Hot Topics: Institutions, Centers, Funding

Blog Posts (11)

January 19, 2017

Peer Reviewing: Paying it Forward

by Kayhan Parsi, JD, PhD and Bela Fishbeyn, MS

As an associate editor and executive editor of the American Journal of Bioethics, we identify and recruit peer reviewers to review manuscripts that have been submitted for publication.…

January 4, 2017

Last Days of the ACA

by Craig M. Klugman, Ph.D.

Politicians are notorious for making campaign promises and then not carrying them out. With the beginning of the 115th Congress, the GOP has doubled-down on its promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”).…

November 9, 2016

President Trump & A Republican Congress: What Might It Mean?

by Craig Klugman, Ph.D.

In a 2000 episode of The Simpsons, a flash forward shows Lisa being elected the first heterosexual female U.S.…

October 25, 2016

Shooting Galleries: Time To Change Our Drug Policy

by Craig Klugman, Ph.D.

A hospital in Paris has opened that country’s first “shooting gallery,” a medically supervised facility where drug addicts can use their injection drugs in a safe, clean environment.…

June 16, 2016

Dear Professional Organizations…It’s Not Me, It’s You

by Craig Klugman, Ph.D.

Dear Professional Organizations,

Being an active member of my profession is important for both my personal mission and my professional career.…

February 29, 2016

A Post-Oscars “Spotlight” on Neonatal Lupus for Rare Disease Day

by Amanda Zink, J.D., M.A. and Jill P. Buyon, M.D.

As national funding decreased in recent decades, medical research suffered. Progress toward uncovering beneficial preventative and therapeutic treatments slowed for thousands of devastating conditions, affecting the health, happiness, and life expectancy of millions of Americans.…

October 5, 2015

Your Biology is in My Technology

by Craig Klugman, Ph.D.

The PBS series Open Mind has been on television for nearly 60 years. The program “is a thoughtful excursion into the world of ideas.” The December 30 episode was an interview with Dr.…

August 31, 2015

Hashtag Advocacy or Slacktivism: How Should We Evaluate the Impact of Social Media Campaigns for Public Health?

by Macey L. Henderson, J.D.

It takes more than a TV news story or a Twitter hashtag campaign to save lives.…

August 26, 2015

The Price of Academic Freedom

by Craig Klugman, Ph.D.

Alice Dreger resigned from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine/Memorial Hospital this week. The slash is because last year the hospital and the medical school merged.…

April 29, 2014

Defending Bioethics in the Job Market

By Keisha Ray, PhD

I am a junior scholar who is currently on the job market, hoping to secure a faculty position as a bioethicist.…

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Published Articles (2)

AJOB Primary Research: Volume 8 Issue 2 - Apr 2017

Growing an ethics consultation service: A longitudinal study examining two decades of practice Christine Gorka, Jana M. Craig & Bethany J. Spielman

AJOB Primary Research: Volume 7 Issue 3 - Jul 2016

Improving third-year medical students' competency in clinical moral reasoning: Two interventions Paul J. Cummins, Katherine J. Mendis, Robert Fallar, Amanda Favia, Lily Frank, Carolyn Plunkett, Nada Gligorov & Rosamond Rhodes

News (34)

June 1, 2017 9:00 am

NIH scales back plan to curb support for big labs after hearing concerns (Science)

Faced with a barrage of criticism, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has scaled back a plan to cap its support for individual labs in order to free up funds for more scientists.

May 9, 2017 9:00 am

French plan to create €5-billion science ‘super-campus’ in disarray (Nature)

French ambitions to create a €5-billion (US$5.5-billion) science ‘super-campus’ near Paris by 2020 seem to be in falling further apart, after a compromise scheme to save the troubled project was rejected by one of its creators.

May 4, 2017 9:00 am

NIH to limit the amount of grant money a scientist can receive (Nature)

For the first time, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will restrict the amount of funding that an individual scientist can hold at any one time, based on a new point system. The move, announced on 2 May, is part of an ongoing effort to make obtaining grants easier for early and mid-career scientists, who face much tougher odds than their more-experienced colleagues.

May 2, 2017 9:00 am

$10 million settlement over alleged misconduct in Boston heart stem cell lab (Science)

A research misconduct investigation of a prominent stem cell lab by the Harvard University–affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston has led to a massive settlement with the U.S. government over allegations of fraudulently obtained federal grants. As Retraction Watch reports, BWH and its parent health care system have agreed to pay $10 million to resolve allegations that former BWH cardiac stem cell scientist Piero Anversa and former lab members Annarosa Leri and Jan Kajstura relied on manipulated and fabricated data in grant applications submitted to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

March 30, 2017 9:00 am

Gates Foundation announces open-access publishing venture (Nature)

One of the world’s wealthiest charities, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, is set to launch its own open-access publishing venture later this year. The initiative, Gates Open Research, was announced on 23 March and will be modelled on a service begun last year by the London-based biomedical charity, the Wellcome Trust. Like that effort, the Gates Foundation’s platform is intended to accelerate the publication of articles and data from research funded by the charity.

March 21, 2017 9:00 am

Federal advisory panels agree Opana's risks outweigh benefits (USA Today)

The new extended-release version of Endo Pharmaceuticals’ Opana may even be more dangerous than the version it replaced, according to critics including the advocacy group Public Citizen. Two Food and Drug Administration advisory panels seemed to agree, voting 18 to 8 that it presents more risks than benefits to society. Next it’s up to the FDA to decide whether to act on the panels’ advice, which it generally does. Possible actions include changes to labels, restriction of prescriptions and an outright ban.

February 27, 2017 9:00 am

U.S. researchers guilty of misconduct later won more than $100 million in NIH grants, study finds (Science)

Overall, 23 of the scientists (roughly 8% of sanctioned researchers) received NIH funding after receiving an ORI sanction. Of that group, 17 researchers won more than $101 million for 61 new projects. Thirteen continued to receive funding from NIH grants that had been awarded before being sanctioned.

February 16, 2017 9:00 am

Speedy drug approvals are risky, but drug companies have another idea that's just terrible (Los Angeles Times)

As with Trump’s proposed elimination of consumer safeguards, environmental-protection measures and financial reforms, the reality is that if his administration proceeds with a wholesale deregulation of the drug industry, the public will be largely undefended against the aggressive and potentially dangerous predations of multibillion-dollar conglomerates.

February 14, 2017 9:00 am

French auditors criticize €5-billion science super-campus near Paris (Nature)

France’s government auditor has taken a sharp swipe at efforts to develop a science super-campus near Paris that, by 2020, was supposed to rival the world’s top campus universities, such as the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). More than €5.3 billion (US$5.7 billion) in public spending has been earmarked for the Paris-Saclay science cluster, the Court of Auditors estimates in an annual report published on 8 February — but the original vision of creating a large integrated research university there is “at a standstill”.

February 13, 2017 9:00 am

Senate confirms Price to lead HHS (Science)

Price now takes the helm of a $1 trillion government department that includes the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Most visibly, he will be charged with overseeing the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, that Republicans have promised.

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