DENIS CAMPBELL, - The Guardian (U.K.)/Raw Story
Stephan: This awful trade is inevitable. Desperate people will pay anything. Evil people will provide anything. The only solution is for the advanced nations to do the research to develop the technology allowing organs to be grown. Healthy organs, no rejection, and no impoverished third world people missing kidneys, or part of their liver, or a lung.
The illegal trade in kidneys has risen to such a level that an estimated 10,000 black market operations involving purchased human organs now take place annually, or more than one an hour, World Health Organisation experts have revealed.
Evidence collected by a worldwide network of doctors shows that traffickers are defying laws intended to curtail their activities and are cashing in on rising international demand for replacement kidneys driven by the increase in diabetes and other diseases.
Patients, many of whom will go to China, India or Pakistan for surgery, can pay up to $200,000 (nearly £128,000) for a kidney to gangs who harvest organs from vulnerable, desperate people, sometimes for as little as $5,000.
The vast sums to be made by both traffickers and surgeons have been underlined by the arrest by Israeli police last week of 10 people, including a doctor, suspected of belonging to an international organ trafficking ring and of committing extortion, tax fraud and grievous bodily harm. Other illicit organ trafficking rings have been uncovered in India and Pakistan.
The Guardian contacted an organ broker in China who advertised his services under the slogan, ‘Donate a kidney, buy the new iPad!
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Stephan: Here is a wonderful story. This is what our educational system is supposed to be about.
Another amazing teen scientist is making headlines for developing advances in cancer research in his after-school hours. Fifteen-year-old Jack Andraka from Maryland, winner of the world’s largest high school science research competition, developed a test for pancreatic cancer that is not only 28 times cheaper and faster than current tests in place, but also 100 times more sensitive. Astoundingly, the urine and blood test that he developed can detect this type of cancer with 90 percent accuracy.
Jack received the Gordan E. Moore award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for his groundbreaking research, earning a $75,000 prize. He beat out over 1,500 students from 70 countries to claim the award.
Two runners-up — Nicholas Schiefer of Ontario, Canada and Ari Dyckovsky of Virginia — earned $50,000 prizes for their innovations. Nicholas’s ‘microsearch’ research used information like tweets and Facebook status updates to improve search engine capabilities, while Ari looked into the atomic basis for quantum teleportation.
Seventeen other Best of Category winners at the week-long Pittsburgh event took home $5,000 prizes for their research.
Like Jack, another group of teen scientists was able to develop a low-cost and high-accuracy development in health research. After learning that drinking unpasteurized milk was leading […]
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Stephan: Here is the first report of what I predict is going to be a massive transformational bio-technology.
Science fiction writers, you have a new inspiration. Researchers have successfully stored data in the DNA of living cells.
After three years and 750 different trials, scientists finally found a method for repeatedly encoding, storing, and erasing the digital information within the DNA, as part of a partnership between Stanford University’s schools of engineering and medicine.
Think of their creation as a bioengineering bit; Graduate student Pakpoom Subsoontorn explains, ‘If the DNA section points in one direction, it’s a zero. If it points the other way, it’s a one.
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JANICE D'ARCY, - The Washington Post
Stephan: This is the latest update on an increasingly distressing trend. We are literally maiming our young in the service of profit for the few. The only way out of this that I can see is eating locally grown organic food, or food you raise yourself, eating nothing that is processed. Your children's health hangs in the balance.
Now, yet more evidence that children’s health is in dire need of attention: A new study released today shows that almost a quarter of teens have diabetes or prediabetes.
Almost a quarter.
That’s up from 9 percent a decade ago, according to a study in the June 2012 issue of Pediatrics, published online today.
The findings come from a report that looked more broadly at the risk factors teens have for cardiovascular disease. ‘Prevalence of Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors Among U.S. Adolescents, 1999-2008
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KATHERINE STEWART, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: In Texas the forces of willful ignorance are well-entrenched and this is what they have wrought. We are debasing our children's education in the service of Theocratic Rightist delusions and fantasies. Meanwhile the rest of the industrialized world is producing educated thinking individuals. We just keep telling ourselves how wonderful we are hoping that this will take the place of real substance.
Don McLeroy, chairman of the Texas State Board of Education from 2007 to 2009, is a ‘young earth
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