Biotechnology

...Some drug industry critics are not so surprised that advertising oversight has slackened. "The question is whether the industry has gotten better at complying with the rules or the FDA has gotten worse at enforcing them. It's probably a combination of the two," says Shannon Brownlee, author of the new book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer...

The book describes how the industry fought the FDA to loosen ad restrictions on the basis of… more

Beyond Bioethics, a new report by Dr. Francis Fukuyama and Dr. Franco Furger, provides the most comprehensive examination to date of legislative and/or regulatory answers to the challenges raised by human biotechnologies in the United States. The report's premise is that reaping the benefits of medical progress offered by biotechnology while preventing possible abuses requires that we create a new regulatory agency. Dr. Fukuyama and Dr. Furger discussed legislative developments at the national and international level and explore public attitudes… more

Over the past several decades, breakthroughs in medicine and biotechnology have begun to alter the basic process of birth. Increasingly, parents are able to protect their unborn children from potential life-threatening diseases, or give birth to children that are chosen for specific genetic qualities. Infertility treatments are pushing back the age at which women can give birth, and novel surrogacy arrangements have given couples the opportunity to have others bear their children.

This discussion will consider how governments craft… more

Shannon Brownlee is a writer whose stories, essays, and opinion pieces about medicine and health care have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, Time, Discover, BusinessWeek, Washington Monthly, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wilson Quarterly.… more

Imagine that the year is 2012. Your 80-year-old mother is suffering from Alzheimer's and your 16-year-old son desperately needs a new kidney. The good news, doctors tell you, is that there is now a cure for Alzheimer's based on cloning nerve cells, and a safe and effective way to grow a kidney that matches your son's genetic makeup. The bad news, however, is that these and similar treatments were banned in the United States in 2002. Worse still, if you… more

For Alan and Louise Masterton, the death of their daughter, Nicole, had a uniquely cruel twist. It was terrible enough that the3-year-old succumbed to burns suffered in an accident at the family's Monifieth, Scotland, home in 1999. But for the Mastertons, Nicole was more than just a cherished child -- she was a chromosomal miracle. The couple had spent 15 years trying to conceive a girl, bearing four sons in the process. When Nicole finally arrived in 1995, the Mastertons… more

George W. Bush is agonizing over his decision about federal policy on stem-cell research. And White House aides, meanwhile, are busily "backgrounding" reporters with tidbits designed to show that the president who normally prides himself on snappy management is consulting widely and thinking deeply on the subject.

For the inside-the-Beltway Washingtonians, it all makes for interesting reading, but for outside-the-Beltway Americans, there's not much reason to follow the circuities of Bush's pondering because, in effect, the decision has already… more

At various points in U.S. history, issues and events come along that make old ideologies obsolete, that make existing coalitions untenable, that make the contradictions within parties too pressing… more

Since the publication of his groundbreaking work The End of History and the Last Man, Frank Fukuyama has stayed ahead of the curve, describing the present historical moment with a lucidity and boldness shaped by his rich knowledge of the past and extraordinary sense for the future. Now he has turned his attention to an emerging family of technologies with the potential to change the trajectory of civilization and even what it means to be human -- the biotechnology revolution… more