The News Review:

- Mixing medicine with religion may limit our potential
- Should research volunteers be told results?
- emedcareers.com relaunches with new look and improved content

Mixing medicine with religion may limit our potential
Sunday Herald – Jun 8, 2008
Yet in medical terms it is relatively new with advances made year-on-year as new research yields new success in the fight against diseases such as leukaemia. Since the early 1960s when two Canadian scientists Ernest McCulloch and James Till first began looking at the stem cells medical research has never doubted their potential to make a hugely positive contribution to the treatment of human diseases including cancer Parkinson’s disease spinal cord injuries and many others. Certainties don’t exist in clinical research as the long fight to discover cures and new therapies for HIV and Aids has shown. But it is a certainty that if stem-cell research simply halts or backs off from new approaches then nothing of value will be discovered. Writing in this newspaper and speaking later today from the pulpit of a Roman Catholic church in Edinburgh Cardinal Keith ‘Brien states that claim after claim has been made for research that involves the use of stem cells taken from human embryos and that after a decade of promised cures and treatments not one new treatment or therapy has arrived. Like any prominent church leader the cardinal is entitled to his opinion an opinion that in the case of Roman Catholics in Scotland is expected to be followed without question as part of the church’s wider teaching. advertisementIn the case of Catholic MPs the archbishop expects to see them vote against the government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill which allows on the archbishop’s interpretation of the science “the creation of hybrid human-animal embryos” a procedure which involves a “monstrous attack on human rights human dignity and human life”… But by not making it clear if a three-line whip is going to be imposed the PM has created a heated forum where the views of Cardinal ‘Brien and others are given a public currency rather than being confined to the teachings within their own church. Brown should quickly make it clear there will be no three-line whip and that Labour MPs will be allowed to vote as their conscience directs. If the bill does not pass this field of clinical research and the benefits it may bring will not be lost. It will be conducted in another country – and when the medical advances do come which one of us will turn them away or deny them to our children? Share this story on:.

Should research volunteers be told results?
News-Medical.net – Jun 8, 2008
Even when it’s bad news most study volunteers want to know. So should all medical researchers make an effort to communicate about their results with the volunteers who are so vital to their research? If they try to do so what hurdles – ethical privacy-related financial or logistical – might complicate their efforts? Could sharing clinical research results with some volunteers actually upset them? Such questions are addressed in the new paper which was written by University of Michigan medical student and Bioethics Program member David Shalowitz and Franklin Miller Ph. of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. The research was funded by a grant from the U-M President’s Initiative for Ethics in Public Life. The paper reviews the landscape of knowledge on this issue including commentaries on the potential positive and negative impacts of sharing results and data from studies that evaluated the desires and reactions of research volunteers in specific clinical trials… “We also need better evaluations of the best ways to communicate data to research participants. We need to change the current situation in which claims are being made about the benefits and risks of sharing results without data to back them up. For more information on participating in clinical research trials at the University of Michigan visit the U-M Engage web site.

emedcareers.com relaunches with new look and improved content
nline Recruitment – Jun 8, 2008
com in line with their recent on and offline brand awareness campaign. Building on the new iconic logo and brand message ‘You’re special we specialise’ the offline advertising campaign has been specifically targeted to candidates looking for new opportunities in the multitude of scientific job sectors which are covered on the site. This includes features within publications such as Pharmaceutical Marketing Clinical Research Focus while journals of several pre-clinical industry bodies such as PIPA ACDM and BrAPP have been used to reach a highly specific and ‘specialist’ candidate audience. Now in its third year of business emedcareers. com was launched in 2005 to meet the growing need from candidates and recruiters for a niche job board in the biotechnology pharmaceutical and healthcare industry sectors. Since launch emedcareers. com has gone from strength to strength and has recently exceeded 50000 registered users and has over 27000 stored CVs.