A journal retracted a 2004 paper this week that was among the 70,000 papers flagged last week as potentially containing plagiarized material.

Last week's report, published in Nature, presented findings from a new text-search program that scanned medical literature for duplicate publication.... Click to continue

A new Web site launched this week from a biotech company around for nearly 50 years contains something you won't see on other biotech sites: A clip from one of the most popular television shows, watched by nearly 14 million Americans last week.

Yes, that's right: CSI. Approximately two years ago, the Newark, DE-based company Analtech,... Click to continue

A significant portion of biomedical research papers contain plagiarism, according to a report in this week's Nature.

Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center used a new text-search program to scan papers and now estimate that the 17 million articles on Medline may contain 200,000 duplicates.

One of the nabbed authors is a "big... Click to continue

Should biotechs stake out real estate in the blogosphere? This question came up at a media panel I attended yesterday in Delaware, hosted by the Delaware BioScience Association. Towards the end of the session, our moderator, Lee Marshall of Business Wire, posed that question to Gary Haber of The News Journal in Wilmington,... Click to continue

NIH peer reviewers based on the West Coast now have less far to travel for study section meetings, according to the Center for Scientific Review, the gateway for all NIH grant applications.

For reviewers based far away from DC who have lamented the burden of traveling to Washington for study section meetings, the agency says half of scientific review officers will hold one meeting in Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, or San Francisco in 2008. All SROs will do so by 2009, according to in Peer... Click to continue

A University of California, San Diego communications professor is starting an unusual experiment today (Jan 22): He's testing whether a large online community of academic bloggers are better at peer review than a few hand-picked experts.

To compare the two review methods, Noah Wardrip-Fruin is posting excerpts from his new book about video games onto the blog Grand Text Auto, run by himself and five colleagues. He... Click to continue

Lawrence Tabak, who is spearheading the NIH's review of peer review, has read every single one of the thousands of responses submitted to the NIH last year, after the agency asked the biomedical community to weigh in on how it should improve peer review.

Last month, I sat down with him to talk about what he plans to do with this information.

For starters, the "village vote" won't work,... Click to continue

If you're interested in how your elected representatives feel about science, Scientists and Engineers for America have just launched a new wiki-type site that tracks how politicians have behaved. The network already includes more than 500 Web sites, and at least one for every senator, congressman, and Presidential candidate.

"Not sure what your congressman has said or done about global warming? Look it up on their SHARP page. If it's not there, then you can help by adding it,"... Click to continue

This afternoon, I spoke with Harold Dvorak, a colleague of Judah Folkman's at Harvard, who reacted to his colleague's sudden passing yesterday. He said that he's spent the day thinking back over Folkman's generosity as a physician, not only his achievements as a pioneer in anti-angiogenesis therapy for cancer.

Hundreds of patients contacted Folkman with problems - an incurable case of cancer, for instance - and he stayed... Click to continue

Judah Folkman, a proponent of the idea that halting angiogenesis could starve tumors, died yesterday at the age of 74. According to news reports, the cause of death was a heart attack.

The promise of anti-angiogenesis therapies led to many high hopes for Folkman's work, particularly when the New York Times ran a 1998 story quoting James Watson's prediction that Folkman would cure cancer in two years.... Click to continue

This week's news about researchers growing a new heart from baby cells was exciting, no doubt - a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota, led by Doris Taylor, grew a beating rat heart by adding heart cells from newborn rats to the scaffolding of a dead rat's heart. After only two weeks, the authors report in this month's Nature Medicine, the organ began conducting electrical impulses and pumping blood.

The achievement, researchers said, suggests scientists could one day... Click to continue

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has established a new five-year $100 million fast-track grant program for global health research. Each project will receive $100,000, with the option of additional funding if merited.

The program, which will adopt a fast-track review, is for scientists with "creative concepts" to fight global health scourges affecting developing countries, such as vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics.

One of... Click to continue

What are the most important questions and technologies that will hit your discipline within the next 10 years? Do you believe your NIH grant applications are aligned in the most appropriate study sections? Should grant reviewers serve as mentors to applicants?

Last month, I sat down with Antonio Scarpa, director of the Center for Scientific Review, the gateway for all NIH grant applications, to discuss these and other questions. The occasion was the agency's final open house, during which... Click to continue

Anyone get an Email that looks like it's from Elsevier, asking for papers? Only, it's not really Elsevier, and you shouldn't click on any of the links.

The Email, entitled "Elsevier: Building insights; breaking boundaries" and signed by Peter Throwher (Prof.), asks researchers to submit manuscripts in "all fields of human Endeavor."

The message is quite bizarre in spots. "Papers submitted will be sorted out and published in any of our numerous journals that... Click to continue

In an effort to keep good peer reviewers coming back, the National Institutes of Health is letting "permanent" reviewers, who typically serve for four years on chartered study sections, submit their own R01, R21, and R34 grant applications at any time, disregarding standard deadlines.

NIH spokesman Don Luckett told me the agency decided to adopt the change after receiving feedback from long-term reviewers that their service put them at a disadvantage by requiring them to review applications... Click to continue

It's the first day of voting today in Iowa, and a perfect time to talk about...science?

So says a group of scientists who have joined Sciencedebate2008, now urging the candidates for US president to debate their stance on the environment, medicine, and science policy.

This debate is vital, they argue, "given the many ... Click to continue

It's the end of the year, so time to count the number of pennies the NIH has doled out in the last 12 months. Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News published a list of the top 20 PIs of the year, and Barton F. Haynes at Duke University ($46,482,429) sits at the top of that pyramid.

The best-funded institutions were Johns Hopkins University ($566,516,255) and the University of Pennsylvania ($434,874,723). The list... Click to continue

In case you missed this over the holiday, former Medical Research Council head Colin Blakemore was denied knighthood by the UK, where news reports have attributed the decision to his support of animal research.

In 2003, Blakemore was also denied knighthood for a similar reason. The snub smarts, especially since the chief of the MRC would normally automatically be granted a knighthood. That year, Blakemore threatened to resign as MRC... Click to continue