Tag Archives: Bioethics

Features

The banality of corporate corruption: Janssen’s reimbursement department takes the stand. (Risperdal on trial, cont’d.)

By Kalman Applbaum
This article is part of the series:

When I first began interviewing pharmaceutical company executives on site, I was baffled by the size of their “government affairs” or similarly named departments. I understood that regulatory matters were complex and important to the process of drug licensing, but did management of that task require entire departments of full-time employees? The reason for this remained unclear to me until …

Features

The Risperdal trial in Texas, cont’d: Establishing not just facts, but the yardstick by which facts are to be measured, and other matters

By Kalman Applbaum
This article is part of the series:

I.          Marketing = Education

The first evidence brought before the jury on the afternoon of January 10 was the deposition of a former Janssen product manager, Thomas Anderson, who was one of two marketing managers responsible for launching Risperdal in 1993. The exhibit placed before the jury was a document from the early planning days, entitled “Building a Consensus.” The …

Features

Public Debate and the Conflict of the Faculties

By Anthony Stavrianakis

For the last five years Paul Rabinow, Gaymon Bennett and I engaged in collaborative participant-observation in the Berkeley based Synthetic biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). SynBERC is a consortium of biologists and engineers from UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, Harvard, MIT and Stanford. This Center is funded by National Science Foundation and was the first synthetic biology …

Web Roundups

Monthly Web Round-up: Bodies/borders

By Cassandra Hartblay

Frontpage news over the past month has repeatedly returned to the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, in which prominent French politician and development affairs guru Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) was arrested after being accused of sexually assaulting a hotel worker in New York City. The accusation, emerging at the end of May, sparked an international scandal that many speculate will impact the outcome …

Web Roundups

Monthly Web Round-up

By Georgia Richardson-Melody

CULTURE AND NATURE

It is important to consider the role that societal and institutional factors play in the relationship between ‘natural’ disasters and the causes of social suffering. It is too simple to call natural disasters ‘natural’, as they happen in a particular social and cultural context. When attempting to understand how and why natural disasters can cause social suffering, …

Features

Translating the brain

By Eugene Raikhel

2010 was a good year for neuroscience-and-society conferences.  We’ve already written about three of them on this site.  And here’s another: “Translating the Brain: Ethics, Publics, Prospect,” was convened late last year at the University of Edinburgh by Martyn Pickersgill, Christina Plafky and Sarah Cunningham-Burley:

The symposium sought to examine the place, role and impact of

…