As regulators seek to weigh the potential benefits and risks of a new medicine, my own observation is that they tend to be both tentative and ultra-paternalistic.

Senator Carl Levin says that Facebook is exploiting a tax loophole in order to avoid paying taxes to the government. But Facebook is a textbook case of win-win-win: the company's creators get rich, society gets the benefit of an innovative communications platform, and the U.S. Treasury gets billions in new revenues.

Successfully translating scientific discoveries requires a sense of urgency, which some disease foundations seem to have, and many big pharmas appear to need. Patients waiting expectantly for medical research to produce important new cures are finding bad news almost everywhere they turn.

Over the past decade, a number of remarkable organizations have cropped up that dramatically shape twenty-first century education reform. Joining this influx of groundbreaking, reform-minded organizations is Rice University’s Education Entrepreneurship Program (REEP), housed at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Policymakers at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue want to get the American economy growing again. Growth can lower unemployment, and it can yield the revenues needed to fill federal coffers. The key to robust economic growth is innovation. So how do we get it?

Durably improving health is really, really hard. I've discussed this in the context of drug discovery, which must contend with the ever-more-apparent reality that biology is incredibly complex, and science remarkably fragile. Here, I'd like to focus on another challenge: measuring and improving the quality of patient care.

The wireless ecosystem is intensely competitive and will remain so even if policymakers sit on their hands.

A century from now, observers may well identify the last months of 2011 as the start of higher education’s Great Disruption.