[Courier-Journal]-U.S. government doctors once thought it was acceptable to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates, including giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.
Much of this occurred 40 to 80 [...]

[Washington Post]  Federal law protects pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits by parents who claim that vaccines harmed their children, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.
The court ruled 6 to 2 that going before a special tribunal set up by Congress is the only way parents can be compensated for the negative side effects that in rare instances [...]

Above: Testing a G.M. vehicle. The Transportation Department says each life saved is worth $6 million.
[NYTimes] — As the players here remake the nation’s vast regulatory system, they have beengrappling with a subject that is more the province of poets and philosophers than bureaucrats: what is the value of a human life?
The answer determines [...]

[Bloomberg]- U.S. regulators plan to outsource more inspections of overseas factories within the next decade after criticism from Congress about a lack of oversight for food and drugs made in other countries.
The Food and Drug Administration aims to increase its reliance on third-party inspectors and has started reaching out to industry trade groups about the [...]

[NYTimes] The two mothers-to-be felt the same urgency. Told that their babies had potentially crippling spina bifida, both women hoped to receive an ambitious surgery that closes the hole in the spine while babies are in the womb.
Their only access was through a clinical trial testing whether risky prenatal surgery was better than standard surgery [...]

[HealthDay News] — A surprising number of valuable new drugs and vaccines approved in the United States have arisen wholly from research funded by the public sector, new research finds.
The authors of a study published Feb. 10 in the New England Journal of Medicine count 153 new drugs and vaccines from public sector research institutes [...]

[Tampabay] Wake up and good morning. What you see above is a microfluidic device used to create human mimetic tissue models for testing potential malaria drugs. That’s a too technical way of saying this device will help researchers mimic the human liver outside the body to make it easier to find a drug that fights [...]

[Yahoo News] PARIS (AFP) – Doctors in France on Monday announced the country’s first birth of a “savior sibling,” selected at the embryonic stage to be a close genetic match to save a brother or sister suffering from a fatal inherited disorder.
The baby was born at the Antoine Beclere Hospital in Clamart, in [...]

[FDA]Today the U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed the Innovation Pathway, a priority review program for new, breakthrough medical devices and announced the first submission: a brain-controlled, upper-extremity prosthetic that will serve as a pilot for the program. The FDA also announced plans to seek further public comment before the Pathway can be used more [...]

[Yahoo News] – The Vatican will host an international conference in May on preventing AIDS and caring for those afflicted with it amid continued confusion over its position concerning condoms as a way to prevent HIV transmission.
The Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers also said Thursday it was working on a set of guidelines for [...]