Tag: National Institutes of Health

Meanwhile, Chinese scientists planning to attend conferences or meetings in the United States have told Nature that they are experiencing significant delays in obtaining short-term visas. Last August, Collins wrote a letter to the more than 10,000 US institutions that it funds, stating that the agency was concerned that “some foreign entities” were interfering in the funding, research and peer-review of NIH-supported projects. Then, last week, Collins said that investigations at 55 US universities had found some “egregious” breaches of rules governing the agency’s grants — including grant recipients not disclosing foreign government money or diverting intellectual property from their US institution to other countries such as China. “If students are told they cannot do cutting-edge research at US institutions, they are going to go elsewhere,” Mowery says. What about visas? Pan told Nature that he has missed two conferences in the United States this year, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting, at which he was to have collected the prestigious Newcomb Cleveland Prize for an outstanding paper published in the journal Science, because he was not granted a visa in time. Several major scientific conferences in the United States have also reported visa delays for Chinese nationals. An official at the Chinese embassy in Washington DC, who asked not to be named owing to the sensitivity of the situation, said the embassy is aware that increased numbers of Chinese students and academics have been unable to obtain US visas for China–US student exchange programmes, conferences and meetings over the past 12 months. Are the tensions affecting science in China? Universities need to be more vigilant against foreign interference in research, Smith says, but also to balance that with the need for academic openness and international collaboration.

Under these new rules, Planned Parenthood must either get out of the abortion business or set up separate facilities for offering abortion in order to achieve a clear separation between family planning activities and abortion. Instead, Planned Parenthood President Leana Wen has repeatedly attempted to brand abortion as healthcare. Abortion is not healthcare, certainly not for the baby who loses her life, but neither does it constitute healthcare for the mother. Sponsored View Cartoon Planned Parenthood’s image as a women’s healthcare provider was tarnished when past-President Cecile Richards falsely claimed her organization provided mammograms. Perhaps in an attempt to repair the organization’s image, Wen is trying to change that. Americans are already wise to the Planned Parenthood abortion business model. One way Americans have learned the truth about Planned Parenthood is through the testimony of people who have experienced Planned Parenthood from the inside. The movie “Unplanned,” which opens in theaters this weekend, follows the real-life story of former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson and the change of heart she experienced after witnessing an abortion procedure. Abby’s story shows that the abortion procedure is clearly the violent taking of a human life. Not only is abortion not healthcare, it constitutes the violent ending of an innocent life.

Under these new rules, Planned Parenthood must either get out of the abortion business or set up separate facilities for offering abortion in order to achieve a clear separation between family planning activities and abortion. Instead, Planned Parenthood President Leana Wen has repeatedly attempted to brand abortion as healthcare. Abortion is not healthcare, certainly not for the baby who loses her life, but neither does it constitute healthcare for the mother. Sponsored View Cartoon Planned Parenthood’s image as a women’s healthcare provider was tarnished when past-President Cecile Richards falsely claimed her organization provided mammograms. Perhaps in an attempt to repair the organization’s image, Wen is trying to change that. Americans are already wise to the Planned Parenthood abortion business model. One way Americans have learned the truth about Planned Parenthood is through the testimony of people who have experienced Planned Parenthood from the inside. The movie “Unplanned,” which opens in theaters this weekend, follows the real-life story of former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson and the change of heart she experienced after witnessing an abortion procedure. Abby’s story shows that the abortion procedure is clearly the violent taking of a human life. Not only is abortion not healthcare, it constitutes the violent ending of an innocent life.

In a recent hearing on vaccines, Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., admitted the medical value of vaccines but added, "I still do not favor giving up on liberty for a false sense of security." What Paul — a part-time ophthalmologist but full-time libertarian crank — calls "a false sense of security" is technically known as herd immunity. Achieving that level — 93 to 95 percent for measles — not only protects the health of a community, it protects those who really can't be vaccinated for medical reasons such as immune system problems or infants to whom the measles vaccine is not given until later. He is applying standards of political philosophy to a scientific field. Paul is making a category error in the other direction. And public health is the application of this discipline to a community of human beings. Given the nature of the measles virus, 93 to 95 percent of a human population needs to be covered for a community to be protected. Politics does make a huge difference to public health in one way. When politicians give legitimacy to dangerous and disproven scientific theories — as both Paul and President Trump have done on vaccinations — they are encouraging a lower level of coverage, which makes a higher level of compulsion necessary. So it is the vaccination skeptics who are making intrusive public health methods more likely.

Still, it is not easy to speed up a $20tn economy, even by running a budget deficit of nearly $1tn, as Trump’s administration is doing. | Hans-Werner Sinn Read more In a cantankerous political environment, it is not easy to think about the long term. Ronald Reagan’s massive tax cuts in the 80s helped restore US growth in the ensuing decades – but also exacerbated inequality trends. And Barack Obama’s efforts (and before him George W Bush’s) to contain the damage from the 2008 financial crisis underpin the strong economy for which Trump wants to take full credit. What will be the cumulative effect of Trump’s economic policies on the economy 10 years from now? The end-of-2017 corporate tax reform was one of those rare instances where the US Congress comprehensively streamlined and improved the US’s byzantine tax system, though the corporate tax rate should have been set at 25%, not 21%. Trump’s efforts to scale back regulation, particularly on small and medium-size businesses, are probably also a plus for long-term growth, reversing some excesses that crept in at the end of Obama’s term (though Trump is throwing out good regulations with bad ones). Many of the regulations that Trump is targeting ought to be strengthened, not eliminated But while the Trump administration has strengthened the US economy’s long-term growth potential in some ways, the other side of the ledger is rather grim. Recovery from the damage Trump is inflicting on institutions and political culture in the US may take years; if so, the economic costs could be considerable. On the other hand, neutering existing legislation without putting anything adequate in its place sets the stage for another financial crisis.