Links

1. T.V. Padma in Scientific American: India Court Ruling Upholds Access to Cheaper, Generic Drugs. It's about yesterday's landmark Supreme Court verdict that denied Novartis a patent for its evergreened version of its anti-cancer drug.

2. Henry R. Bourne (UC-San Francisco) in eLife: The Writing on the Wall. Here's the abstract:

   The biomedical research enterprise in the US has become unsustainable and urgent action is needed to address a variety of problems, including a lack of innovation, an over-reliance on soft money for faculty salaries, the use of graduate students as a source of cheap labour, and a ‘holding tank’ full of talented postdocs with limited career opportunities.

3. Kristina Lerman in ACM SIGMOD Blog: Stop Publishing So Much Already!

4. Rebecca Skloot in NYTimes: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the Sequel:

   The Lackses’ experiences over the last 60 years foretold nearly every major ethical issue raised by research on human tissues and genetic material. Now they’re raising a new round of ethical questions for science: though their consent is not (yet) required for publishing private genetic information from HeLa, should it be? Should we require consent before anyone’s genome is sequenced and published? And what control should gene-sharing family members have?

5. SMBC has a "mathy" variant of "Talk dirty to me" -- with probably the first ever appearance of the Frobenius method in a comic strip.