Archive for the 'dilemmas dilemmas!' Category

I’ll have a burger, some fries and a side of insulin resistance with my shake, please

 If you've ever seen the film "Super Size Me," Morgan Spurlock, the documentary's star and director, embarks on a month-long experiment to discover the adverse health effects of consuming a diet composed entirely of items from the menu at McDonald's.  Spurlock decided to investigate whether or not eating only foods from McDonald's would cause him any [...]

Selling out your DNA

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 [...]

Bioethical conundrums sometimes come in multiples

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 [...]

A spoonful of sugar makes the E. coli go down…

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 [...]

Selectively choosing data may lose you a Nobel Prize

You know how sometimes you watch shows like "Entertainment Tonight" and they have something like "The Lost Episodes of 'The Brady Bunch'" or something like that? Well, discovering lost "episodes" isn't something exclusive to the entertainment world, it turns out. Today I read an interesting article about Stanley Miller and Harold Urey. You're probably [...]