The NIH and Moderna Are Fighting Over Who Owns Their Vaccine; Intelligencer, November 10, 2021

Matt Stieb, Intelligencer; The NIH and Moderna Are Fighting Over Who Owns Their Vaccine

"While last year the government was calling the shot the “NIH-Moderna COVID-19 vaccine,” the biotech giant filed a patent made public this week in which it found that “only Moderna’s scientists” designed the vaccine. The patent, filed in July, is specific to the genetic sequence creating spike proteins, which allow vaccine recipients to build antibodies to block the virus when the body is actually exposed. As the New York Times reports, the NIH was surprised by the attempt at a solo effort. If the two parties cannot figure out a way to split the credit, the government will have to determine if it will take the expensive step of going to court. Already, the U.S. has paid $10 billion in taxpayer funds for Moderna to help create the vaccine, test its efficacy, and provide shots for the federal government."

There’s a reason we don’t know much about AI; Politico, September 16, 2019

Arthur Allen, Politico; There’s a reason we don’t know much about AI

The U.S. government used to study new technologies to flag ethical or social problems. Not anymore. 

"Though many university professors and tech-funded think tanks are examining the ethical, social and legal implications of technologies like Big Data and machine learning, “it’s definitely happening outside the policy infrastructure,” said John Wilbanks, a philosopher and technologist at the Sage Bionetworks research group.

Yet these technologies could have profound effects on our future, and they pose enormous questions for society...

As it happens, there is a good precedent for the federal government stepping up to examine the ethical and legal issues around an important new technology. Starting in 1990, the National Institutes of Health set aside 5 percent of the funding for its Human Genome Project for a program known as ELSI—which stood for the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics research.

The ELSI program, which started 30 years ago, “was a symbol that NIH thought the ethical issues were so important in genomics that they’d spend a lot of money on them,” says Isaac Kohane, chief of the Harvard Medical School’s Department of Biomedical Informatics. “It gave other genetics researchers a heads-up—police your ethics, we care about them.”

ELSI’s premise was to have smart social scientists weigh the pros and cons of genetic technology before they emerged, instead of, “Oops, we let the genie out of the bottle,” said Larry Brody, director of Genomics and Society program at the National Human Genome Research Institute."

Navy Official: Concerns About Intellectual Property Rights Becoming More 'Acute'; National Defense, NDIA's Business & Technology Magazine, November 29, 2018

Connie Lee, National Defense, NDIA's Business & Technology Magazine;

Navy Official: Concerns About Intellectual Property Rights Becoming More 'Acute'

"Capt. Samuel Pennington, major program manager for surface training systems, said the fear of losing data rights can sometimes make companies reluctant to work with the government.
“We get feedback sometimes where they’re not willing to bid on a contract where we have full data rights,” he said. “Industry [is] not going to do that because they have their secret sauce and they don’t want to release it.”
Pennington said having IP rights would allow the Defense Department to more easily modernize and sustain equipment.
“Our initiative is to get as much data rights, or buy a new product that has open architecture to the point where [the] data rights that we do have are sufficient, where we can recompete that down the road,” he said. This would prevent the Navy from relying on the original manufacturer for future work on the system, he noted.
The issue is also being discussed on Capitol Hill, Merritt added. The fiscal year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act requires the Pentagon to develop policy on the acquisition or licensing of intellectual property. Additionally, the NDAA requires the department to negotiate a price for technical data rights of major weapon systems."

The U.S. government recruited black men to watch them die; The Washington Post, July 3, 2018

[Podcast]  Retropod, The Washington Post; The U.S. government recruited black men to watch them die 

"The Tuskegee syphilis experiment is a horrific piece of American history."

Can Europe Lead on Privacy?; The New York Times, April 1, 2018

Tom Wheeler, The New York Times; Can Europe Lead on Privacy?

"The United States government has a lot of explaining to do. Why is it that American internet companies such as Facebook and Google are required to provide privacy protections when doing business with European consumers but are free to not provide such protections for Americans? Why is it that Americans’ best privacy hope is the secondary effect of interconnected networks rather than privacy protections designed for Americans? Why shouldn’t Americans also be given meaningful tools to protect their privacy?"

One Way To Force Down Drug Prices: Have The U.S. Exercise Its Patent Rights; NPR, March 16, 2017

Alison Kodjak, NPR; 

One Way To Force Down Drug Prices: Have The U.S. Exercise Its Patent Rights

"...Trump already has a weapon he could deploy to cut the prices of at least some expensive medications.

That weapon is called "march-in rights."...

...[L]ower prices could also make drug companies less eager to invest lots of money in new medications.

That's the trade-off the government has always had to wrestle with. But it's one Trump could very well decide is worthwhile.

"Perhaps we as a country would rather have lower drug prices and a little less innovation," [Sara Fisher] Ellison [an economist at MIT] said."

Medical Ethics Have Been Violated at Detention Sites, a New Report Says; New York Times, 11/4/13

Denise Grady and Benedict Carey, New York Times; Medical Ethics Have Been Violated at Detention Sites, a New Report Says: "A group of experts in medicine, law and ethics has issued a blistering report that accuses the United States government of directing doctors, nurses and psychologists, among others, to ignore their professional codes of ethics and participate in the abuse of detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The report was published Monday by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession, an ethics group based at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the Open Society Foundations, a pro-democracy network founded by the billionaire George Soros. The authors were part of a 19-member task force that based its findings on a two-year review of public information. The sources included documents released by the government, news reports, and books and articles from professional journals."