Unjustified asymmetries in the debate on GM crops
In his valedictory speech as Government’s chief scientific adviser on November 27th , David King said there was a "moral case" for the UK and the rest of Europe to grow genetically modified crops as the technology could help…
Read MoreHonest Opinions or Bullying?
Recently the website SpickMich.de that allows German pupils to anonymously rate their teachers defeated a legal challenge from teachers claiming invasion of personal privacy. This was just the latest of a series of legal victories for the s…
Read MoreFeeling good about the failure of others
The journal Science last week published a study indicating that the reward centres in our brains are highly sensitive to the success of others. In the study, 19 pairs of subjects were presented with a task involving the estimation of the nu…
Read MoreOur Obligations to the Poor
The relationship between the rich and the poor countries of the world has been questioned in a number of ways today. Oxfam have released a report, Investing for Life, which suggests that pharmaceutical companies are missing an important opp…
Read MoreThe importance of life extension
One of the most important ideas in public health is that we can never really save lives: we just extend them. If a doctor ‘saves the life’ of a 60 year old patient who later dies at 90 years of age, then she hasn’t actuall…
Read MoreIs this the end of the debate for human embryo research?
Two landmark papers published this week have demonstrated that stem cells (“Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells”) capable of developing into a wide range of different tissues can be made from human skin cells. It has been claimed in …
Read MoreHands off my non-existent furniture!
The BBC recently reported that a Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing €4,000 worth of virtual furniture from virtual hotel rooms in Habbo Hotel, a social networking website.
Read MoreIt is 10 O’clock, do you know what your cells are?
BBC File On 4 recently learned that “millions of pounds of charity donations and taxpayers’ money have been wasted on worthless cancer studies”. Labs have been using contaminated cell lines – rather than experimenting on the cancer ce…
Read MoreImaging the Political Brain
In an interesting study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience in 2006 but widely circulated earlier, Drew Westen and his colleagues at Emory University used fMRI to image the brains of committed Democrats and Republicans before…
Read MoreWilmut Gives Up Cloning
Despite the therapeutic potential of human embryonic stem (HES) cells, many people believe that HES cell research should be banned, because the present method of extracting HES cells involves the destruction of the embryo, which for many is…
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