[Reuters] A $37 million international collaboration by major research bodies in the United States, Britain and Africa wants to take the fruits of the genetic revolution to a continent it has largely bypassed until now.
The project, named Human Heredity and Health in Africa or “H3Africa,” will use genetic techniques developed in the West to explore [...]

[NYTimes] Seven years ago, the Havasupai Indians, who live amid the turquoise waterfalls and red cliffs miles deep in the Grand Canyon, issued a “banishment order” to keep Arizona State University employees from setting foot on their reservation — an ancient punishment for what they regarded as a genetic-era betrayal.
Members of the tiny, isolated tribe [...]

In 1951, doctors removed Henrietta Lacks’s cells without her consent. More than half a century later, companies have made millions from her cell culture, while few of Lacks’s descendants can even afford insurance.
[Newsweek] The unsettling story of Henrietta Lacks begins with an everyday occurrence: a trip to the doctor’s office. The 30-year-old African-American’s 1951 diagnosis [...]

[Reason.com] In November, President Barack Obama issued an executive order establishing a new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. He appointed political scientist and University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann as the chair of the new Bioethics Commission. Such commissions are charged with working through tough questions about intellectual property rights, the protection [...]

[MHT] When it comes to vaccines, everyone now wants to get in on the action. That’s according to Paul Bogorad, a senior manager at pharmaceutical and biotechnology consultancy Putnam Associates in Burlington. Bogorad and other analysts say that the frenzy over H1N1 has heightened the public’s awareness of the difficulty of making vaccines and has [...]

[msnbc] Analysis of a dozen published studies testing possible new uses for a Pfizer Inc. epilepsy drug found that reporting of the results was often misleading, indicating the medicine worked better than internal company documents showed.
According to the report, when a company-funded study’s primary finding wasn’t favorable, that result was usually buried and something else [...]

Scripps research prompts potential concerns
[San Diego Union Tribune] Scientists in San Diego and in other parts of California are working on numerous projects related to stem cell research, and some of that research is showing promise, at least in the early stages. At a time when the state’s finances are bordering on distress, this research [...]

Donors may get up to $10,000, an amount critics say could induce women to take unnecessary medical risks.
 
[American Medical News] The board that administers New York’s stem cell research funding program recently approved using state money to pay women who donate fresh oocytes for an experimental technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, also known as [...]

[Newswise] UCLA researchers have found that embryonic stem cells and skin cells reprogrammed into embryonic-like cells have inherent molecular differences, demonstrating for the first time that the two cell types are clearly distinguishable from one another.
The data from the study suggest that embryonic stem cells and the reprogrammed cells, known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, [...]

[NYT] As many American companies in the last decade have sent tasks like customer service and computer support to other countries, drug makers have followed suit by outsourcing clinical trials — the human studies that determine the safety and efficacy of medicines.
The New York TimesNow, an article about the globalization of clinical trials, published Thursday [...]