In its just-published report Taking Exception on the allocation of cancer drugs by UK Primary Care Trusts, the Rarer Cancers Forum (http://www.rarercancers.org.uk)  provides further evidence of a ‘postcode lottery’ operating within the…

If, like me, you were one of the kids whose preferred superpower was invisibility, you may soon be in luck. The BBC reports today that US scientists have created a material that could one day be used to make people and objects invisible. Th…

Yesterday’s Daily Mail online contains an opinion piece bemoaning the decision by NICE – the UK body responsible for rationing healthcare resources – to decline funding for four new treatments for Kidney Cancer. The Mail c…

Scientists in Korea have for the first time successfully cloned a dog commercially. Cloning of dogs is notoriously difficult. This brings us closer to human cloning. The film Boys from Brazil , made in the earlier 80s, portrayed accurately …

The Guardian yesterday reported the death of the man who had been so tragically shot in Antigua, with his wife, three weeks after their wedding. It began like this: "Ben Mullany, the newlywed who was shot on honeymoon in Antigua in an …

Nature reports that in response to analysis done by bioethicist Robert Streiffer (and published in the Hastings Center Report), Stanford University may withdraw the use for research of several of its publicly funded stem cell lines because …

House prices have been falling quickly in both the US and, more recently, the UK. Newspaper reports tend to use negative language to refer to this fall. For example, todays edition of The Independent says: Today’s gloomy data, which i…

Climate change will impact the well-being of future generations, directly by, for example, increased intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as heavy storms. It will have also indirect impacts on human heath – via cardiovascu…

Drug scandals again tarnish the Tour de France. Last week three riders, Spaniards Manuel Beltrain and Moises Duenas and Italian climber Riccardo Ricco, winner of two mountain stages, failed tests for the banned performance enhancer EPO. Thi…

Yesterday the world celebrated the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the ex-Bosnian Serb leader who has twice been indicted by the UN War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, and is charged with – among other atrocities — ordering his forces to ki…