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IBM spent several billion dollars on acquisitions to build up Watson. Former senior IBM executive John Kelly once touted the initiative as a “bet the ranch” move. It didn’t live up to the hype. Watson Health has struggled for market share in the U.S. and abroad and currently isn’t profitable.


The decision to put its flagship Watson Health business up for sale underscores the wider challenge tech companies face in healthcare.

These three pillars of cybersecurity risk management need not stand alone. In fact, they all should be incorporated together in cybersecurity framework strategy to identify gaps, mitigate threats, and build resilience in the case of an inevitable cyberattack. Of course, there are many other elements and protocols associated with utilization of these cyber risk management pillars. Combining them creates a more holistic mindset that also makes it easier to plan and adapt. With the growing sophistication of global cyber-threats and the expanding digital attack surface, a vigilant three pillar approach makes good sense.

Chuck Brooks, President of Brooks Consulting International, is a globally recognized thought leader and evangelist for Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies. LinkedIn named Chuck as one of “The Top 5 Tech Experts to Follow on LinkedIn.” Chuck was named as a 2020 top leader and influencer in “Who’s Who in Cybersecurity” by Onalytica. He was named by Thompson Reuters as a “Top 50 Global Influencer in Risk, Compliance,” and by IFSEC as the “#2 Global Cybersecurity Influencer.” He was named by The Potomac Officers Club and Executive Mosaic and GovCon as at “One of The Top Five Executives to Watch in GovCon Cybersecurity. Chuck is a two-time Presidential appointee who was an original member of the Department of Homeland Security. Chuck has been a featured speaker at numerous conferences and events including presenting before the G20 country meeting on energy cybersecurity.

Bonny Lemma. Originally published in the HIR Winter 2019 Issue.

Jennifer Lopez has one more industry to add to her illustrious résumé: molecular biology. In 2016, she was asked to be the executive producer of a new futuristic bio-crime drama for NBC called C.R.I.S.P.R. While that project is a work of science fiction, the CRISPR technology that it is based on is very real.

CRISPR, or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is not just a gene editing technique, but also a phenomenon that carries significant implications for the future of biotechnology. Therefore, the interactions between the countless players in this field and the objectives driving them are crucial to understanding of CRISPR and the promise it holds.

Although the definitive causes of Alzheimer’s diseases aren’t yet fully understood, one of the leading suspects is the accumulation of abnormal proteins in the brain that impinges on the activity of the neurons. Scientists at Northwestern University have explored this phenomenon in a group of elderly individuals with excellent memory, known as SuperAgers, and found them to be far more resistant to the troublesome buildup of some of these proteins, shedding further light on how the disease may take hold.

A lot of the research into the progression of Alzheimer’s focus on a pair of proteins called amyloid and tau. Clumps of amyloid are thought to build up and develop into plaques that impact on memory and cognitive function, while tau takes the form of tangles that interfere with the way nutrients are taken up by the neurons, eventually leading to the death of the cell.

The Northwestern University researchers carried out experiments to study the prevalence of these proteins in SuperAgers, a group of subjects over the age of 80 with the memory capacity of someone 20 to 30 years younger than them. These subjects are assessed annually as part of ongoing research at Northwestern’s Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease.