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‘Weight of the Nation’
NIH Collaborates on HBO Obesity Project |
| By Amy F. Reiter |
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NIH director Dr. Francis Collins (r) films part of HBO series. |
One-third of American adults are obese. Another third are overweight. How did this happen? And how can we, as a nation, return to a healthy weight?
To help illustrate the answers—and to show the science of obesity and NIH’s efforts to combat the obesity epidemic—NIH has collaborated with HBO and major research and health organizations to develop The Weight of the Nation, a documentary series and public education initiative that spotlights this urgent public health problem.“ If we don’t succeed in turning this epidemic around, we are going to face, for the first time in our history, a situation where our children are going to live shorter lives than we do,” said NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, who appears in the full-length films. “It takes diverse and rigorous research to understand the causes of obesity and to identify interventions that work in the real world. The results from federally funded research, as seen in these films, can help to prevent and treat obesity and its complications.”
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Brain Science Is Changing Society, Says Legal Scholar Greely |
| By Susan Keown |
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Stanford’s Hank Greely speaks at NIH. |
Over the past several decades, neuroscience has created powerful technologies to peer into the brain and show us something astounding: the physical processes that create our minds. In a lecture on Mar. 13, law professor and bioethics expert Hank Greely asked scientists to consider the profound impacts that neuroscience could have on criminal justice, family life, employment and other aspects of our society. The “dual-use technologies” that have come out of neuroscience “will have implications far beyond health,” says Greely, director of Stanford University’s Center for Law and the Biosciences and director of the Stanford interdisciplinary
group on neuroscience and society. “Because what we care about in people is not fundamentally
their bodies, it is their minds, it is their behavior, it is who they are.”
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