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Blood, sperm and sometimes even organs are bought and sold. And now the next human-harvested commodity appears to be DNA. Two West Coast firms are entering the so-called "bio-broker" market, looking to buy your genetic data in order to re-sell it to pharmaceutical companies. It's all in the name of scientific research and drug discovery.

Thirty five years after graduating, ACSH President Hank Campbell returned to North Penn-Liberty High School in Pennsylvania to give the commencement speech honoring the Class of 2018. While noting that much has changed since he left, the basic challenges facing young people today have not.

A large study focusing on breast cancer treatment demonstrates that for estrogen responsive, HER2-negative cancers, the majority of women do not require chemotherapy. 

When lawyers and marketing firms can directly target patients via their mobile phones – while, yes, even in the ER – the time is yesterday to preserve the once-presumed protected health information.

Synthetic cannabinoids are sometimes mixed with rat poison, which causes uncontrollable bleeding. So, as it turns out, the neighborhood drug dealer might not be a completely trustworthy individual.

Using data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Canadian researchers focusing on adult deaths for those aged 24 to 35 found that in 2016, the last year studied, 20 percent of all fatalities in this age group were opioid related. In 2001, the figure was just 4 percent.

There's a shortage of physicians needed to intervene in acute strokes. Cardiologists have the skills, but not the experience or judgment. Should they fill the gap? Will more patients be helped or harmed?

Reductionism is the basis for most science. Since so many factors can be involved, isolating them in a lab-bench experiment can yield valuable insights. For epidemiological studies, it doesn’t work as well.

Can the FDA's tactics – to impact the current opioid problem – also predict its successor? The goal is to head off escalation before problems are crises, and the move is a departure from the status-quo, reactive nature of prior policies.

This week, Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, an NFL offensive lineman, graduated from McGill University’s medical school while an active player for the Kansas City Chiefs. In football's modern era, if not the NFL's entire history, his fascinating accomplishment – the first active player to hold a medical degree – appears to be unprecedented.

With the proposed consumer privacy initiative in California a reaction to internet data abuse, it's time, long overdue, to discuss the murky territory once-presumed-protected health information has entered.

French lawmakers gave President Emmanuel Macron an exit from his bizarre political promise last year about banning the safe, herbicide glyphosate. And Europeans, finally, have caught on to the junk science at Ramazzini Institute.

The ubiquitous, on-screen advertising about prescription drugs is highly structured by the FDA. That helps explain why the voice-over's claims and cautions are delivered so quickly at the end of the commercial. 

In our postmodern society – where truth is relative, "fake news" is prevalent, and scientific facts are just an opinion – it shouldn't come as a surprise that modern medicine is facing a backlash.

Keith Humphreys, a psychologist, writes about opioids for The Washington Post. But he has an unusual take on the matter. Does Humphreys know what he's talking about? Let's see. 

A word of caution: Combining marshmallows and lava is a bad idea. Some lost soul on Twitter asked the U.S. Geological Survey if they should engage in this cookout practice, and this is one time we agree with centralized government on science and health.

OK, folks. Time for a five-question pop quiz, based upon reading Access Imperative by McKinsey and Company. And for you overachievers out there, there's a bonus question for extra credit! Go for it.

How can we get more parents to vaccinate their kids? New correspondence in The Lancet may bring us one step closer to an answer, using its analysis of the human papillomavirus vaccination program that began in Ireland in 2010. 

A new paper published in the journal Intelligence adds to the body of literature that characterizes how intelligent people differ from others. Mimicking the behaviors of intelligent people will not make a person intelligent, but it could provide a health boost.

The author of "Silent Spring," the 1962 best-selling book which helped launch the modern environmental movement, actually disliked the nonscientific absolutes embraced by the organic movement. 

Baby powder causes cancer in California but not in South Carolina. That makes sense, right? Because as everybody knows, when you cross into the Golden State your risk of cancer immediately quadruples.

In a lawsuit against the FDA, eight activist environmental groups are being represented by a bunch of lawyers from a group called Earth(in)justice. What do they want? To force the FDA to remove seven food chemicals from its "permitted" artificial flavor list. But there are the same chemicals that are naturally found in all kinds of foods. We use Nanogodzilla to demonstrate pure foolishness. 

When environmental activists discovered that it was bad optics to be opposed to natural gas, because it lowered the CO2 emissions they insisted must be lowered drastically or else the apocalypse was nigh, they changed tactics.

GR2E Golden Rice, a provitamin-A biofortified rice variety received a positive food safety evaluation from the FDA regarding its safety and nutrition. GR2E is the first nutritionally enhanced genetically-modified rice to receive regulatory approval for use in food.

The report from the National Transportation Safety Board on Uber's fatal crash is good government in action. It helps us understand the cause of the accident, and to make changes to improve safety.