1. In a Christmas miracle, the UN Biodiversity meeting - often environmental activists lobbying bloated quasi-world-government committees - met in Cancun and didn't cave into anti-science environmentalists determined to prevent all biology from being used in agriculture. As Joshua Krisch notes in The Scientist, we had fought the anti-science barbarians at the gate and the UN’s final agreement—penned December 16—instead only sanely urged caution in testing gene drives. Which is exactly what we wanted.
2016 was a weird year in many ways, but we are finishing it off with a win.
2. We're also in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, talking about another way to keep the public away from the dark side when it comes to science and medicine; showing how medical professionals can all act to curb patient sexual abuse.
Negligence is a very real internal cancer and since physician assistants, medical assistants, nurses, and medical students are all part of medical treatment they are also accountable.
3. In the New York Post, our Dr. Josh Bloom discusses how the feds are fueling America’s opioid disaster. When we testified at FDA that the problem with existing approaches to opioid abuse (blame drug companies, more paperwork for doctors) was setting off a chain reaction in substitutes, almost no one had heard of fentanyl. Soon after, we were getting calls from the Wall Street Journal and every other newspaper. Now, almost everyone had heard of fentanyl and the government wants to address that, instead of the underlying problem that our policies have created.
