Since it was revealed in 1972, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male has been considered among the most egregious violations of research ethics during the 20th century. The study began in 1932; for 40 years, researchers passively monitored hundreds of adult black males with syphilis, despite the availability of effective treatment.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has just awarded the first-ever grant dedicated to laying the policy groundwork needed to translate genomic medicine into clinical application. The project – LawSeqSM– will convene legal, ethics and scientific experts from across the country to analyze what the state of genomic law is and create much-needed guidance on what it should be.
In 2013, Mindy Kurzer, PhD, published research demonstrating that "aerobic exercise influences the way our bodies break down estrogens to produce more of the ‘good’ metabolites that lower breast cancer risk." Kurzer, director of Consortium member center Healthy Foods, Health Lives, is a professor in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition.
A 2006 opinion by US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is still reverberating throughout environment regulation circles, having triggered a decade of fevered debate over how to determine which bodies of water are protected by the Clean Water Act of 1972. By positing that a waterway had to be part of a "significant nexus" with a river or wetland to be covered under the act, Kennedy's decision sparked dozens of lawsuits.
Despite the promise of pharmacogenomics – selecting drugs based on a patient's genetic makeup – significant obstacles to its wide implementation remain. According to an article in Scientific American, "fewer than 10 hospitals around the country. . .
Today, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it has finalized the new Nutrition Facts label for packaged foods. The changes include a refreshed design that will make it easier for consumers to spot key information such as number of calories and serving size.
A new proposal by the Obama administration would require scientists who work with human biospecimens to obtain consent from patients prior to using them in research, even when all personal information is removed. The proposed change is part of the revision of the Common Rule, the federal law used to govern research with human participants, which is currently under review.
Professor Efie Kokkoli, PhD, has been inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows, a top honor in her field of Chemical Engineering. Prof. Kokkoli was recognized for outstanding contributions to the design of peptide- and aptamer-amphiphiles for the development of functionalized biomaterials.
Consortium Chair Susan M. Wolf, JD, lectured yesterday at Boston University's School of Public Health. Her topic was the current status of legal and ethical guidelines, as well as the development of best practices, related to translational genomics – issues given greater urgency in light of the federal Precision Medicine Initiative, which launched last year. For more than a decade, Prof.