Did you know that it is legal to patent a gene?
According to US law, it is. In 1980, the Supreme Court heard the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty, which became a landmark for genetic science in terms of being able to lay claim to certain parts of the genome. While working for GE, Chakrabarty had developed a strain [...]
Posted in DNA, bioethics, dilemmas dilemmas!, discuss, genetics, science and society
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92 Comments
By now, you have all probably heard about Nadya Suleman, the California woman who gave birth to a set of surviving octuplets last week. It is important to make this distinction, as another set of octuplets was born in the US in 1998, however, one of the babies died a week after birth due to [...]
Posted in bioethics, dilemmas dilemmas!, discuss, reproduction
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45 Comments
As you probably are aware, the number of Americans who develop Type II diabetes has steadily increased over the past two decades. Many people have attributed the typical American diet to the increase, but now researchers from Lund University in Sweden are proclaiming that a poor diet isn't the only contributing factor to the [...]
Posted in bioethics, discuss, disease, research, science and society
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84 Comments
A Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
The medicine go down-wown
The medicine go down
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
In a most delightful way
We've all heard the song "A Spoonful of Sugar" from the movie "Mary Poppins." Now replace the word "medicine" with "E. coli" and you've got an entirely [...]
Posted in better living through biological science, bioethics, dilemmas dilemmas!, discuss, evolution, science and society, what do you think?
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111 Comments
This week, CNN.com is running a series about autism. If you are not familiar with autism, here's a little primer about this condition.
Autism is a disorder of brain development that usually appears before the age of 3 that results in developmental delays causing problems with communication, social development and interaction. Many children with [...]
Posted in bioethics, brains!, discuss, genetics
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57 Comments