Church backs science to provide alternative to embryonic stem cells
[AP] The Vatican is pushing for research of adult stem cells as an alternative to the use of embryonic stem cells, which the Catholic Church opposes because it maintains that the destruction of the embryo amounts to the killing of human life.

On Friday, the Catholic Church [...]

[msnbc] The number of women dying in childbirth worldwide has dropped dramatically, a British medical journal reports, adding that it was pressured to delay its findings until after U.N. meetings this week on public health funding.
A new, separate report by a group headed by the United Nations reached a very different conclusion on maternal mortality, [...]

[abc] Britain is considering paying organ donors as a way of increasing the number of transplants carried out in the United Kingdom.
A consultation being run by the independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics is canvassing opinions from the public and professionals on different incentives which could be provided to potential donors. 
Ethicists will examine whether laws prohibiting [...]

(Bloomberg) — The U.S. government’s cancer research network is “approaching a state of crisis” as waste and inefficiency cause 40 percent of late-stage trials it funds to be abandoned before completion, a report found.
The government-funded National Cancer Institute’s clinical trials group isn’t able to effectively study the benefits of new and current treatments, according to [...]

[nytimes] This could be one glimpse of the future of health insurance.  The UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, is teaming up with the Y.M.C.A. and retail pharmacies to try a new approach to one of the nation’s most serious and expensive medical problems: Type 2 diabetes.
Rather than simply continuing to pay [...]

[nytimes] By the time she was 38, Dr. Desiree Pardi had become a leading practitioner in palliative care, one of the fastest-growing fields in medicine, counseling terminally ill patients on their choices.

She preached the gentle gospel of her profession, persuading patients to confront their illnesses and get their affairs in order and, above all, ensuring [...]

[NYTimes] Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline will supply hundreds of millions of doses of their pneumonia vaccines to the world’s poorest countries at heavily discounted prices under a novel agreement announced Tuesday.
But at least one expert maintains that the prices are still too high.
The deal was announced by the GAVI Alliance, a nonprofit organization, which estimated the [...]

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 [...]

[Reason.com] In November, President Barack Obama issued an executive order establishing a new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. He appointed political scientist and University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann as the chair of the new Bioethics Commission. Such commissions are charged with working through tough questions about intellectual property rights, the protection [...]

[RFERL]  In late December, Snezhana Mitina received a tearful phone call from her friend Svetlana. Sobbing, Svetlana explained she had just read a newspaper article calling for babies with mental disabilities to be killed at birth.
The author, Aleksandr Nikonov, used the word “debil” — a deeply offensive term in Russian — to characterize such children. He [...]