Do animals with partly human brains, or producing human embryos, sound like science fiction? Some worry that creating “chimeras”— embryos with cells from more than one species — opens the door to just such possibilities.
The number of retractions in scientific journals has increased significantly in recent years, according to research.1 Sometimes, it’s due to honest mistakes — researchers realize they made an error and want to correct the scientific record.
A patient asks her physician, whom she’s never seen previously, a particularly sensitive medical question. How does this interaction differ if the patient is at home, viewing the doctor’s response on a computer screen?
If a medication for major depression has a dangerous adverse interaction with a different medication that’s being studied in a clinical trial, will it be discovered by researchers and reported in the literature? Not likely, if no one enrolled in the study has major depression.
“I often felt like I’m driving up the costs of the healthcare system …We used to sell an implant that has 99% survivorship at 15 years, which is great, right? We were told to not ever market it to anybody … If a doctor asked for it by name, we would give it to him. We want to market the newer, the better technology. I’m not certain I ever thought the newer technology was better. There certainly wasn’t data on it … I was uncomfortable with those sorts of things.”
