Mary Carmichael

It's easy to get carried away in the wake of Thursday's announcement that Craig Venter & Co. have created what is in some sense the world's first synthetic organism.

On Monday, the Supreme Court released two important decisions about the prison system: one ruling that juveniles can't receive life sentences for crimes other than murder and another that the federal government is allowed to hold sex offenders in custody indefinitely, even after they have completed their sentences.

From 1996 to 1999, the U.S. food and Drug Administration approved 157 new drugs. In the comparable period a decade later—that is, from 2006 to 2009—the agency approved 74. Not among them were any cures, or even meaningfully effective treatments, for Alzheimer's disease, lung or pancreatic cancer, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, or a host of other afflictions that destroy lives.

Attention, Walgreens shoppers, The Washington Post wants you to know about a new product going on sale:Beginning Friday, shoppers in search of toothpaste, deodorant and laxatives at more than 6,000 drugstores across the nation will be able to pick up something new: a test to scan their genes for a propensity for Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, diabetes and other ailments … For those thinking of starting a family, it could alert them to their risk of having a baby with cystic fibrosis,...

Tara Parker-Pope, author of The New York Times's Well blog, has gone beyond the weepy and weary self-help marriage tomes and written a trustworthy guide to fixing (or tweaking) your marriage. And there are lots of sex stats, too

A new report finds five types of consumers who are wasting billions of dollars in Rx drugs. Are you one of them?

Here is a vignette from a small newspaper  that will sound familiar to Southerners like me who were taught creationism in school:Mark Tangarone, who teaches third, fourth, and fifth grade students in the Talented and Gifted (TAG) program at Weston Intermediate School, said he is retiring at the end of the current school year because of a clash with the school administration over the teaching of evolution . . .

At least when it comes to these cheap, effective medical tests.

 Oh, bouncing baby boy, here comes the next round in the never-ending slugfest over the health benefits of breast-feeding: The lives of nearly 900 babies would be saved each year, along with billions of dollars, if 90 percent of U.S. women breast-fed their babies for the first six months of life, a cost analysis says ...

There's been a lot of hoopla lately about the upcoming 10th anniversary of the Human Genome Project. This week, the journal Nature is commemorating the milestone with a special issue.

The president has just appointed the person who's going to oversee Medicare and Medicaid for the next few years—a daunting task, given that the programs are bleeding money and may have big changes in store.

Last week it was revealed that for the first time in years, there's been an increase in young doctors going into primary care. That may have a lot to do with new scholarships for students interested in that field. (One of the reasons young doctors tend to shy away from primary care is that four years of medical school can cost an awful lot of money—cash that's hard to pay back if your salary is in the mid-$100,000s, compared with the $400,000-something a doc can make as a specialist.) But, as...

Why March Madness winners get treated like losers.

Earlier today, Politico posted what looked like a heck of a scoop: a supposedly leaked memo saying that Democrats were planning to try to permanently repeal the massive Medicare payment cut that reliably gets delayed every year, but only after getting health-care reform passed.

Today is a big day for young doctors in two ways. It's Match Day, which means graduating medical students nationwide are finding out where they'll be doing their residencies.

If you work near a congressional district office, you may want to bring earplugs to the office tomorrow, because the health-care debate is about to officially become what some people think it already is: a lot of confusing, loud, and futile noise.

I tend to think the Baby Einstein enterprise isn't directly harmful to children if the videos are used in moderation, but in yesterday's New York Times there was a chilling article about how Baby Einstein's corporate parent—the Walt Disney Co.—may be indirectly harming some very vulnerable kids.

As part of its plan for health reform, the Obama administration has lavished attention on a particular type of medical research: "comparative effectiveness" studies, which pit different treatments directly against each other to see which one works better. (They're like medical cage matches: in this corner there's Prozac; in the opposing corner there's Zoloft.) The stimulus package included $1.1 billion for this type of research, which is often the best guideline doctors have for deciding how to...

Roger Ross Williams reacted the classiest way he could to being Kanye'd at the Oscars after his win for the documentary Music By Prudence. As his producer, Elinor Burkett, held forth on "my role models and my heroes—marvelous and energy," he tried to put the focus back on the subject of his film. "Prudence is here tonight," he said, half-interrupting Burkett and pointing at a smiling young woman in the audience.

Pity the experimental subjects in a new paper out of Johns Hopkins: they're "sedentary, obese, glucose intolerant, and on a trajectory to premature death." They very rarely exercise.

Local media is abuzz about 'K2'. A scary drug, or just another drug scare?

Another day, another study showing that "educational" programming for babies isn't. The latest research, which came out yesterday, shows that infants between 1 and 2 don't pick up any language skills from Baby Wordsworth, a DVD in the Baby Einstein series.

Let's say an order comes down from the CEO of your company ordering that your salary be drastically cut. You tell your boss you'll have to quit because you can't survive on your meager new paycheck.

OK, maybe the health-care summit was "a gabfest . . . with no tangible results," but Congress did do something concrete about health care yesterday: it started the process of blocking the pending 21.2 percent Medicare pay cut to doctors.

A critical shortage of primary-care physicians is yet another symptom of our ailing health-care system.

A scientist explains his fascinating research. Then we explain his explanation.

It's pretty clear that today's health-care summit is going to revolve around the big, obvious issues: how to increase the number of people with insurance, how to tamp down costs.

When I wrote this piece on umbilical-cord stem-cell banks back in December 2008, I was six months pregnant. I hoped that by analyzing the banks' promises as a journalist, I'd be better able to decide what to do about them as an expectant mom.

Conspiracy theorists, listen up: on Friday, Harvard-educated biologist Amy Bishop allegedly opened fire and killed three of her colleagues at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

Why racial disparities in health care persist.