[NYTimes]- Last October, in Foshan, China, a 2-year-old girl was run over by a van. The driver did not stop. Over the next seven minutes, more than a dozen people walked or bicycled past the injured child. A second truck ran over her. Eventually, a woman pulled her to the side, and her mother arrived. [...]

How ’sham’ brain surgery could be killing off valuable therapies for Parkinson’s disease.
[Nature] Peggy Willocks was 44 when she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It progressed quickly, forcing her to retire four years later from her job as a primary-school principal in Elizabethton, Tennessee. Soon, her condition had deteriorated so much that she was often [...]

[Guardian]- A pill to enhance moral behaviour, a treatment for racist thoughts, a therapy to increase your empathy for people in other countries – these may sound like the stuff of science fiction but with medicine getting closer to altering our moral state, society should be preparing for the consequences, according to a book that [...]

[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 [...]

[Reuters] Brain scans may be able to predict what you will do better than you can yourself, and might offer a powerful tool for advertisers or health officials seeking to motivate consumers, researchers said on Tuesday.
They found a way to interpret “real time” brain images to show whether people who viewed messages about using sunscreen [...]

[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 [...]

Brain Death remains a valid criteria for defining death, states a nine page Vatican statement (2006) signed by prominent theologians and bioethicists including Cardinals Cottier, Trujillo and Martini and Bishop Sgreccia.  Nonetheless, debates continue regarding when life ends, similar to the debates of when life begins.  
As of June 2007, there were roughly 97,000 people awaiting organ transplants, in [...]

Nonnie Hawkins remembers standing beside her daughter’s hospital bed, steeling herself for a final goodbye.
She turned to physicians at DeKalb Medical Center, who minutes earlier had disconnected a machine that was breathing for 18-year-old Tara Bottoms-Hawkins. Hawkins thought her daughter was in a coma, as she had been for four months. But doctors said the [...]

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, [...]

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