From the Heavens to the Helix: The Cost-Benefit Analysis of President Obama's "Moonshot" Call to Cure Cancer

In his final State of the Union, President Obama called on the scientific community to “make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.” Congress has since responded, increasing funding for such research. While this is good in the abstract, it is unclear that it is an objectively correct and productive use of government funds. This article proposes measures by which to analyze the costs and benefits of the government’s cancer research funding expenditures. Having done so, the article then offers specific policy recommendations incorporating further costbenefit analysis to realize the President’s aim, namely: weighting grant applications by the cost of the cancer being addressed, increasing the number of grants funded and creating a revolving fund for future funding, converting NIH spending from discretionary to mandatory, expending cooperative partnerships, and collecting more data on grant applications themselves for further analysis.

The Role of Neuroscience in Drug Policy: Promises and Prospects

Crack cocaine use carries high costs for society, particularly in terms of increased crime. The tools of modern neuroscience may be able to reduce demand by addressing altered brain circuitry of individuals suffering from severe cocaine use disorder. Here, we review several rehabilitative strategies, including pharmacotherapies targeting neurotransmitter systems, immunotherapies that block cocaine from entering the central nervous system, brain stimulation to disrupt abnormal circuit function, and real-time feedback in neuroimaging to allow the strengthening of impulse control. These experimental treatments hold promise for treating severe cocaine use disorder, and such approaches could be employed as an alternative to widespread incarceration.

A New Criminal Records Database for Large-Scale Analysis of Policy and Behavior

To allow large-scale, cross-jurisdictional analyses of criminal arrests, we have developed the Center for Science and Law’s Criminal Record Database (CRD), a collection of tens of millions of U.S. courthouse records. The CRD can enhance many types of research—for example, identification of high-frequency offenders, measurement of changes in policing strategies, and quantification of legislative efficacy—giving policy makers the best data upon which to base law enforcement decisions. The CRD provides a heightened level of detail about individual offenders, their crimes, and their interactions with the criminal justice system; additionally, it translates court records into a common framework for cross-jurisdiction comparison. In particular, the database includes anonymized identifiers to support exploration of criminal re-offense (recidivism) within the same jurisdiction. A constantly growing project, the CRD currently contains 22.5 million records from 1977 to 2014 from Harris County in Texas, New York City, Miami DadeCounty in Florida, and the state of New Mexico.

On the Origin of Samples: Pathogen Provenance and the Rise of the Material Transfer Agreement

The purpose of this Opinion article is to inform scientists of the access and benefit-sharing (ABS) laws that could encroach on their ability to obtain pathogen samples for research purposes. The United Nations' Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) reaffirms the sovereign right of states over their genetic resources and recommends that access to such resources occur on mutually agreed terms and with the prior informed consent of eligible providers. This creates the conditions for a quid pro quo on genetic resources, essentially transforming them into articles of trade. The CBD cedes the authority to determine the terms of access to genetic resources, including pathogens, to national governments and this has created a patchwork of domestic ABS regulations around the globe. This article posits that the current ABS regime creates unacceptable incentives to avoid benefit-sharing obligations that could irreparably skew the scientific record. Scientists may restrict their research to samples collected from countries with lax ABS policies, or might even be tempted to misrepresent the provenance of pathogen samples to avoid entering into protracted and potentially expensive benefit-sharing negotiations. The article concludes that one solution might be to use Material Transfer Agreements as a chain-of-custody tool until such time as policymakers can reconcile the ambiguities and inconsistencies of international pathogen sharing regulations.

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The Ethics of Biomedical Big Data: Busting Myths

Biomedical research ethics has historically rested on cases of egregious harm and disrespect to subjects through direct experimentation on bodies. However, with the emergence of sophisticated health data and specimen analysis, a new type of research ethics case study has emerged to highlight the limitations of applying current research and privacy regulations to the study of Big Data. In this paper I challenge common myths about data protection and argue three points researchers must keep in mind: (1) De-identification does not always secure privacy in the manner intended, (2) Successful identification does not suffice to address all ethical concerns, and (3) any party that creates new health records should not presume that traditional regulatory restrictions have fully accounted for their own part in this vanguard of evolving responsibilities. To this last point, I argue that any researcher, including those operating in the largely unregulated domains of public data and citizen science, should seek ethics consultation to help them respect persons, avoid harms, and proceed justly beyond the legal minimums.

Review of Adam Benforado's "Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice"