The Ramazzini Institute
for Occupational and Environmental Health Research   

Who Are We?

• Unfinished Agenda: Analysis of key legislative proposals ranging from genetic discrimination to aid for the walking wounded in the nation’s nuclear bomb factories. The Congress of the United States and the White House are leaving a lot on the table for the new Congress and the new administration.
•  Details on the new directions being taken in the NIH Office of Research Subject Protection in the face of contention over deaths associated with experimental gene therapy.
•  What happens to workers who were “normal” when they began work, but now “flunk” genetic and other clinical tests indicating higher risks because of “susceptibility” or “sensitivity” to a chemical or physical agent they work with?
•  An expert panel of the AAAS publishes a stern warning to researchers about changing the genes passed to the next generation.  The who, what and why of a crucial science policy. 
•  Shirley Webb, Vice President of the Late Onset Tay-Sachs Foundation publishes a membership survey that provides a thumbnail sketch of what it means to have a genetic disorder.
•  A distinguished occupational physician, who likes to be known simply as Dr. Morris Greenberg of London, writes about genetic testing in British industrial medicine.
•  An amicus brief has been filed in the Supreme Court by 40 prominent economists, including Nobel Prize Winner Kenneth Arrow, all associated with the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Institution regulatory group. The brief supports the American Trucking Association in their suit against the Environmental Protection Agency’s new clean air standards for protection of specially vulnerable populations, such as asthmatic children and the elderly.  GEE! takes a hard look.
•  Recommended “heavy” readings on the gene and medicine by researchers William Rom and others;  by the three “G’s” of  American ethics: Gewirth, Grisez and Gert; and by a rising star in evolutionary biology:  Susan Oyama.  
•  A Moral Question: Should we worry about laboratory animals in pain? Even guppies? What Flipper did for animal rights and the Human Condition.
•  Are they really patenting my genes? The economics of gene therapy and the new drugs and treatments may really hinge on what we mean by a “gene”.  A short historical review.
•  Background for the Institute-union Amarillo Health Project:  Institute sociologist Howard Kelman evaluates the Department of Energy’s beryllium workers medical surveillance program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
•  Archived Articles from the last issue.
•  The European Environmental Agency is busy promoting its new approach to environmentalism, the “Precautionary Principle”.  What is it?
•  Israel’s struggling new center for the pursuit of the Selikoff Agenda.
• Employee Assistance Programs: a look at the potential for stress counseling in your plant or office.