Uncoupling Scientific Progress From Human Progress -The Loss of Checks and Balances: Part II – The Bayh-Dole Act

The Bayh-Dole Act from Nature.com Mike Magee Since Vannevar Bush presented his “Science the Endless Frontier” to President Truman, and the President had insisted on strong government control of federally sponsored research, there had been a prohibition on private ownership of patents that emerged from research discoveries supported by federal grant dollars.(1) As the thinking […]

Can A Damaged Heart Heal Itself? With a Little Help, Maybe.

Source: AHA Journals Mike Magee At last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama placed Vice President Joe Biden in the command seat as director of the scientific assault on cancer. The destination – a cure for the dreaded and stubbornly complex myriad of disorders that have created so much suffering and loss of […]

Microbiota: Who’s Hosting Whom?

Mike Magee If you search under “The Future of Medicine”, you’ll see that the “Microbiome” is getting a great deal of air space these days. In fact, the NIH has committed $173 million to a collaborative dive titled the Human Microbiome Project. And yet, for most of us, it’s a new enough term that we […]

NIH Leader Francis Collins Optimistic For Science

VIDEO INTERVIEW : NIH DIRECTOR Francis Collins MD SOURCE: USA Today “Dr. Francis Collins sees a world of possibilities with medicine and the light-speed advances that await mankind. A universal flu shot? Ending the HIV epidemic in the U.S.? A human genome map as part of everyday patient care? Why not? The physician-geneticist, guiding hand of the international Human […]

5 Things We Need To Know About Serotonin

Mike Magee What do you really know about serotonin? Probably about as much as I do – neurotransmitter, implicated in depression, one of the S’s in SSRI’s, featured blobettes in the classic Zoloft animated commercial.(1) What else? Lack of it is no cause for personal shame and can be treated, but treating it (especially in the […]

The Pull and Push of Personalized Health Care

Ralph Snyderman ORIGINAL SOURCE My interest in personalized health care began approximately a dozen years ago when as Chancellor for Health Affairs at Duke University, I realized that emerging sciences and technologies were creating medical capabilities never before known. Through the power of genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, systems biology, and bioinformatics, one could begin to predict […]

Falling Asleep At The Wheel: Why Watson Beat Us.

Mike Magee Watching Watson, the computer, humiliate our human race on Jeopardy (combined with in-your-face strife and turmoil here and around the world as witnessed on Cable TV) simply reinforces how little we understand about our physiologic selves (1). I’ve mentioned before an interview I did some years back of Craig Venter, the gene genius, […]

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