To our first readers

A short account of our mission and values.

ERIC GREENBERG

Welcome to the first issue of the Acumen Journal of Life Sciences, an independent journal whose mission is to cover the business of life sciences and health care. We will analyze discoveries, innovations, and challenges in life sciences and health care, and explain their commercial, economic, and policy implications for decision makers in business, academia, and government. I am the publisher of the Acumen Journal, and also the founder and CEO of Acumen Sciences, a life sciences and health care advisory firm based in San Francisco that owns the Acumen Journal. This publication operates with editorial independence.

What kinds of stories can you expect in the Acumen Journal of Life Sciences? We hope to promote debate about issues that are of urgent interest to the life sciences industry, whose motivating concern is to offer people happier, healthier, longer, more productive lives. Our motto is Pro Bono Humani Generis, “For the Good of Mankind.”

For instance, many of the stories in our first issue are about the potential of human stem cells to cure humankind’s most terrifying diseases, and about the scientific, economic, and social consequences of opposition to this technology.

Those who criticize stem cell research often characterize it as one step down the slippery slope to human cloning or as a scheme to promote abortion. But I believe no sane person could ever support human cloning. And a blastocyst (the mass of 30 to 150 cells from which undifferentiated embryonic stem cells are derived) is not a human, nor could it ever become one unless implanted in a human womb.

Those who oppose stem cell research because they say they are pro-life often support in vitro fertilization, which necessarily involves the selective destruction of fertilized eggs that will never be brought to term. This is pure hypocrisy. When scientists remove the nucleus from a human egg and replace it with DNA from another cell to create a blastocyst, they do so in the hope of curing disease, rather than just treating symptoms or curtailing human suffering. Common sense suggests that we and our loved ones will all fall sick one day, and we would surely be grateful for the research that leads to a cure. But as is often said, “Common sense is all too uncommon.”

In Every Issue

» Common Sense

By Invitation: Freeman Dyson

Obituary: Dolly

From the Editor