The Cost for Life

TAG of the Week: The Cost for Life

If you are a policymaker and you've read that screening for Lynch Syndrome can save lives and money in the long-run, what pieces of evidence would you like the article from BioTech Now to present to you in order for you to assess whether a program can use this information in the near future? Now as an engineer in a biotech company looking into cancer-related genetic markers, what do you think will support and enhance future research goals? Do you agree or disagree with the court ruling as an engineer? What ways can both financially support the interests of venture capitalists and biotech companies while keeping these tests accessible to those who need it? Do you think a change in health policy planning must be involved in regulating costs?

http://www.biotech-now.org/section/health/2010/12/22/cost-effective-genetic-testing-proves-advantageous-identifying-cancer-risk
(some background) - http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/168/8/989

Good Bugs

TAG of the Week: Good Bugs

The human body is its own ecosystem comprised of various pH levels and flora (the bacteria that colonize on our skin, live in our gut, and coat our teeth). We co-exist with these bacteria as they help us digest food and these bacteria co-exist with each other. When there's an imbalance whether its our hormone levels or a competition between the bacteria, inflammation can occur and cause diseases and conditions like peptic ulcers, eczema, and psoriasis. From the article, what can you suggest will be the next implication(s) in the interaction of humans and bacteria in the context of disease? Do you think we will be treating the bacteria or the human symptoms or temper with both? Being presented with the interplay of humans and bacteria, has this article changed your overall perception of bacteria as being "bad for you"?

Click on the article link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7949651/Human-Microbiome-Project-a-map-of-every-bacterium-in-the-body.html

Sleepless in Genomics

TAG of the Week:  "Why People Can Run on Little Sleep"

"My long-term goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate the sleep pathways without damaging our health," says human geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California-San Francisco. "Everybody can use more waking hours, even if you just watch movies."

Do you think that by taking a gene variant and exploiting it to manipulate our body so we can accomplish more things in the day  is a good idea or a harmful one? Do you think that with more waking hours people would be more productive or wasting more time? How important do you think it is to have sleep and to allow your body to rest? And how important is it to be able to accomplish more things in the day? Aside from workaholics and college students, do you think that this research could potentially benefit certain other people?   

Read News Clip:

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/112502/why-people-can-run-on-little-sleep-wsj

Stem Cells

TAG of the Week:  Stem Cells

Moving around the embryo debate, researchers have managed to avoid killing embryonic stem cells in stem cell research. Do you think we avoid controversy by using this method? While it is still in its nascent stages, many mutations can still occur. Should we continue on in this path to perfect this procedure so we avoid the ethical debate of destroying an embryo? What potential ethical issues are there?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/13/ips-reprogrammed-stem-cells


The UK and Sweden have relatively more liberal rules with stem cell research and researchers in these countries have made many valuable contributions to the scientific and medical community, while other countries in the EU have placed more rigid rules on stem cell research. President Obama also overturned the ban that former President Bush placed on using federal spending on stem cell research. By allowing more research to be focused on stem cells, are we actually helping or potentially harming future generations? Do you think we have been promised too many cures from using stem cells with little results in recent years? If you think that we should press on with stem cell research, can you provide examples where stem cells have proved to be quite successful in treatment and therapies?
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110316/full/471280a.html