[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 [...]

[Reuters]- Newly trained female doctors in the United States make nearly $17,000 less than their male counterparts, even though women increasingly are choosing careers in higher-paying medical specialties, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
They said there has been a widening gender gap in starting salaries for female doctors, rising from a difference of $3,600 [...]

[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, [...]

[WSJ] California has purchased a large supply of a drug used in executions from a British pharmaceutical company, according to a spokeswoman with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The state ordered the drug before the U.K. last month said it planned to limits exports of the drug, thiopental sodium, because of the U.K.’s “moral [...]

[SeattleTimes]  A simple bowl of white rice sits on a conference table inside the Seattle headquarters of global-health nonprofit PATH.  What looks and tastes like ordinary rice is actually the product of two decades of research and development.

For every 100 grains of rice, the bowl contains one grain of Ultra Rice. It’s actually not rice [...]

[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 [...]

[Medscape] The proportion of organ donors from U.S. minority groups has increased substantially in the past 20 years, following national education efforts to raise awareness of the need, a new study finds.
Kidney transplants, for example, have a greater chance of success when the donor and recipient are as genetically similar as possible. But historically, organ [...]

[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.  [...]

[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 [...]