[Reuters] – Most people who have used direct-to-consumer genetic tests bought them to improve their health and say they found the tests easy to interpret, but some do not fully understand their results, U.S. researchers said on Friday.
A team led by David Kaufman of Johns Hopkins University did a random online survey of 1,048 people [...]

[NYT] ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen.

While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering [...]

[BBC] Another Danish pharmaceutical company is withdrawing products from Greece in protest at the government’s decision to cut the prices of medicines by 25%.
The Leo Pharma company says it is suspending sales of two popular drugs because the price reductions will cause job losses across Europe.   The Greek government is struggling with a debt crisis.  [...]

[BBC] A British scientist says he is the first man in the world to become infected with a computer virus.
Dr Mark Gasson from the University of Reading contaminated a computer chip which was then inserted into his hand. The device, which enables him to pass through security doors and activate his mobile phone, is a [...]

[CNN] Scientists appear to have broken another barrier in stem cell research by creating a better research model to study human illnesses – a pig – actually 34 pigs.  It’s an important advance for research because pigs are much more like humans than other lab animals are.
The scientists did not clone the pigs – instead [...]

(Bloomberg) — Drugmakers face $105 billion in costs over 10 years, $25 billion more than the industry first estimated, from discounting medicines sold through government health programs, according to Leerink Swann & Co.
The extra costs will come from expanding drug rebates through Medicaid, the U.S. insurance program for the poor, Leerink’s John L. Sullivan said [...]

[Boston.com] Top executives of the state’s two largest biotechnology companies offered diverging views today on the health care bill signed into law by President Obama, with one contending it protects innovation and the other insisting it does little to control costs. “I don’t think this health care reform really addresses the fundamental underlying issues that [...]

[WSJ] Biotechnology companies, in a sign of the industry’s maturity, are increasingly coming under the microscope of shareholder activists, who want the sector to act more like traditional businesses.
In recent years, well-known activists like Carl Icahn and Ralph Whitworth have questioned whether larger biotechs, which tend to have good cash flow and diminished competition, are [...]

[Reuters] Patents on two human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer should be declared invalid because they stifle the free flow of information and hamper research, lawyers told a New York judge on Tuesday.
A lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups last May posed a broad challenge to gene patenting [...]

[The Independent] All research involving the controversial creation of animal-human “hybrid” embryos has been refused funding in Britain and one of the three scientists licensed to carry out the work has left the UK for a job in Australia.
Every one of the three projects to develop embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos created by fusing [...]