Mac Slavo – Company Selling Genetic Data On Millions Of Americans

The questions of our time have become – Who owns you? Your data? What about your DNA? For customers who opted into signing a consent form when they signed up to have their DNA sequenced through the company 23andMe, it would appear that their DNA data belongs to a giant database that is being shared and sold to third-party medical …

Bruce Levine – What Does It Mean to Be Called ‘Crazy’ in a Crazy World?

It has become increasingly mainstream [3] to criticize psychiatry for its corruption by drug companies, invalid diagnoses, lack of long-term treatment effectiveness, and other scientific failings. The recent book, Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness [4], by radio host and therapist Will Hall, reminds us that perhaps the most pathetic aspect of “inside mainstream mental health” is how simplistic, boring and reductionist it …

MATTHEW SHAER – The False Promise of DNA Testing

ne evening in november of 2002, Carol Batie was sitting on her living-room couch in Houston, flipping through channels on the television, when she happened to catch a teaser for an upcoming news segment on KHOU 11, the local CBS affiliate. She leapt to her feet. “I scared the kids, I was screaming so loud,” Batie told me recently. “I said, …

Steven Hoffman – GMO Mushroom Waved Through by USDA, Potentially Opening Floodgates for Wave of Frankenfoods

Repeat after me: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats That’s CRISPR, a new GE technology that uses an enzyme, Cas9, to cut, edit or remove genes from targeted region of a plant’s DNA. Because it doesn’t involve transgenics, i.e. inserting genes from foreign species into an animal or plant, foods produced in this manner just received a free pass from …

Friendships Better Than Morphine

Friends ‘better than morphine’ – Larger social networks release more pain-killing endorphin, University of Oxford reports People with more friends have higher pain tolerance, Oxford University researchers have found. Katerina Johnson, a doctoral student in the University’s Department of Experimental Psychology, was studying whether differences in our neurobiology may help explain why some of us have larger social networks than others. …

Climate-exodus expected in the Middle East and North Africa

More than 500 million people live in the Middle East and North Africa – a region which is very hot in summer and where climate change is already evident. The number of extremely hot days has doubled since 1970. “In future, the climate in large parts of the Middle East and North Africa could change in such a manner that …

Michael Moore – Dear President Obama: Your Visit Is Too Little Too Late

ear President Obama — Finally, after months of us begging you to come to Flint, you’ve decided to visit next Wednesday. I know this will make many people happy and grateful. But, as one who voted for you twice and was thrilled beyond belief over your election, I’m sorry to tell you your visit is too little too late. You …

JONATHAN LATHAM – God’s Red Pencil? CRISPR and The Three Myths of Precise Genome Editing

For the benefit of those parts of the world where public acceptance of biotechnology is incomplete, a public relations blitz is at full tilt. It concerns an emerging set of methods for altering the DNA of living organisms. “Easy DNA Editing Will Remake the World. Buckle Up“; “We Have the Technology to Destroy All Zika Mosquitoes“; and “CRISPR: gene editing …

Dahlia Lithwick – Pseudoscience in the Witness Box

The Washington Post published a story so horrifying this weekend that it would stop your breath: “The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.” What went wrong? The Post continues: “Of 28 examiners …