Biotechnology

Earlier this month, the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) hosted a fascinating event featuring Ashok Singh, the Deputy Director General at the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). The focus was on how these unique ID numbers, or Aadhaar numbers, which are issued after iris and fingerprint scans are employed to ensure each individual is unique to the system, can provide a means for financial inclusion for the poor. Remarkably, Singh, said, UIDAI is issuing Aadhaar numbers at the rate of 1 million a day, with a goal of 600 million over the next four years.

Please join the New America Foundation’s National Security Studies Program for an INVITATION-ONLY, OFF-THE-RECORD discussion with the Honorable Dr. Richard Danzig about the looming risk of bioterrorism, and the steps U.S. can take to minimize the danger to the United States.

**Please note that this is an INVITATION-ONLY, OFF-THE-RECORD event.**

Welcome

Andrés Martinez, co-director of the Future Tense Initiative and director of the Schwartz Fellows Program at the New America Foundation, took to the stage at Washington, D.C.’s Google office to welcome the assembled audience and set the stage for the day-and-a-half-long event. Among the primary questions to be pondered, he said, were: “How, as a democratic society, can we exercise oversight over scientific inquiry?

Video of  the keynote from Monday's event is posted above; please see the agenda for links to individual panel discussions.

New technologies are changing warfare as profoundly as did gunpowder.  How are everything from flying robots as small as birds to “peak warrior performance” biology altering the nature of the military as an institution, as well as the ethics and strategy of combat?  How will the adoption of emerging technologies by our forces or others affect our understanding of asymmetrical conflict?  

California provides more funding for stem cell research than the other 49 states combined. So what does President Obama's executive order lifting the restrictions financing and structure of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the state's cash-strapped stem cell agency?

Not much.

In April, Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours, told the tech website ZDNet that the government "could wire Walter Reed or Bethesda (the two biggest military hospitals) for VistA in an afternoon. Technically, there's no big problem." In fact, VistA's code is so flexible that it's even been adapted for use in other countries.

...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...

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.

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.

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 take your loved ones abroad to benefit from these breakthroughs, they may be subject to criminal fines and imprisonment upon their return.