Professor Yasheng Huang writes for The New York Times about the role of the government in the recent downturn in Chinese markets. “The current mess is entirely due to the active encouragement by the authorities to invest in the markets and to lax regulations," Huang writes.
Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times writes about Professor Amy Finkelstein’s survey of low-income Oregonians in which she determined that those given access to Medicaid spent more on healthcare than the uninsured. “There’s overwhelming evidence from our study and others that when you cover people with health insurance, they use more health care,” said Finkelstein.
Research led by Professor Paul Osterman in 2013 indicates that policymakers’ focus on the “skills gap” among American workers may be misplaced, writes David Scharfenberg for The Boston Globe. According to the study, “employers, for the most part, are simply not demanding the high-level talents that the skills gap rhetoric would suggest.”
John Tirman, executive director of the Center for International Studies, writes for The Huffington Post about the negotiations behind the Iran nuclear deal. Tirman draws parallels between the successful negotiations with Iran and the political circumstances that brought about the end of the Cold War.
James Walsh, a research affiliate at the MIT Center for International Studies, speaks on Bloomberg TV about the prospects for a nuclear deal between Iran and the U.S. “I think the agreement in principle has been there a while and I think it’s a good one,” says Walsh.
Professor Kenneth Oye co-authored a commentary that urges regulators to work to prevent abuse following a study that finds that opioids can be home-manufactured by genetically engineering yeast, reports Eryn Brown for The Los Angeles Times. “[A]ll of these technical steps should be done beforehand,” says Oye. “Afterwards, it's too late."
Professor Barry Posen speaks with Tom Ashbrook, host of NPR’s On Point, about the new American military push in Iraq against ISIS. Posen argues that there is no military solution to ISIS and that the, “Islamic State problem is basically a political problem.”
In a post for BetaBoston, Senior Lecturer Steven Spear urges the Boston 2024 committee to use videos and other representations to demonstrate what it would be like to host the Olympics: “Such simulations could help give people a sense of what something that occurs on the scale of the Games will look and feel like in practice.”
Elisabeth Reynolds, Executive Director of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center (IPC), speaks with Bob Seay of WGBH about a new IPC report that recommends greater interconnectedness in Massachusetts’ manufacturing innovation ecosystem. “What we know is that there is a very vital link between our manufacturing and innovation capabilities,” says Reynolds.
After the release of a paper from U.C. Berkeley researchers detailing how certain strains of yeast may be used to produce opioids, Professor Kenneth Oye coauthored a commentary calling for regulation in the field, writes Lexi Pandell for Wired. “I haven’t seen anything quite like this before,” says Oye.
Rachel Feltman writes for The Washington Post about a commentary by Professor Kenneth Oye that calls for regulation of genetically modified yeast that could potentially produce opiates. “It’s not like tomorrow someone’s going to have a fully integrated, one-pot pathway to go from sugar to morphine,” says Oye. “But it’s coming.”
Michael Le Page writes for The New Scientist about Professor Kenneth Oye’s commentary on research indicating that genetically engineered yeasts could be used to produce opiates. Oye provides a number of policy recommendations to prevent illicit opium production, including outlawing the distribution of opiate-making yeast strains.
Professor Kenneth Oye has coauthored a commentary on a paper that demonstrates researchers may be close to being able to engineer morphine from yeast, writes Nicola Twilley for The New Yorker. The authors worry this “could put illicit opiate production into the hands of many more people, at a much smaller scale.”
Donald McNeil writes for The New York Times about a commentary coauthored by Professor Kenneth Oye on advances that could make it possible to produce morphine using genetically modified yeast. Oye argues for “locking up the bioengineered yeast strains and restricting access to the DNA that would let drug cartels reproduce them.”
The Associated Press writes about Professor Kenneth Oye’s commentary on a paper by researchers at U.C. Berkeley that shows how morphine and other painkillers can be manufactured without opium poppies. Oye calls for regulation in order to prevent abuses.