My recent article at MercatorNet looks at the ethics of killer robots and drones. New technologies create geographic distance between the combatants and the war zone, but some people are concerned that it also create emotional distance. With that in … Continue reading
Category Archives: Science
Originally, I wanted to write an article about parabiosis since it was a hot topic in the news. But, it turns out what the company Ambrosia is doing isn’t exactly parabiosis. It’s more akin to expensive blood transfusions. Parabiosis involves … Continue reading
This first of two articles I review Sharon Begley’s book Can’t Just Stop: An Investigation into Compulsions. Begley says that our need to check our cell phone every five minutes is not an addiction, but a compulsion. Begley is a … Continue reading
I have a new article at MercatorNet on embargoes on scientific reporting and how they can go wrong. When journalists report on breaking science news, they actually receive the journal article information and press release a week before the research … Continue reading
I have a new article at MercatorNet called “Blind Faith in DNA.” This article is cross-published at The Stream as “Be Wary of the Magical, Hyped-Up Claims About DNA” I wrote this article after Harvard’s George Church and several others … Continue reading
I have a new article in Quartz, an online publication that hits a wide audience and is geared toward the global business community. Find my article here, “Pigs with human hearts, and other wild tales from the future of organ … Continue reading
I have a new article at The Stream on the U.S.’s Institute of Medicine’s recommendation that the FDA approve mitochondrial transfer, or what is being called “three-parent IVF” in the media. Read about it here. … Continue reading
The recent issue of Scientific American has an article by Carl Erik Fisher, a psychiatrist and bioethics professor at Columbia University, in which he explores whether behavioral addictions are mental illnesses or just bad habits. His article, “Food, sex, gambling, … Continue reading
Check out my latest post at Salvo’s blog, Signs of the Times. I look at the Nuffield Council on Bioethics report on how the words “natural,” “unnatural,” and “nature” are used in the media, journals, and in other venues. In … Continue reading
My latest post in Salvo’s Signs of the Times addresses a question posed by several researchers from Australia, The Netherlands, and the U.K. in a recent commentary in Nature Methods: What if stem cells turn into embryos in a dish? … Continue reading
It’s the stuff of comic book lore. A young woman who was a former professional athlete gave birth to a baby with unusually developed muscles. She did not give the identity of the boy’s father, but several members of her … Continue reading
In an opinion-editorial in the Boston Globe Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker wrote that the best thing bioethicists can do to help society is to get out of the way: Biomedical research, then, promises vast increases in life, health, and flourishing. … Continue reading
Watchdog websites like Retraction Watch are not going out of business any time soon. It seems like there has been an uptick in the number of retractions in the peer-reviewed literature recently. Some have been high profile blunders, like the … Continue reading
In my latest blog post at Salvo’s Signs of the Times I comment on the recently published research out of Nature that says scientists are very close to making a yeast strain that will convert glucose into morphine. … Continue reading
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Broadway Books, 2010 It was a time when donated blood was labeled “colored.” Hospitals were segregated. Consent laws were in flux, and cellular biology was a growing field. It was … Continue reading
Genetically modifying adult cells is one thing. Genetically modifying an embryo is another. Why the difference? This fundamental difference is what has many scientists in an uproar over research out of China in which scientists genetically edited a human embryo. … Continue reading
What is artificial intelligence? It turns out there is a bit of a debate over what exactly defines “intelligence” and how we can know if something is artificially intelligent. There are some people who think that we have already achieved … Continue reading
Last week’s Nature was devoted to the results of the NIH’s Roadmap Epigenetics Project, marking the conclusion of this eight-year endeavor to investigate the “stuff” around (i.e., epi-) DNA that tells the genome what to do. I have used the … Continue reading
Here is a summary of some recent studies on Alzheimer’s disease. Glial cells, from the Greek for “glue” are the new focus of neuroscientists looking for a way to combat Alzheimer’s disease. Two studies, one out of Stanford University and … Continue reading
One of the tricky things about science writing is news cycles move quickly while research moves slowly. Research in the biomedical and health fields rarely involves one, big, “Eureka!” moment. Usually it starts with “hey that’s an interesting correlation we … Continue reading