say there’s a damaging conflict of interest in the financial ties between drug companies and leaders who are revising the “bible” of psychiatric diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), as well as guidelines on the best treatments.
IRBs must sign off on clinical trials before they can go ahead; a major charge they have is to look out for the well-being of trial subjects. Coast “approved our bogus research protocol for human subjects testing after only minor edits to our submission materials, even though we were a bogus company with falsified credentials and an unproven medical device.”
In what may be among the longest-running and widest-ranging cases of academic fraud, one of the most prolific researchers in anesthesiology has admitted that he fabricated much of the data underlying his research, said a spokeswoman for the hospital where he works. The researcher, Dr. Scott S. Reuben, an anesthesiologist in Springfield, Mass., who practiced at Baystate Medical Center, never conducted the clinical trials that he wrote about in 21 journal articles dating from at least 1996, said Jane Albert, a spokeswoman for Baystate Health.
