[WSJ] The quest to harness the power of DNA to develop personalized medicine is on the threshold of a major milestone: the $1,000 genome sequencing.
Life Technologies Corp., a Carlsbad, Calif., genomics company, plans to introduce Tuesday a machine it says will be able to map an individual’s entire genetic makeup for $1,000 by the end [...]

[Tampabay]-State Rep. Richard Corcoran recalled a day last year when a doctor recommended an MRI test for his wife’s back pain.
When they asked how much it would cost, “nobody knew,” Corcoran said. “No one would tell me.”
They called around, and found that the price of an MRI varied from $350 to $1,200.
That experience was a [...]

[The Guardian] CIA organised fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad to try and find Osama bin Laden.
The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family, a Guardian investigation has found.
As part of extensive preparations [...]

[Huffington Post]- I am a psychiatrist who has treated patients for over 35 years, run all varieties of psychiatric services and worked in city and state government. But I still cannot bear to read or hear a story of a fatal outcome for a person with a serious mental illness who dies from neglect or [...]

[First Word]- The US Supreme Court on Tuesday questioned whether Vermont’s decision to enact laws that prohibit the use of prescription drug records for marketing purposes violates free-speech rights. All states currently allow pharmacies to collect and pass on data about the prescription-writing habits of physicians, but Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire banned use or [...]

[biotech-now] In a first report on synthetic biology, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has called for the U.S. government to foster and promote innovation in this emerging field while also taking precautions to avoid misuse of the technology.

The commission identified five ethical principles and highlighted 18 recommendations in the report, “New [...]

[Reuters] – Most people who have used direct-to-consumer genetic tests bought them to improve their health and say they found the tests easy to interpret, but some do not fully understand their results, U.S. researchers said on Friday.
A team led by David Kaufman of Johns Hopkins University did a random online survey of 1,048 people [...]

[Scienceblog] People want to be informed and asked for consent before deciding whether to let researchers share their genetic information in a federal database. This is according to a team of investigators at Group Health Research Institute and the University of Washington (UW). The team’s report, called “Glad You Asked,” is in the September 2010 [...]

[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 [...]