In late November, He Jiankui, a scientist in China, announced that he had created the first “CRISPR babies,” meaning that he performed germ-line genome edits on human embryos, which were implanted through in vitro fertilization (IVF), and has now resulted the birth of twin girls. He used CRISPR-Cas9, a genome editing technology that can target DNA at precise …
Category Archives: Web Roundups
Web Roundup: Trapped in the Tar Pit
Earlier this month, Atul Gawande, physician-author and new CEO of the yet-to-be defined health venture formed by JP Morgan, Berkshire Hathaway, and Amazon, published the long-form New Yorker article, “Why Doctors Hate their Computers.” The article describes rising rates of physician burnout attributed to poor work-life balance, long hours, and exorbitant amounts of time spent on chart review and data …
Web Roundup: Annals of Politics and Psychopathology
For those of us in the U.S. who read the Liberal News Media, September began with a bang that reverberated loudly, if anonymously, around the Internet. Well, the bang had a source, but the source of that source requested not to be identified. A few weeks ago, The New York Times published an Op-Ed essay written by a senior official …
Web Roundup: Pharmaceuticals, ‘Pharmascolds,’ and Conflicts of Interest
Over the past month, a number of researchers, institutions, and pharmaceutical companies have come under pressure for relationships between medical research, clinical treatment, and corporate profits. An investigation by the New York Times and ProPublica looked into Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s chief medical officer, Dr. José Baselga, who has since resigned, and his failure to disclose important financial relationships …
Web Roundup: Annals of Injury and Dispossession
In a 2013 essay in American Anthropologist, Andrea Muehlebach summarized the concept of “precarity” as “a shorthand for…the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age entails.” Indeed, the last month has seen a collection of events, acute and ongoing, that characterize the precariousness of the historical present. In the U.S., July 26 marked the court-imposed deadline …
Web Roundup: Abortion Access
This month, and especially this past week, has seen immense media coverage of abortion access, both in the United States and abroad. A recent study out of UCSF has shown that abortion is extremely safe, with lower post-procedure ER visits than many other routine surgical procedures. However, despite the safety of this medical procedure, abortion is still highly …