Please join us on February 27 at 2:00pm in Wasserstein 1019 at the Harvard Law School as we launch Professor Frances Kamm’s latest book, Bioethical Prescriptions: To Create, End, Choose, and Improve Lives (Oxford University Press, January 2014). The book showcases Professor Kamm’s articles on bioethics as parts of a coherent whole, with sections devoted…
By I. Glenn Cohen Earlier this week, the D.C. Circuit upheld the FDA’s authority to regulate stem cells (for a good news report see here). The company in question, Regenerative Sciences, had received a warning letter from FDA, which the company challenged claiming that its use of stem cells as therapy was not prohibited by existing…
By Jeffrey Skopek For those interested in the FDA’s decision to regulate 23andMe’s direct-to-consumer genetic testing service, it is worth reading a recent comment in Nature by Robert Green and Nita Farahany. The piece raises two core objections to the FDA’s decision that deserve further attention. One objection is that the FDA’s decision runs contrary to “the historical…
By Timo Minssen Following a request by the European Competition Law Review (Sweet Maxwell), I have today submitted a review of the recent publication “Pharmaceutical Innovation, Competition and Patent Law – A Trilateral Perspective”, edited by Max Planck Director Josef Drexl and Finnish scholar Nari Lee (Edward Elgar 2013, 322 p., ISBN 978 0 85793…
By Nicholson Price There’s an interesting post up on the New York Times’ Well Blog about children with three biological parents—in this case, three genetic parents. Here, a mother and a father provided chromosomal DNA (i.e., the standard 23 chromosomes from each leading to the diploid 46 chromosomes), and another woman provided the egg, which…
By Michael Young In 1972, biochemist Paul Berg and his student Janet Mertz published groundbreaking details of their first successful attempt at devising a procedure to cleave separate pieces of DNA and recombine them into a single novel molecule. These innovations, dubbed recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology, spurred a flurry of concerns from members of the scientific…
By Richard Epstein Cross-post from PointOfLaw. Richard A. Epstein is a professor of law at NYU Law School, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago and a visiting scholar with the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Legal Policy. His forthcoming book is “The Classical Liberal Constitution,” from Harvard…
By Chloe Reichel 1) Following orders from FDA, 23andMe will no longer market genetic tests using health analyses. The company will, however, continue to sell genetic tests related to ancestry. 2) Families with children who have seizure disorders are flocking to Colorado. There, these children can legally receive medications containing extracts from marijuana, which are…
By The Petrie-Flom Center Bioethical Prescriptions: To Create, End, Choose, and Improve Lives By Frances M. Kamm, Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Professor of Philosophy in the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Petrie-Flom Academic Fellow alumna This book is a collection of Frances M. Kamm‘s articles on bioethics, which have…
Bill of Health Contributor Dov Fox was interviewed today on NPR’s “Marketplace” about the FDA’s decision to ban all sales of direct-to-consumer genetic testing by 23andMe. 23andMe provides information about genetic health risks to people who buy at-home “DNA spit kits.” The company seeks to inform consumers about their susceptibility to more than 250 diseases. But the FDA…
