[NYTimes]- For years scientists have dreamed of developing a genuine memory booster, a drug that could tune the brain’s biological search engine so that it’s better at retrieving not only recently learned facts, like last night’s dinner menu, but details that seem all but lost in the fog of time, like childhood classmates’ names and [...]

[Huffington Post]— Experts say that the kind of unethical medical studies that occurred half a century ago could still happen again despite more than 1,000 rules and regulations that should prevent such abuses.
Bioethicists and researchers spoke Tuesday before a presidential panel in Washington. The meeting was triggered by the government’s apology last fall for federal [...]

[Forbes]-Patients taking an experimental Eli Lilly Alzheimer’s treatment worsened faster than those on placebo. The treatment also apparently caused skin cancer. Lilly says it will stop developing the drug, but will keep working on another, different Alzheimer’s treatment.
The result is another setback for Alzheimer’s research and should probably make scientists and investors think again about [...]

[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 [...]

[theworld.org] Early on a cold fall morning, a dozen volunteers gathered in a waiting room at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research outside Washington, D.C. They had come to test an experimental malaria vaccine.
The volunteers included college students, Walter Reed employees, and a 41- year-old single mother from Baltimore named Renee Krueger.
Krueger said she [...]

[VanityFair] Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year. Will that number go up, now that most clinical trials are conducted overseas—on sick Russians, homeless Poles, and slum-dwelling Chinese—in places where regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves? The authors investigate the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, [...]

[Medscape] “Honesty is the best policy” and “the patient always comes first.”
As absolute and correct as those aphorisms may be, they can be hard for doctors to apply in the complex world of modern medicine.
A recent Medscape medical ethics survey of over 10,000 physicians found that when it comes to patient treatment, a significant number [...]

[NPR] Drug companies say the millions of dollars they pay physicians for speaking and consulting justly compensates doctors for the laudable work of educating their colleagues.
But a series of lawsuits brought by former employees of those companies allege the money often was used for illegal purposes — financially rewarding doctors for prescribing their brand-name medications.
In [...]

[The Hill]  A group of bipartisan senators this week introduced legislation to entice drug makers to focus more intently on cures for uncommon children’s diseases.
Sponsored by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.), the Creating Hope Act aims to solve a nagging problem inherent to the market-driven world of pharmaceutical manufacturing: [...]