health
Historian Elizabeth Abbott tells us the story of how people first fell in love with sugar - despite the high human cost of producing it. Read more...
If you find yourself reaching for an extra serving of broccoli instead of that giant spoonful of Nutella, new research suggests you might have your mother to thank. Read more...
What if the gap between the haves and have-nots opens up earlier in life than we ever expected? Dr. Jack Shonkoff says a child's success in school depends on her earliest stages of development. Read more...
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick tells us about his new Pre-K policy initiative that takes cues from research in early childhood development. Read more...
Is Jack Andraka the country's most famous high school student? We talk with the 15-year old winner of the Intel Science Talent Search, who developed an early means of detecting one of the world's deadliest cancers. Read more...
Is there an upside to being overweight? Dr. Katherine Flegal, senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, talks about the pros and cons of a few extra pounds. Read more...
J. Craig Venter, author of "Life at the Speed of Light," went from surfer dude to one of the first scientists to sequence the human genome. Now he's working on changing our biology. Read more...
When journalist Steven Brill first began investigating the American health care system for his article "Bitter Pill, he started in a familiar place: medical bills. What he found shocked him. One patient, for example, paid $2,293 per day just for room and board in a hospital - about ten times more than he would have paid for a hotel room - and had little choice in the matter.
"There's no marketplace at all," Brill says. "The person buying the service has no leverage, no power, and no visibility into the cost."
Imagine you're a doctor about to write a prescription for a patient, but you realize what she really needs is food, or heat, or a safe place to live. For years, you had two options, says Rebecca Onie, co-founder and CEO of Health Leads. You could either adopt a "don't ask, don't tell policy" and look the other way, or spend valuable time away from clinical care addressing social needs. (In fact, one survey conducted at Bellevue hospital found that for every fifteen minute visit with a patient, doctors spent 9.2 minutes addressing social – and not medical – needs.) That’s where Health Leads comes in.
This week, Innovation Hub is all about altruism in business. Meet one CEO who walks the walk: Michael Schrader of Vaxess Technologies, a company that uses silk protein to stabilize the temperature of vaccines so they can be shipped across the globe without refrigeration. In other words, with Schrader’s help, some of the 2.5 million people who die annually of preventable diseases could be saved using the fiber in your bedsheets.
