Editor’s Note: In an interview published this week, Health Affairs Contributing Editor Barbara Culliton asks Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Associate Commissioner For Science, Norris Alderson, about his agency’s regulation of nanomedicine and the potential for health care cost savings. Here’s an excerpt of their conversation:
Barbara Culliton: Nanomedicine is the “next big thing” in medicine, [...]

Last week, Health Affairs published three interviews [one-week free access] that I conducted with leading cancer oncologists. As Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science, and I wrote in an introduction to these interviews:
“An intellectual chasm exists between those who do innovative research and those who deliver it. Researchers and physician-scientists read different journals than their counterparts in health policy or [...]

It is by no means a coincidence that an explosion of knowledge about the human genome has occurred simultaneously with huge breakthroughs in computing capability and information technology. Sequencing the genome, after all, depended on being able to digitize the representation of the nucleotides in DNA. The genome’s mechanisms of operation involve intercellular messaging that [...]