Civil wars are frequent in lesser-developed nations, wherein is harbored a disproportionate share of the world's biodiversity. These wars have had serious detrimental effects, direct and indirect, on conservation programs. From 2001 to 2005, we conducted site visits, personal interviews, and document searches bearing upon this problem as exemplified by Nepal's ongoing Maoist insurgency. Cases of insurgents usurping full control of several protected areas have come to light, as has a rapid increase in poaching and illicit wildlife trade nation-wide. Staff and infrastructure of conservation agencies and non-governmental organizations have been attacked. The Nepalese situation invites reassessment of traditional “fortresses-and-fines” conservation strategies as well as more modern “community-based” approaches that require local governmental offices to remain functional. Also called into question is the role of military force in the protection of parks and reserves. In times of civil strife, we conclude, robust conservation may most likely be achieved by nongovernmental organizations that are politically neutral and financially independent.

Investigational, conceptual, and interventional advances in the neurosciences strain consensus in research ethics, clinical ethics, legal ethics, and jurisprudence and demand innovative adaptation in public policy. I review these advances, ask how they might change a range of policies, and conclude that their implications — particularly relating to aggression — are likely to have been underestimated.

background. Enrollment in the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), created under the federal Balanced Budget Act of 1997, had a distressingly slow start and varied substantially county-to-county in many states, including Pennsylvania.

methods. We performed a quantitative county-level analysis of barriers to enrollment in Pennsylvania's Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for the year 2000, seven years after it was implemented and three years after federal SCHIP legislation. Using multivariate regression analysis with a county as the unit of observation, we modeled enrollment in SCHIP as a function of accessibility to health care, availability of clinicians, and community economic health.

results. High clinic density and Medicaid managed-care membership predicted SCHIP enrollment success, while female head-of-household predicted SCHIP enrollment failure. A principal-components factor analysis revealed four underlying barriers to enrollment: accessibility, availability, affordability, and effort.

conclusions. The most formidable barriers to SCHIP enrollment success in Pennsylvania were not programmatic; they were correlates of poverty itself.

Since the anthrax attacks of 2001 in the United States, annual U.S. government spending on biodefense programs has increased enormously. U.S. biodefense was once exclusively the domain of military agencies and was aimed principally at protecting battlefield troops against the products of state-run biological warfare programs. Today, it is engaged in and promoted by a variety of government agencies contemplating “bioterrorism,” and it is aimed principally at protecting the American civilian population. I ask if certain U.S. biodefense policies, pointedly those funding “threat assessment” projects, make biological attacks paradoxically more likely by undermining international norms against deliberately causing disease. I conclude that they do and consider the ramifications of this answer.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's Council of Public Representatives (COPR) was established in 1998 as an advisory council to the NIH director and NIH's only wholly “public” advisory group. COPR's stated objective was, and remains, to strengthen and formalize public input into funding-allocation decisions for biomedical research by the NIH, the single largest sponsor of such research. Yet, to date, COPR's work and effectiveness have not been carefully explored. In beginning to fill this void, my goal is to contribute to the understanding of public involvement in the distribution of health research dollars. More specifically, I show that COPR has failed to promote public participation in the apportionment of biomedical research funds, but that it has been beneficially effective in some respects and likely could — and arguably should — be made more effective. The essay draws on interviews I conducted with former COPR members and discussions I initiated with executive branch employees familiar with COPR's mission, opportunities, impediments, and performance.

In well known formulations, political science, classical and neoclassical economics, and political economy have recognized as foundational a human impulse toward self-preservation. To employ this concept, modern social-sciences theorists have made simplifying assumptions about human nature and have then built elaborately upon their more incisive simplifications. Advances in biology, including advances in evolutionary theory, notably inclusive-fitness theory, have for decades now encouraged the reconsideration of such assumptions and, more ambitiously, the reconciliation of the social and life sciences. I ask if this reconciliation is feasible and test a path to the unification of politics and biology, called here “political biology.” Two new notions, “fitness extraction” and “fitness exchange,” are defined, then differentiated from each other, and lastly contrasted to cooperative gaming, the putative essential element of economics.