News Updates

Along with exacting an awful health toll, the spread of the new coronavirus will mean, according to some predictions, that manufacturers in the United States will need to reduce their dependence on current supplier nations such as China and India and find new ways to make products at home—or face economic hardships. Issues has pointed to ways forward, including bridging a major gap in the innovation process, expanding efforts to support the competitiveness of small- and medium-sized firms, and preparing workers for higher-skilled and ever more complex jobs.

A person’s teeth provide a “faithful biological archive for the entirety of life,” says a researcher who has developed a technique (reported in the news here and published here) for teasing out their clues to better understand human evolution. As additional information to chew on, a book recently reviewed in Issues examines how teeth, once of secondary interest behind bones, are gaining increasing attention among anthropologists as “the most abundant human remains in the fossil record [that] also provide a more accurate picture of an individual’s underlying genome.”

In a recent Issues online exclusive, an expert in disease prevention argued that social dysfunctions in the United States—millions of people with no access to health care, no insurance, no sick days, no cash reserves—complicate the medical challenge of responding to the coronavirus sweeping the nation. Now, amid herculean efforts of health care workers, some government and business leaders are proposing actions, such as deemphasizing social distancing and reducing health-related funding programs, that many experts say will make social problems only worse.

The number of people living with Alzheimer’s disease in the United States may nearly triple by 2050, barring medical breakthroughs, the Alzheimer’s Association concludes in its latest annual report. In this regard, challenges abound. In Issues, a policy analyst pointed out that research has yielded modest gains primarily in patient care, not biomedical advance, and the head of a philanthropy that supports brain and cognitive studies said it was time to “open the imagination of scientists and funders” to look at “the complexity of the aging brain in its biosocial context.”

The Pentagon has contracted three companies to design small, portable nuclear reactors that can be “rapidly moved by road, rail, sea or air and for quick set up and shut down, with a design which is inherently safe,” making them fit for such uses as powering remote bases. But even as proponents see such efforts as helping the United States regain leadership in nuclear energy technology, experts writing in Issues have dismissed this route, though they did identify some modest policy changes that might enable the military to buttress the nation’s commercial nuclear enterprise.

A top official at the National Institutes of Health, Anthony S. Fauci, has told a congressional committee hearing that the nation’s testing system for the spreading coronavirus “is a failing, let’s admit it.” In a recent online exclusive for Issues, a population health expert went even further, giving the United States a failing grade for its across-the-board response to the newly declared pandemic, going on to list some critical actions—learned from what other countries have done—that the nation should take, from basic science to treatment and prevention.

The World Health Organization just declared the ongoing coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, defined as occurring over a wide geographic area and affecting an exceptionally high proportion of the population. But the United States is failing in its response, an expert in disease prevention and population health writes in an Issues online exclusive, falling woefully short on efforts to scientifically understand the virus itself and to effectively implement prevention, containment, mitigation, and treatment efforts.

The US Census Bureau on March 9 took a major step in counting the nation’s population, launching its official website where people can fill out the census form—marking the first time that most people are being encouraged to answer the questions online. In Issues, a census expert recently reviewed the challenges of ensuring the quality, timeliness, and security of the 2020 count and noted places of continued concern, such as preventing cyberattacks and pursing follow-up operations to reach housing units that do not respond to initial contacts.

In what the World Health Organization has dubbed an “infodemic,” misinformation about the new coronavirus is spreading rapidly and widely, outpacing efforts by governments or the social media giants to slow the flow. In anticipation of just such a dilemma, a technology entrepreneur recently called in Issues for the creation of a global corps of volunteers from across scientific and communication fields who would work independent of but in tandem with official sources to quickly provide clear, credible information to the public to help prevent or mitigate major disease crises.

Recent years have seen a boom in a few economically privileged metropolitan areas and a bust in others passed over by development, especially in high tech, says a Washington Post columnist, citing the need to steer investment and innovation to places off the conventional radar screen. Issues has explored ways to make this happen, including expanding the capacity of universities (here and here) in overlooked regions to deliver higher education grounded in applied learning and research, and using the power of venture capital (here) to promote technology-based start-ups in underserved areas.

In a first, scientists have used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to directly alter a gene—specifically, a gene in the eye that can cause a rare form of blindness—without removing it from the person’s body, potentially opening “an era of gene-editing for therapeutic use that could have impact in many aspects of medicine.” But as explored in Issues, introduced here and here, many social, ethical, and practical questions remain, with one overarching concern being the need for public involvement in deciding when and how the new technology should be used.