There are several Ebola drugs in development and they're starting to reach struggling victims, especially Western aid workers, who agree to participate in ad hoc trials. Read the rest

Fourty-two years after the exposure of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, a group of educators, activists, and writers discuss the history and the present of medical experimentation and medical ethics. Read the rest

An execution in Arizona turned torturous yesterday, with convicted murderer Joseph Wood taking almost two hours to die after he was injected with a secret mixture of drugs. Read the rest

Open science advocate Michael Nielson writes about how scientists can infer causation in situations where it's not possible to do a randomized controlled trial. Read the rest

There are some pretty freakish, but well-substantiated, reports this week that demonstrate just how much we still have to learn about stem cells and how they work (and don't work). Read the rest

Kannapolis is the site of an ambitious plan to collect medical information on 50,000 people and use it to hunt for the molecular changes that signal or cause disease. Read the rest

I'm speaking on Saturday about human experimentation and its impact on the origins and future of medicine at Minnesota Public Radio's Top Coast Festival. Read the rest

Colorado's new "Right to Try" bill probably won't get dying people more access to experimental drugs, writes pharmacologist and blogger David Kroll. The new law's wording doesn't actually change much and offers false hope. Read the rest

Mayo Clinic doctors injected a woman with enough measles vaccine to inoculate 10 million people. Now her cancer is in remission. More research is needed, but, woah, is this fascinating. Read the rest

I missed this Ask Me Anything when it was live back in February, but it's definitely worth going back and reading. It features Eva Mozes Kor, who was chosen at age 10, along with her twin sister, for experiments performed by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Really an amazing AMA. Read the rest

In 2009, researchers sliced apart one of the most famous brains in history, live on the Internet. Now that brain (which once belonged to an amnesiac patient who had lost the ability to form new memories) is available to scientists around the world in digitized form. Read the rest

Back in 1931, a cancer researcher working in Puerto Rico either confessed to intentionally killing research subjects in a drunken, racist rant or (his side of the story) wrote a satirical letter to a friend that got taken out of context. Read the rest

If you donate fluid/tissue samples ... if you participate in research as a subject of said research ... then you ought to know what scientists have learned about you, argue two geneticists in an upcoming editorial in the journal Science. The catch, say critics, is that that research is population-focused, so raw data on an individual from a population-level study could be extremely misleading. Read the rest

Surprisingly, there are a good half-dozen medical eponyms that come from Nazi doctors who performed experiments on unwilling human subjects or used bodies of executed prisoners in their work — often in the course of discovering the very things that now bear their names. Clara cells, for instance, are a type of cell that lines small airways in your lungs. They're named for Max Clara, who discovered them by dissecting executed political prisoners. Read the rest

The Sacramento Bee is reporting on a complicated story about last-ditch treatments and the ethics of human experimentation.

Glioblastomas are incredibly deadly brain cancers that usually kill the people diagnosed with them within 15 months. Two neurosurgeons at UC Davis ran across anecdotal evidence suggesting that glioblastoma patients who accidentally picked up infections after surgery sometimes lived much longer — one of the surgeons claims that a patient he knew of survived another 20 years. Read the rest

Really, really intriguing piece at Nature News by Heidi Ledford. It's all about a class of patients called "exceptional responders" — aka, the people who got a benefit (sometimes a big one) from a medication or treatment that otherwise failed the clinical trial process. When we do clinical trials, we're looking at group averages. We want to know whether a drug performed better than placebo when administered to lots of people. Sometimes, though, drugs that can't do that do seem to have a positive effect for a few lucky individuals. Now, scientists are trying to figure out why that is. What makes those people special? And how should this change the way we do research? Read the rest

i09's Annalee Newitz is donating her body to science when she dies. In a moving and fascinating article, she tells the story of her mother's death, how it led her to make this choice for herself, and what happens to bodies once they find their way into the hands of medical schools and scientists. Read the rest