A poignant story in Thursday’s Boston Globe describes how the O’Donnell family of Boston channeled their love of a son, Joey, who died tragically at the age of 12 from cystic fibrosis, into a successful mission to develop impactful new treatments for this terrible affliction.

In his new book, “Phake: The Deadly World of Falsified and Substandard Medicines,” Roger Bate explores the underground trade in illegal medicines that kills over 100,000 people per year and supplants billions of dollars of real products.

From the perspective of the corporate profit and loss statement, a trading loss is one expense item in the context of all revenues and expenses. So $2 billion should be compared to the bank's $26.7 billion in pretax profits for 2011, suggesting a reduction of something less than 10 percent in annual profit.

At this conference, we will assess whether high frequency trading (HFT) has been good or bad for the securities markets and investors.

Reviewing "The Myth of The Paperless Office" for the New Yorker in 2002, Malcolm Gladwell argued that if the computer had come first, and paper didn't exist, someone would have had to invent it.  Paper, it turns out, is a lot more useful than we typically appreciate.

This is the season of generational twaddle. At graduation ceremonies across the country, politicians, authors, actors, and businessmen take to the stage to tell young people they are fantastic simply because they are young. This year, the ritual is more pathetic than usual because there’s a presidential election in the offing.

Have drug discovery efforts been less successful in the recent past?

In case you missed it, AEI health expert Scott Gottlieb, MD explains the transformation of the pharmaceutical industry in a recently published piece (full text below). Drug discovery has become targeted, averse to bureaucracy, and focused on solving more difficult to cure, serious maladies.