Biodiversity and Natural resources Sustainability is the capacity to endure.

In ecology the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. Sustainable living is a lifestyle that attempts to reduce an individual's or society's use of [1] the Earth's natural resources and personal resources. Practitioners of sustainable living often attempt to reduce their carbon footprint by altering methods of transportation, energy consumption, and diet. sustainable living in the twenty-first century as "shifting to a renewable energy-based, reuse/recycle [4] economy with a diversified transport system." Drug development is a blanket term used to define the process of bringing a new drug to the market once a lead compound has been identified through the process of drug discovery. It includes pre-clinical research (microorganisms/animals) and clinical trials (on humans) and may include the step of obtaining regulatory approval to market the drug. Currently, some Phase 2 and most Phase 3 drug trials are designed as randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled. Randomized: Each study subject is randomly assigned to receive either the study treatment or a placebo. Blind: The subjects involved in the study do not know which study treatment they receive. If the study is double-blind, the researchers also do not know which treatment is being given to any given subject. This 'blinding' is to prevent biases, since if a physician knew which patient was getting the study treatment and which patient was getting the placebo, he/she might be tempted to give the (presumably helpful) study drug to a patient who could more easily benefit from it. In addition, a physician might give extra care to only the patients who receive the placebos to compensate for their ineffectiveness. A form of double-blind study called a "double-dummy" design allows additional insurance against bias or placebo effect. In this kind of study, all patients are given both placebo and active doses in alternating periods of time during the study. Placebo-controlled: The use of a placebo (fake treatment) allows the researchers to isolate the effect of the study treatment from the placebo effect
The phenomenon of a patient's perceived medical improvement following treatment with an inert substance is called the placebo effect Informed consent is clearly a 'necessary' condition for ethical conduct but does not 'ensure' ethical conduct.

ARTICLE For Phase I Studies, Ethical and Practical Concerns Abound Kate Travis For researchers who conduct clinical trials, phase I studies are a hard sell: The drug or therapy is being tested in humans for the first time, the study has no hypothesis to test, and none of the accepted goals include a benefit to the patient. Instead, patients are asked to be willing participants in research that mayor may nothelp cancer patients in the future.The history of human experimentation can be traced back as long as the history of medicine, said Neil Abramson, M.D., of the Baptist Cancer Institute in Jacksonville, Fla., who chaired a symposium on the practical and ethical issues of phase I research at this year's annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). When is it right to experiment and when is it wrong to experiment? For phase I research, the answer to that question is repeatedly debated and analyzed in the medical community. There are certain ethical principles that bioethicists and others argue need to be kept in mind when we ask patients or even a normal volunteer to participate in clinical research, Christopher K. Daugherty, M.D., of the University of Chicago, said at the ASCO symposium. These principles include that we ought not to deceive others, we ought not to harm others or allow harm to come to others, and we ought not to use others as means to an end. Daugherty noted that these principles are not unique to cancer research, but in the context of clinical research, patients are in fact used as means to an enda violation of one of the principles. This is allowable if the benefits outweigh the harms or if voluntary and informed consent is given by the patient. In the phase I setting, it's at issue whether the benefits outweigh the harms, he said. For many patients, however, the true benefits of phase I trials are misunderstood. In survey data collected over the course of 10 years from more than 500 participants in phase I clinical studies at the University of Chicago, Daugherty and his colleagues found that when patients were asked about the purpose of their clinical trials, 61% of patients gave responses related to the effectiveness of the drug, and when they were asked what their goals were for participation in the clinical study, 56% of them said that they hoped for cure or remission of their disease. This belief is sometimes referred to as the therapeutic misconception. The reality is that only 3% to 5% of patients will have a partial response or better in a phase I trial; some studies suggest that the percentage may actually be lower. A natural assumption from the misperception of benefit is that the informed-consent process is not truly informing patients of the purposes of a phase I study. However, among those same patients in Daugherty's study, 95% of them said that they understood most or all of what was told to them during the informed consent process. A study published in December 2002 in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at 272 consent documents from phase I clinical studies and found that, overall, the forms themselves were unlikely to be a source of misinformation about the purpose of phase I studies. Most of the forms explicitly stated that the trial was a research study and that the purpose was to determine the safety of the drug, and nearly all of the forms discussed the patient's right to withdraw from the study. At the same time, the consent form document does not represent the full extent of the informed-consent process, said Mace Rothenberg, M.D., of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville. You don't simply give the form to the patient, have them read it, and say, `OK, I've fulfilled my responsibility.' It's a process. That process involves discussing it, answering questions, making sure patients understand all things in the consent form, seeking out answers, and making sure patients have enough time [to make an informed decision], Rothenberg said. Also essential to the ethical conduct of phase I studies is ensuring that a patient has a realistic understanding of his or her prognosis, Daugherty added. In a study of 160 patients in phase I trials, 31% of patients reported that their doctor never discussed prognosis with them or gave them a quantitative estimate, and 30% of patients reported that they were told that their cancer was terminal. Our knowledge is never 100% when we're asked to make big decisions in our lives, and we can't expect that to be true in phase I clinical trials either, Rothenberg said. But there's really a threshold at which we say we know enough to be comfortable with our decision. And that's what we have to recognize in the consent process.... But looking back, will these patients say they were informed?Outside of the ethical questions surrounding phase I studies and the basic goals of a phase I studyto determine the toxic effects and adverse events, identify the highest dose with an acceptable toxicity profile, and assess the pharmacologic behavior of the drug in a patient's bodythere are several practical issues for clinical researchers to overcome. By presenting phase I clinical trials to the patient as one of several options, the patient is empowered to make the choice that is right for him or her.

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Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life forms within a given species, ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet. Biodiversity is a measure of the health of ecosystems. Biodiversity is in part a function of climate. In terrestrial habitats, tropical regions are typically rich whereas polar regions support fewer species.( totality of genes, species, and ecosystems of a region) species diversity ecosystem diversity

genetic diversity Biodiversity is not evenly distributed, rather it varies greatly across the globe as well as within regions. Among other factors, the diversity of all living things (biota) depends on temperature, precipitation, altitude, soils, geography and the presence of other species. A biodiversity hotspot is a region with a high level of endemic species that is under threat from humans. [29][30][31][32] The term hotspot was introduced in 1988 by Dr. Sabina Virk. While hotspots are spread all over the world, the majority are forest areas and most are located in the tropics. Biodiversity is the result of 3.5 billion years of evolution