[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 [...]

[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 [...]

[NYT]  Several years ago, I learned that a physician in a town not too far from where I was practicing had committed suicide. Neither I nor my hospital colleagues knew him, but according to the story we heard, he was the father of young children, was respected by doctors and patients alike and had struggled [...]

[NYTimes] Growing up in California’s rural Central Valley, the two cousins spent summers racing dirt bikes and Christmases at their grandmother’s on the coast. Endowed with a similar brash charm, they bought each other matching hardhats and sought iron-working jobs together. They shared a love for the rush that comes with hanging steel at dizzying [...]

Coalition government promises to abolish respected regulator in effort to cut back on quangos.
[Nature] In the ethically fraught field of human-embryo research, Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has long been regarded as a world leader in regulating and advising scientists.
But now the HFEA faces the axe, and researchers and politicians are chorusing their [...]

[NYT] ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen.

While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering [...]

[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 [...]

[MHT] When it comes to vaccines, everyone now wants to get in on the action. That’s according to Paul Bogorad, a senior manager at pharmaceutical and biotechnology consultancy Putnam Associates in Burlington. Bogorad and other analysts say that the frenzy over H1N1 has heightened the public’s awareness of the difficulty of making vaccines and has [...]

[medscape] As healthcare reform legislation grinds its way through Congress, 2 articles published online January 6 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) advocate for one of its touchiest provisions — comparative-effectiveness research (CER).
In theory, CER sounds like a calm, academic subject: evaluate different treatment options for a given illness — drug A vs [...]

[People's Daily] When Xiao Luo arrived in south China’s Guangzhou city in May last year, the 30-year-old was struggling to raise her 6-year-old son alone in Hunan Province. Her husband never showed up soon after a business failure. “I was devastated that my husband abandoned us just like that, leaving dunners knocking on the door [...]