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Labs on chips and low-cost genetic sequencing could vastly improve medicine in the coming decade, if we allow it. An expert in technology, science, and law argues that the next [...]

THE MORE our health depends on their little pills, the more we seem to hate big drug companies. In The Constant Gardener (2000), John le Carre assigns to the pharmaceutical [...]

The turf still divides up quite neatly. The electrical engineers move the light stuff--electrons, power, bits, and logic. The mechanical engineers do the heavy lifting; they move atoms. And, like [...]

What lies at the bottom of the bottomless well isn't oil, it's logic. Fuels recede, demand grows, efficiency makes things worse, but logic ascends, and with the rise of logic […]

SELDOM HAS a chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) been heard to anticipate the demise of the most important sector of the industry he regulates. Yet in a speech [...]

A widespread opinion in the US is that liability laws restrict innovation. These liability laws are intended to enhance safety, but many companies have stopped manufacturing new types of products because they fear the legal consequences in case of accidents. Modification of legal rules is essential, because even though they seek to enhance safety, they also hinder innovation.

To THE EDITOR: Peter W. Huber's 'Of Pills and Profits: In Defense of Big Pharma' [July-August] makes a sound economic case for the most powerful companies on earth. He lauds [...]

In this article the author foresees a time when an individual's genetic code will be public knowledge and will become an element in social networking. He notes the common practice of prenatal genetic testing in 2007 to determine the occurrence of birth defects in the unborn. The impact such widespread genetic knowledge will have on medical treatment and diagnostics is assessed.

THE TRIGGER was pulled by a friend, who had bought the gun on the street. Steven Fox, a Queens, New York, teenager, was badly injured by the .25-caliber bullet, which [...]

There are only two basic engines for making law. One is top down: it is law by edict and national commission. The other is bottom up: law built by adjudication [...]

Discusses the energy intensive digital age of the Internet. The amount of energy used to manufacture computer equipment and support Internet use; Implications of the thermoelectrical power complex; The demand for electricity in the transportation sector; Lack of reduction in total energy use per square foot in commercial office buildings despite efficient use of energy for environmental conditions; Power supplies companies such as American Power Conversion.

Science has been the foremost cause of shifts in tort law over the last twenty-five years, particularly in the attention it has drawn to the areas of public risk. Public risks involved air travel, chemical additives in food, vaccines and hazardous wastes. Because of the growth in public risk, tort law has become more of a political arena than it should be.