[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 [...]

Hurray for the Biotech world – they have developed a way to transform “one type of fully developed adult cell directly into another inside a living animal, a startling advance that could lead to cures for a variety of illnesses and sidestep the political and ethical quagmires associated with embryonic stem cell research,” reports the [...]

Efforts to create an artificial blood substitute to prolong life for wounded soldiers or bleeding car crash victims were set back Monday by a study saying the products have led to a 30% increase in the risk of death and a nearly three-fold chance of having a heart attack.
The findings in the Journal of the [...]

MPs are planning a change in the law to allow babies to be conceived from artificial sperm, a move described by opponents as playing God with human DNA.
A furious debate is building over how far to leave the door open to its use in IVF treatment, ahead of a Commons vote due shortly on the [...]

There’s new hope for the five million people in the United States who live with heart failure. Scientists say they have been able to grow a rat heart in a lab. They were also successful at getting it to start beating.About 50,000 people die each year waiting for a heart donor. But that all may [...]

Watching her tend her ill son, there is no doubting the love Clare Ginns feels for her ten-year-old son Joshua. “Are you comfy?” she asks as she gently props up her boy with pillows on the sofa. “Now, let’s give you your lunch,” she says. She even manages to handle the pumping of liquidised food [...]

For centuries, man has searched for miracle cures to end suffering caused by disease and injury. Many researchers believe nanotechnology applications in medicine may be mankind’s first ‘giant step’ toward this goal. According to Freitas nanomedicine is:

The comprehensive monitoring, control, construction, repair, defense, and improvement of all human biological systems, working from the molecular level, [...]

[Article excerpts] We sit on the cusp of a new world in which the ability to genetically engineer our children, as well as reupholster our own organs, promises to become routine rather than exotic. Just as old definitions of life proved ethically problematic once medicine understood pregnancy better (would people fight over abortion if everyone [...]

Google Inc-funded 23andMe launched on Monday and began offering a DNA saliva test for $999 per person, which would help U.S. users of the online site learn about disease risk, inherited traits and their ancestry.
Eventually users, who sign up for the saliva test online and receive it by mail, will also be able to participate [...]

MRI scans show that physicians’ brains learn to edit out emotional reactions to patients’ pain during medical procedures, letting them do their jobs.