By Patrick O’Leary In the October 22 edition of The New Yorker, Michael Specter wrote a fascinating article about the growing and exciting science of the human microbiome, the ecosystem of ten thousand or so bacterial species that call each of our bodies home. The hype around this particular field of scientific and medical inquiry…
By Patrick O’Leary A friend and I were having a conversation about health policy the other day when he observed that drug regulators like FDA face an impossible task in terms of public expectations: as consumers, we expect the drugs we take to be 100% safe, 100% of the time. Of course, no regulator, no…
By Patrick O’Leary Looking back over last month’s health-related news, two articles published on The Atlantic’s website stand out to illustrate a tension that has received a great deal of focus in Medicare reform circles, and that seems to be a political sticking point for many otherwise promising cost-reduction strategies. In his September 10th article The…
By Patrick O’Leary Back in February, President Obama’s FY 2013 budget authorized $4.5 billion for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), about $2 billion of which was to come from user fees, the fees paid by regulated industry under a variety of schemes including the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA), the Medical Device User…
We’ll have several Harvard graduate students blogging with us this academic year, including the 2012-13 cohort of Petrie-Flom Center student fellows.
