[Newswise] NEW YORK, April 9, 2012 – In the current hyper-charged United States healthcare debate, the focus on lowering cost without compromising quality of care remains a priority. But according to a new study by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center and colleagues, one common approach may have serious unintended consequences.
Funded by the Robert Wood [...]

[Newswise] A UCSF-led effort to create an implantable artificial kidney for dialysis patients has been selected as one of the first projects to undergo more timely and collaborative review at the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA announced today (April 9) that it had chosen three renal device projects to pilot a new regulatory approval program called [...]

[PharmPro] Counterfeiting – the distribution of imitation goods with the intent to defraud a consumer – is a significant and growing problem for manufacturers, brand owners and consumers alike in wide range of industries. But perhaps nowhere is the crime of counterfeiting more troubling than in the pharmaceutical industry where criminals have never had more [...]

[Newswise] The part of the brain we use when engaging in egalitarian behavior may also be linked to a larger sense of morality, researchers have found. Their conclusions, which offer scientific support for Adam Smith’s theories of morality, are based on experimental research published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The [...]

By HIROKO TABUCHI
[New York Times] KAMAISHI, Japan — Amid the grief of finding her mother’s body at a makeshift morgue in this tsunami-ravaged city last March, Fumie Arai took comfort in a small but surprising discovery. Unlike the rest of the muddied body, her mother’s face had been carefully wiped clean.
Mrs. Arai did not know at [...]

[PharmPro] A former chemist for the Food and Drug Administration has been sentenced to five years in prison for his role in an insider trading scheme that spanned nearly five years.
Cheng Yi Liang, 58, was sentenced Monday in federal court in Greenbelt. The Gaithersburg resident pleaded guilty in October to using a confidential drug database from [...]

[New York Times] Computerized patient records are unlikely to cut health care costs and may actually encourage doctors to order expensive tests more often, a study published on Monday concludes.
Industry experts have said that electronic health records could generate huge savings — as much as $80 billion a year, according to a RAND Corporation estimate. [...]

[Reuters] A British ethics group has launched a debate on the ethical dilemmas posed by new technologies that tap into the brain and could bring super-human strength, highly enhanced concentration or thought-controlled weaponry.
With the prospect of future conflicts between armies controlling weapons with their minds, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics launched a consultation on Thursday to [...]

[The Telegraph] GlaxoSmithKline chief executive Sir Andrew Witty warned that ministers were making false economies as they tried to grapple with the deficit in the public finances.
In an interview with the BBC, he said that governments across Europe had already cut drug prices by 5 per cent a year – costing GSK around £300 million per [...]

[Bloomberg News]Are society’s most noble actors found within society’s nobility?
That question spurred Paul Piff, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, to explore whether higher social class is linked to higher ideals, he said in a telephone interview.
The answer Piff found after conducting seven different experiments is: no. The pursuit of self-interest [...]