Earlier this month Kim Clijsters won the U.S. Open tennis tournament after being away from competitive tennis for two years while she had her daughter, Jada. Whereas professional sports careers do not offer formal parental leave, careers in science should. Academia is slowly adjusting to the idea of parental leave, and some large companies embrace it. But not all scientists (academic or industrial) find themselves so lucky; parental leave should not be a matter of luck—how unscientific. Continue Reading »

Another new source of energy is making the news: natural gas from shale rock formations. NPR’s Morning Edition recently lauded shale gas as a relatively clean, abundant, domestic source of energy. What it failed to mention were the environmental impacts of extracting natural gas from shale. Continue Reading »

In early September I visited the Center for Genetic Research Ethics and Law (CGREAL) at Case Western. My colleagues there presented some of their work on what they are calling “early adopters” of consumer genomics (specifically genome profiling). Their research begins to profile who the users of these services are: for one thing this is a population of users who are not deceived or duped by what they are getting, although some are still disappointed by what they do get. 

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As someone who works with both collections and the Center, I sometimes come across image requests that overlap with current policy topics. I was contacted recently by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a nonprofit academic organization that is dedicated to open-access genome-based research and educational outreach. One compelling part of the Broad Institute is the DNAtrium. Continue Reading »

In the wake of the health-care storm and President Obama’s address to Congress last Wednesday night, I’ve been interested to see which other interest groups have tried to hitch their wagons to health care. The focus in these efforts has been on the one pressing issue that has just about everyone in agreement: the cost of health care in this country is inexplicably high. But in Washington remedies to this malady have tended to focus on the cost of treatment. That is, why are prescription drugs so expensive? Why do Americans get unnecessary and/or redundant screenings? Is the lack of participation by the relatively young and healthful taxing the system? These groups have taken a different approach. These advocates from other areas aren’t asking about the economics of health care; they’re wondering why Americans have so many health conditions that require treatment in the first place. On Thursday, following Obama’s address, Michael Pollan linked food habits and diet to the rising costs of health care. We are what we eat, and what we eat is largely unhealthy. Others have tried to link the health-care debate to climate change and energy as well. But there are other issues, less publicly visible, that are more intimately connected: namely, our exposure to environmental chemicals and our efforts to update our knowledge about the connections between exposure and disease. Continue Reading »

With supposedly 66 percent of the American population overweight or obese, millions of dollars spent on diet products, and recent studies reporting that obesity may be responsible for a significant increase in health-care spending (mostly through premiums and taxes) in the past decade, obesity is nearly a constant topic in health news. Though new fad diets and methods for those seeking to drop the pounds appear constantly, eating sensibly and exercising have been the most recommended methods. But is exercise really effective for losing weight? Continue Reading »