Science Education & Policy

There's just no substitute for a dead body. Computer teaching is all the rage and simulation can do many things, but when it comes to anatomy, students learn much better through the traditional use of human cadavers. Cary Roseth, psychologist at Michigan State University, said the paper suggests cadaver-based instruction should continue in undergraduate human anatomy, a gateway course to medical school, nursing and other health and medical fields. In the United States, most anatomy courses still emphasize the use of cadavers, although in many cases digital technologies supplement the…

Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, has a $29 billion per year budget, which dwarfs the National Science Foundation and NASA - combined. You'd think for all that money they could have done a lot to create an Ebola vaccine before the crisis was all over the pages of The New York Times. But it seems they need just a little more. Dr. Collins says they have been working on a vaccine since 2001 but haven't been able to complete it because of a "10-year slide" in funding. "NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It's not like we suddenly woke up and…

In America, the cost of health care is not high just because the medicine is the best in the world, it is also because of lawsuits. Due to judgments in court cases that have earned tens of millions of dollars for lawyers - one aggressive lawyer demonized hospitals for not doing enough caesarian-sections and earned enough money to become a Senator and then a Vice-Presidential contender in 2004 - hospitals and offices have instituted a 'defense medicine' policy; even if there is no doubt, there is a protocol in place that says a number of tests must be run so that all of the boxes can…

Diversity in medical education used to be simple - more black people, more women - but it is not just a numbers game anymore.  Instead of focus just on recruiting under-represented students, modern education needs to be about creating an optimal learning environment, where people with different ideas, cultures, opinions, and experiences feel comfortable amongst each other and part of a larger dialogue to come together to solve tomorrow's health care problems, says Mark A. Attiah, a medical student pursuing both a Master's in translational research and bioethics at the University of…

French growers have to endure a lot of strange restrictions - they can't use seeds with neonicotinoids on them, for example, because of a manufactured controversy about colony collapse disorder, but they can spray neonics on the plants themselves, which is actually worse for the environment. They can't use GMOs but they can use products created using mutagenesis, even though it is far less rigorous and precise. Now the European Commission has gone too far; they are putting warning labels on products made with lavender oil, which reportedly can cause allergic reactions for some people.…

More than 2,000,000 people are incarcerated in the United States, the highest incarceration rate in the world - little surprise when abusing a dog is a felony, there are different penalties for attacking a person of one color over another, and judges are given no sentencing leeway in many cases. Given American willingness to put everyone in jail for whatever cultural lobbyists are advocating this year, it was only a matter of time before Sesame Street introduced a character that has an incarcerated father. What could that possibly have to do with health care inequality? It's…

With expensive clinical trials, lawyers waiting to sue, and long approval times unless a disease makes it into the New York Times, pharmaceutical companies are leaving the antibiotic space behind. All those people who wished there were no drug companies competing to make the best treatments are getting their wish. That means universities, which are not used to doing applied research, could now be tasked with trying to fill the void left by the private sector. Can the current university system do it?  As a famous jab at the National Institutes of Health by Samuel Broder, former…

America now has a services funding problem that has plagued Europe for a time - nowhere near enough workers to pay for people getting government money.  Though there are now 2 workers to pay for Baby Boomer social security, compared to 42 when the system started, a new study advocates even fewer babies and more economic slowdown. But it will pay off, say scholars from the University of California, Berkeley and the East-West Center in Hawaii. They correlated birth rates with economic data and concluded that a moderately low birth rate – a little below two children per woman – might…

Naomi Klein: To fight climate change, we have to end capitalism. Mariusz Kubik, CC BY By Matthew Nisbet, Northeastern University Earth is “f---ed” and our insatiable growth economy is to blame. So argues Naomi Klein in her intentionally provocative best-seller This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Klein is the latest among an influential network of like-minded authors who have declared that modern society is at war with nature in a battle that threatens the survivial of the human species. Examples include US writer/activist Bill McKibben, Canadian broadcaster David Suzuki, and…

What role do genes have to play in children's exam results? Student test by  wavebreakmedia /Shutterstock By Eva Krapohl, King's College London and Kaili Rimfeld, King's College London The idea that children can inherit the ability to get good results at school can spark heated debate. But, put simply, all this means is that children differ in how easy and enjoyable they find learning and that these differences are to a large extent explained by differences in their genes, rather than differences between schools or teachers. We know from previous research that educational achievement in…