[Bloomberg]- Biologists have replaced parts of the E. coli bacterium DNA using a new process that hits many targets at once, a feat that may enable scientists to significantly alter or re-engineer genetic material.
A research team, led by Farren Isaacs and George Church of Harvard University Medical School, was able to make precise changes to [...]

[The Economist] DRUG smugglers can expect harsh penalties nearly everywhere—if the drugs in question are heroin or cocaine. Those who smuggle counterfeit medicines, by contrast, have often faced lax enforcement and light punishment. Some governments deem drug-counterfeiting a trivial offence, little more than a common irritant. After all, whose spam filter does not groan with ads [...]

[NYT] When Juliet Jacobs found out she had lung cancer, she was terrified, but realized that her hope lay in getting the best treatment medicine could offer. So she got a second opinion, then a third. In February of 2010, she ended up at Duke University, where she entered a research study whose promise seemed [...]

[MassDevice] A new study alleges that Medtronic’s Infuse bone growth product causes excess bone growth in the spinal canal and researchers on the company payroll covered it up.
MASSDEVICE ON CALL — Medtronic Inc. (NYSE:MDT) faces new heat over the Infuse bone growth product, this time for allegations that the therapy caused excess bone growth in [...]

[Forbes]- Monya Baker has an interesting feature in this week’s issue of Nature, looking at the synthetic biology field a year after J. Craig Venter’s team published their breakthrough Science paper on the generation of a bacterial cell, operating completely on synthetic DNA designed in the lab.
Readers may recall that Venter’s paper touched off a [...]

[San Diego Union-Tribune]- International Stem Cell enrolled the first of what it hopes will be at least 15 U.S. donors of unfertilized human eggs that will be used by the Carlsbad company to produce a vast bank of stem cell lines for clinical trials in humans, the biotechnology firm said Thursday.
The company plans to use [...]

[The Sacramento Bee]- Using a combination of Facebook-like tools and personally controlled health records, researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston have engaged members of an online diabetes social network as participants in public health surveillance. In an article published April 27 in PLoS ONE, Elissa Weitzman, ScD, MSc, and Kenneth Mandl, M.D., MPH, of the Children’s [...]

[Guardian]- A pill to enhance moral behaviour, a treatment for racist thoughts, a therapy to increase your empathy for people in other countries – these may sound like the stuff of science fiction but with medicine getting closer to altering our moral state, society should be preparing for the consequences, according to a book that [...]

[Scientific American]- Technology can help individuals weigh the risks and benefits of an invasive medical procedure, experts say, but only if doctors and patients keep talking.
Much of what happens to you in the hospital in the name of diagnosing and healing is invasive. Depending on what ails you, a doctor may need to ream out [...]

[Vancouver Sun]- Tens of thousands of human embryos hang in cold storage in Canada’s fertility clinics, an unknown number of which are “orphans.”
Increasingly, however, clinics are preparing to match these embryos — which could survive for decades in suspended animation — with infertile couples who long for a child of their own. It’s a form [...]