Ever since the first human gene was patented in 1982, there’s been a near-universal ‘What??!!’ when people hear that it’s legal for someone to own the rights to our DNA. Blame the Constitution, which empowers Congress to give inventors ‘the exclusive right’ to their discoveries;’ the patent office, which interprets ‘discoveries’ as including genes; and the courts, which have said similar patents ‘promote the progress of science,’ as the Framers wrote. So far, all that has trumped complaints that patents on human genes (of which some 40,000, covering about one fifth of the genome, have been issued) ‘halt research, prevent medical testing, and keep vital information from you and your doctor,’ as novelist Michael Crichton wrote in 2007. But maybe not for much longer. In the first lawsuit of its kind, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation of Cardozo School of Law argued last week in federal court in New York that patents on breast- and ovarian-cancer genes held by Myriad Genetics are unconstitutional because they restrict research and thus violate free speech. I defer to others on the legal merits here. But the scientific issues, while no slam-dunk, have become serious enough in the […]
Anthem Blue Cross customers got a shock this week when the health insurer informed thousands of individual policyholders that their premium rates will jump as much as 39 percent on March 1. ‘There aren’t any other parts of our society where people have no regard for inflation rate and increase their prices this much. I can’t imagine anything in the world that’s going up 39 percent,’ said Josh Libresco, 54, of San Rafael, as he grappled with the news that his family premium will go from $858 per month to $1,192 – and that’s with a $5,000 deductible. Anthem, which has reportedly sent letters this week to those who buy their coverage individually and are not covered by a group policy, said rising health care costs led to the increase. The company, based in Woodland Hills (Los Angles County), declined to say how many customers received the increase or what the average premium hike was, but the insurer has the largest number of individual customers in the state. Last year, when Anthem Blue Cross raised rates by as much as 68 percent for some customers, the company said it had about 800,000 members. The Department of […]
In trying to avert dangerous climate change, governments are aiming for something extraordinary. They want to transform the global economy because of a hypothesis for which the evidence is mostly inaccessible to the layman. It is the biggest pre-emption in history, and it relies on collective trust in science. That is why recent controversies around misreported evidence and exclusion of dissent at the University of East Anglia and the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change are so important. The worst allegations relate to the suppression of information – deleting emails, ignoring inconvenient data – in order to make aspects of the case for climate change tidier. The cover-up is the most toxic part in any scandal. The broad outline of the scientific case is unchanged, but confidence in the processes that got there is badly shaken. This is a big problem for advocates of political action on climate change. The case has always rested on a balance of risk. Few hypotheses in a system as complex as Earth’s climate can be asserted with 100% certainty. Yet if there is sufficient evidence that human emissions are having disastrous effects, it is worth acting because the risk […]
The unemployment rate in the U.S. unexpectedly dropped to 9.7 percent in January and manufacturers added to payrolls for the first time in three years, which may provide a spark to revive the rest of the labor market. More than half a million Americans found work, a Labor Department report showed yesterday in Washington, helping push the jobless rate to the lowest since August. A separate survey of employers showed payrolls declined by 20,000 as construction companies and state and local governments cut back. Cisco Systems Inc. is among companies that plan to add staff as businesses update equipment and global growth picks up. The economy may be slow to overcome the 8.4 million jobs lost over the last two years, explaining why President Barack Obama has made employment a top priority and the Federal Reserve has pledged to keep interest rates low. ‘It’s a slow process, but the labor market is indeed starting to turn the corner, said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors Inc. in Holland, Pennsylvania. While there may be one or two more months of payroll declines, ‘I expect increases to be the order of the day going forward. U.S. stocks […]
While the BLM is facing a virtual clog of large, desert-based solar project proposals, smaller, distributed solar projects are popping up at an impressive rate. In just the past few weeks, 1,300 MW worth of these projects have been announced or approved, which could equal about the same energy output of a big nuclear power plant. The larger, more ambitious solar power plans have many environmental and land-use hurdles to clear, while these smaller plans, set to occupy commercial and residential rooftops, areas near electrical substations and urban areas, don’t have the same obstacles in their way. Also, the smaller projects are cheaper, meaning more utilities can afford to implement them as they’re scrambling to meet renewable energy mandates. Arno Harris, the CEO of Recurrent Energy, a company that has signed a contract with Southern California Edison for 50 MW of small-scale solar, summed it up like this: ‘Distributed solar is faster on permitting, on environmental issues and interconnection to the grid. It offers a safety valve for utilities who don’t want to put all their eggs in one basket. The projects, anywhere from 50 to 500 MW each, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
