<P>Twelve Democrats and one independent on a key Senate committee rallied Thursday behind a $611 billion health care reform bill that includes a government-run insurance plan, seeking to put up a united front as Republicans and some moderate Democrats continue to doubt the need for the public option. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) unveiled a bill that costs significantly less than an earlier, incomplete plan from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that would have topped $1 trillion and left many Americans uninsured.</P>
Price competition is coming to the rarified world of genome sequencing. For $48,000, San Diego-based Illumina will sequence your genome -- in other words, your entire genetic code. Until now, the only other company offering personal genome sequencing services is biotech startup Knome. It charges $99,500. Genome sequencing can alert individuals if they have inherited genes that cause illnesses like diabetes, Alzheimer's or cancer. Using the information as a guide, people could alter their lifestyles in an attempt to dodge potentially latent diseases. They also could find out the probability of passing along a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis to their children, or uncover interesting details about their ancestry.
<P>As the&nbsp;Commonwealth of Massachusetts and its 6 million residents struggle to pay their medical bills, they have a new tool on their side, starting today. A law cracking down on the marketing that pharmaceutical firms do with doctors goes into effect. No one expects miracles from the new rules, but they should ensure that doctors’ prescribing decisions will focus more on patient needs and less on the gifts and fancy meals many doctors have long received from drug companies. All the favors that drug companies do for doctors raise overall health costs in two ways. First, they are a substantial part of the $57.5 billion that the industry spends annually on marketing, a cost that gets added on to each prescription a patient buys. Second, the industry’s goal in influencing doctors is often to get them to prescribe a new, higher-priced medication when a generic or cheaper name-brand competitor is just as effective. Partly as a result of high costs of drugs, one-quarter of original prescriptions for chronic conditions never get filled.</P>
<P>A hoard of genetic flaws have been tied to both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in a huge trial that suggests the two mental illnesses have similar roots. Scientists have long believed that schizophrenia is distinct from bipolar disorder, which is also known as manic depression. But now the study, which uncovered thousands of genetic errors which predispose people to schizophrenia, showed that many were the same as those that trigger bipolar disorder. The multinational group of researchers analysed the DNA of 8,000 people with schizophrenia, and 19,000 without it, in three studies reported in the journal Nature.</P>
<P>More than 40 scientists, bioethicists, lawyers and science journal editors are calling on their colleagues, policy makers and the public to begin developing guidelines for the research and reproductive use of stem cell-derived eggs and sperm, even though such use may be a decade or more away. "Science has always moved faster than social debate or society's ability to grapple with these issues," says Debra Mathews, Ph.D., lead author of a paper published in the July issue of <I>Cell Stem Cell</I> and assistant director of science programs at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. The paper calls for all parties to begin engaging in open discussion and debates, and describes the need for informed social policy well in advance of the eventual use of eggs and sperm derived from pluripotent stem cells.</P>
