uBiome: Ethical Lapse or Not?
By Judy Stone,
Scientific American
| 07. 25. 2013
uBiome’s CEO, Jessica Richman, seems to me to be a great saleswoman who also excels at sounding innocent and playing the misunderstood victim in the ethical controversy surrounding her company. I think this was well illustrated in her recent guest blog in Scientific American with Dr. Zachary Apte, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of uBiome. The picture is a little less rosy if you look back at the origins and history of the discussions about her company’s perceived ethical lapses.
I was intending to write about uBiome before this, as I was disturbed by Richman’s appearance at TEDMED. Admittedly, I was already put off by her telling twitter handle of “@venturejessica.” Her hubris was further evidenced by the title of her TEDMED talk, “Could a citizen scientist win a Nobel Prize?” Fortunately, her talk was a bit more restrained, though still touting the potential of her as yet untested product.
Richman and Apte’s recent blog has shown that they seem to have learned little from the heated discussions about uBiome. Their business is part of the UCSF’s Quantitative Biosciences Institute...
Related Articles
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
By Robert Resta, The DNA Exchange | 07.22.2024
Medical geneticists and genetic counselors have an often complicated and at times tense relationship with people with disabilities, their families, advocates, and scholars. Geneticists are strong advocates and supporters for all of their patients, regardless of their abilities and disabilities...
By Katherine Bourzac, Nature | 07.10.2024
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...