December 9, 2014 The U.S. Senate has passed H.R. 1281, the Newborn Screening Saves Lives Reauthorization Act, after adopting significant privacy and consent protections championed by the Council for Responsible Genetics.   Every US state conducts  a newborn screening test ... [More]

  Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spent much of Wednesday completing a report that would let the public see, in embarrassing detail, how the sloppy handling of anthrax by scientists at its headquarters here had potentially exposed dozens of ... [More]

After potentially serious back-to-back laboratory accidents, federal health officials announced Friday that they had temporarily closed the flu and anthrax laboratories at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and halted shipments of all infectious agents from the agency’... [More]

In every one of the dozens of bioterrorism meetings I have attended over the last three decades, experts have stated unequivocally that the worst-case outbreak scenario would be smallpox in the hands of bad guys. And the most alarming other microbial possibilities that follow? Well, anthrax was al... [More]

  A government scientist cleaning out a storage room last week at a lab on the National Institutes of Health’s Bethesda campus found decades-old vials of smallpox, the second incident involving the mishandling of a highly dangerous pathogen by a federal health agency in a month. The v... [More]

An image capture from last week's historical moment: As many of you may know today the National Institutes of Health "N.I.H." and the Lacks family reached agreement for the use of the Henrietta Lacks Genome data. "It was an honor to be included in the conversation of the future of Henriett... [More]

The National Institutes of Health today announced in Nature that it has reached an understanding with the family of the late Henrietta Lacks to allow biomedical researchers controlled access to the whole genome data of cells derived from her tumor, commonly known as HeLa cells. These cells have ... [More]

Several protesters stood outside the John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse Thursday as proceedings continued in a case challenging the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories at Boston University, commonly referred to as the BU biolab.   Inside the courthouse, a team of prosecu... [More]

The fight for environmental justice in Boston will continue at the Moakley Courthouse. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday, April 11th, when Judge Patti Saris will hear cross-motions for summary judgment and the Stop the BU Bio-Terror Lab Coalition’s motion for a permanent injunction again... [More]

The Supreme Court today rejected a request to ban U.S.-funded research on human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). The decision brings to an end a long legal battle that has cast a shadow over hESC studies for over 3 years.   Two scientists who study adult stem cells filed their suit, Sherle... [More]