Tag Archive | Obama
Reproductive Justice in Law and the Clinic
By Dianna Douglas The Affordable Care Act is nearly one and a half years old, but the complexity of its reforms and their gradual roll-out have made it difficult to grade. Different disciplines are still parsing the legislation, attempting to figure out how it will change the future of their field. Experts in the field […]
Stimulating the Hunt for Asthma Genes
In the recent kerfuffle over the national debt, one of the rhetorical flashpoints was the $800 billion “stimulus package” pushed by the Obama administration in 2009 to fight the economic slowdown. Though the benefits of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on unemployment and the economy are fiercely debated, the impact upon the scientific world […]
The History of Health Insurance, Rashomon-Style
In Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, the story of a crime is told three times from the perspective of three different witnesses/participants. Due to the biases of each storyteller, the details of the three accounts fail to align, ultimately leaving the film’s narrator – and the viewer – unsure about what truly happened in the […]
Insurance Against Health Disparities
There are many different stakeholders in fixing the runaway costs of the U.S. health care system, including patients, doctors, hospitals, and the federal government. Another interested party, heavily involved in recent debates over health care reform, is the health insurance industry. As the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act rolls out in the coming years, […]
Putting a Long Leash on Synthetic Life
When scientist/entrepreneur J. Craig Venter announced that his company had created “synthetic life” in March, a predictable tsunami of media hype followed. Though the discovery was more accurately an important step in synthetic biology, rather than the creation of life from scratch in a laboratory, the story provoked rampant speculation about what this new field […]
A Doctor, A Friar, and Now a Presidential Advisor
Daniel Sulmasy is used to wearing many different figurative outfits, from the white coat he wears as a physician at the University of Chicago Medical Center to the brown robe he dons after work as a Franciscan friar. Now, Sulmasy will have another important role in his wardrobe as a member of President Obama’s Commission […]
Linkage 3/24: The Pinky of An Ancestor and Harmful Neurologisms
Expanding the Human Family, One Cave at a Time A couple weeks back on the blog, Callum Ross debunked a lemur-like creature, Darwinius masillae, purported by some to be a very distant human ancestor. If you were feeling sad about this contraction of the human family circle, you may have been cheered by news this […]
Science Stimulus Boosts University Research
For information about the grants that the University of Chicago received as part of the ARRA package, click here. If the scientists you know have an extra spring in their step today, here’s why: over $5 billion in National Institutes of Health funding was announced this week, the scientific portion of the federal stimulus package […]
Looking Beyond Health Care Reform
The question was a welcome one, given the heated, exhausting health care debate that has raged through the summer: On the day after health care reform (whatever form it takes), what are the potential stumbling blocks and opportunities? That’s how moderator Michele Norris (of NPR’s All Things Considered) thoughtfully began the panel at the University […]
Video: Janet Rowley Receives Presidential Award
University of Chicago molecular geneticist Janet Rowley received her Presidential Medal of Freedom Wednesday along with 15 other honorees, including Stephen Hawking and Sen. Edward Kennedy. Here’s video of the ceremony, courtesy of C-SPAN…President Obama’s warm introduction is at 15:50, and he presents Dr. Rowley with the medal at 35:00: http://www.c-spanarchives.org/flash/cspanPlayer.swf?pid=288337-2&autoplay=0 Here is President Obama’s […]
