Clinton, who named drug companies among her enemies in this week’s debate, is pushing populist-inspired policies that could hamper the flow of new medicines.
Medical research can be complex and difficult to understand, but cinematic representations of mad scientists who speak gobbledygook add to the confusion. An annual event separates fact from fiction.
Plants on the International Space Station must figure out how to grow in a completely novel environment. Their adaptability hints at how they’ll react to changes here on Earth – or in future space outposts.
By forgetting that medicine postpones death rather than saving lives, we persuade ourselves it might somehow keep extending our life and come to view death as a failure of medicine.
Throughout history, whenever new technologies have emerged that change our means of production and ability to communicate they have tended to transform society. The rapid technological development of the…
Australian innovation has stagnated in the past 50 years, and could be reinvigorated by focusing on key areas, according to Donald Hector, President of the Royal Society of New South Wales in an interview…
Peter Doherty: Thinking in terms of Australia’s future, how important is it for us to expand activity in the innovation/high technology sector? Donald Hector: It’s critically important. If you look at…
A genetic modification that creates male-only populations could give us a new weapon against invasive fish such as carp that plague our waterways. “Daughterless technology”, which works by removing females…
Synthetic biology is an emerging discipline, but paradoxically it is not particularly new. Since the mid-1970s we have been developing ways of instructing pieces of biology to perform useful tasks in an…
Last October, scientists in California sequenced the DNA for the “type H” botulinum toxin. One gram of this toxin would be sufficient to kill half a billion people, making it the deadliest substance yet…
The launch of the lab-bred “meat” in London was a masterly act of timing, theatre, and media management. But now that rabbit is out of the hat, there are questions that need to be asked, and answers that…
In the past month, we have seen two major announcements of huge projects to map the brain – the European Human Brain Project (HBP) and the Obama Brain Activity Map (BAM). What you may not have noticed…
What’s not to love about bananas? Besides being a wildly popular dessert fruit, they are the staple food of millions of people in developing countries. The current edition of Nature carries a paper that…
The growth of augmented reality (AR) will almost certainly change the way we visually experience the everyday world. And, as discussed previously on The Conversation, it’s likely to be Google’s Project…
Professor - Emerging Technologies (Stem Cells) at The University of Melbourne and Group Leader - Stem Cell Ethics & Policy at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, The University of Melbourne