It’s Great For the Cause But How Will It Affect Our Patients? This weekend, The New York Times Sunday Magazine will feature a story on “The New Abortion Providers,” suggesting a major step forward in abortion rights – new training opportunities that are increasing the number of abortion providers, and moving the practice of [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Laura Hercher’
June 1, 2010
In Baseball as in Life, You Never Know
Sometimes the experts get it wrong. Just ask R. A. Dickey. In 1996, Dickey was a first round pick of the Texas Rangers, with a signing bonus of $810,000 on the table. At 21, he was on the cover of Baseball America along with four other pitchers for the U.S. Olympic baseball team. It was [...]
March 31, 2010
Sweet!! The Judge Rules on the Myriad Patent Case
On Monday, Judge Robert Sweet of the Federal District Court in Southern New York shocked the world by ruling against Myriad Genetics, invalidating claims with regard to patents on BRCA 1 and 2. This morning, the genetic counselors, oncologists, patients and their families as well as other interested parties like patent lawyers and venture capitalists [...]
February 16, 2010
Glenn Beck Hates Babies: Death Panels, Newborn Screening, Fox News and Me
“You are from the Glenn Beck Show?” I asked. My voice betrayed what for lack of a nicer word might be called skepticism. “The Glenn Beck Show,” she answered, her tone sliding past defensive into a smug I-know-what-you-are-thinking defiance that reminded me wordlessly of Fox News’ Nielsen dominance. “We were wondering if you would like [...]
February 2, 2010
“Just Say No” Doesn’t Work in Genetics Either
As Bob Resta’s post here on the DNA Exchange ably illustrates, genetic counselors have lots of reasons to take an interest in the Counsyl Universal Genetic Test. Is it being oversold? Probably – here are a couple of reasons why Universal is not universal: The company cites a high accuracy rate for detection of mutations [...]
January 13, 2010
Intellectual Climate Change: Can we Survive the Rising Sea of Data in the 21st Century?
Happy New Year! It’s a whole new decade – time for some summing up, and some looking forward. If I had to pick a defining image of the last ten years, it would be a tidal wave – a wave as big as the wall of water that drowned New Orleans, as big as the [...]
November 3, 2009
It Was Bound To Happen Amway or Another
Remember Edward R. Murrow? No? Me neither. How about Walter Cronkite? I met him once in an elevator in 1980 (if by “met” you mean that I mistook him for the elevator man and ordered the most famous news anchor of the day to take me to the fifth floor. I recognized him by the [...]
September 4, 2009
DC Takes on DTC: The “T” Doesn’t Stand For Tomorrow Anymore
On the first day of a two-day workshop on direct-to-consumer genetic testing co-sponsored by the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Science, Muin Khoury of the CDC raised the following question: if we speak out against the current crop of micro-array based genome-wide screens. are we allowing the perfect to be the enemy [...]
July 20, 2009
Perils of Language: Why Sonia Sotomayor Won’t Call Herself “Pro-Choice”
As Sonia Sotomayor faces the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, two things are certain: 1. Much of the questioning will be about abortion. 2. You will almost never hear the word abortion. When we talk about this subject – in speeches, in newspapers, and on our NSGC list serve – the dialogue is shaped by [...]
June 1, 2009
About that Paternity Test… (Part 2)
(Find Part 1 here) Okay, so Ms. Washington’s twins have two daddies. It’s just tabloid-fodder, right?. But reading it (hey, it’s my job!) I saw a kind of grandeur in this tale: a window into our evolutionary past. After all, routine gestation of a single child is a late development; most mammals carry littermates, often [...]
