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…

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…

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 …

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. 

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…

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…

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…

Scientific American last week reported that psychiatrist Sean Spence and collaborators at the University of Sheffield are developing a lie-detection test based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. Using fMRI, Spence a…

News The Lancet has published two articles on the efficacy and safety of the anti-obesity drug Acomplia.  This has been widely reported in the news as showing that patients using the drug have well over double the risk of depression an…

News The first successful cloning of primates makes the headlines in the scientific press today.(See also yesterday’s contribution by Dominic Wilkinson to this blog.) The researchers were successful in cloning a primate embryo by inserting …