Specifically in the peripheral nervous system, there's been some work along these lines, primarily in anesthetized experiments, using ChR2-expressing stem cells, which integrate into denervated nerves, and enable optogenetic control of the previously denervated muscles. See here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24700859

We wrote a review recently about what's been happening in optogenetics in the peripheral nervous system/spinal cord. That's here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27147590

Within pharma, Derek Lowe has been blogging for many years, with a mix of posts focusing on new developments as well as broader strategic questions. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ The comment section there is also typically informed.

Derek Lowe also has the tremendous "Things I Won't Work With", which is laugh-out-loud funny.

Before I recommended it, I went back, read the most recent one (which I've read before), and snickered aloud. It's still enjoyable as heck.

And you feel every ounce of those when reading them. Most good versions of this class of book are this heavy (typically prescribed for the late 'undergrad'/first year grad introductory class reading). The neuroscience equivalent (Kandel, Schwartz, Jessell) is 8.7 pounds, with very thin pages.

It refers to the Graham Holdings Company which used to own The Washington Post, still owns Slate, and also owns Kaplan.

They also owned a cable company for revenue stability reasons.

See: http://www.ipscell.com/2016/01/patent-expert-weighs-in-on-cr... and https://law.stanford.edu/2015/12/29/the-crispr-patent-interf... They're mostly specific to Cas9.

See also: Ed Yong in The Atlantic, who has a nice story on this that includes some rather fun sentences [1]: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/youre-pro...

[1] Such as: "In 2014, Judah Rosner from the National Institutes of Health drew attention to this “fake fact” in a letter to Microbe magazine. More recent estimates, he noted, put the total number of human cells at anywhere from 15 trillion to 724 trillion, and the number of gut microbes at anywhere between 30 trillion and 400 trillion. Which gives a ratio that can best be expressed as ¯\_(ツ)_/¯."

On the mechanistic side of things, http://www.pnas.org/content/112/26/8106.short is one of the more interesting papers to come out recently on ketamine's mode of action.

Stanford's release on this goes into more scientific detail, and has a nice interview with the senior author in which she discusses the background behind the work.

http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/04/brain-tumor-gr...

The first author of that paper did an AMA on reddit.com/r/science that you may find interesting as an update on where things stand: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/2tykiu/

The article is here (the link in the popsci article doesn't work for me): http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/7/278/278ra33.full

There's a news article about the paper that Science wrote up, which goes into some of the history of the work and has a broad sampling of views on the relevance of this paper within the broader context. http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/03/ultrasound-therap...