Yesterday the US Senate approved a bill that includes $400 million for NIH funding. The provision is part of the Senate's Supplemental Appropriations bill for 2008, primarily intended to support the Iraq war.

The bill was passed with 75 in favor, 22 opposed. President Bush has vowed to veto the bill if it contains non-military funding measures.

The bill will now be sent back to the House of Representatives for a vote.... Click to continue

When I first heard about a computer game based on folding proteins, I must admit, I was skeptical. How fun could it possibly be to manipulate a virtual protein for points? Well, after countless hours of first hand experimentation I've arrived at an answer: Very.

The game is called Foldit, and luckily for one of the game's principle founders, David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington, thousands of others have come to the same conclusion. Baker hopes that Foldit -- launched two... Click to continue

Another US university has been found in bed with big tobacco, this time on the down-low. The New York Times reported today that Virginia Commonwealth University entered into a contract with Philip Morris in 2006 that severely restricts researchers' ability to disseminate findings from studies funded by the tobacco company.

Tobacco funding in academic research is a contentious issue, with the debate primarily... Click to continue

Scientists have created the first transgenic monkey model of Huntington disease (HD), according to a report that appeared yesterday in Nature. But it's unclear how closely the model represents the disease in humans.

The study, led by Anthony Chan, at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, successfully bred five rhesus macaques with the repeated amino acid sequence CAG in the human huntingtin gene --... Click to continue

There still may be hope for a boost to National Institutes of Health funding in 2008. Yesterday the US Senate snuck some $400 million into a bill approved by the House earlier this week for funding the Iraq war.

At the end of last year, President Bush vetoed a 2008 appropriations bill that would have raised NIH funding by about $1 billion. In order to get the bill approved, Congress slashed $760 million of proposed NIH funding,... Click to continue

The FDA has delayed approval of an application for the first human embryonic stem cell clinical trial by Geron Corporation, the company announced yesterday.

Geron's compound, GRNOPC1, is a cell-based therapy to treat spinal cord injury. Yesterday, the FDA told Geron verbally that they were placing the Investigational New Drug submission of the treatment under a clinical hold. The company is awaiting a formal letter.

Thomas Okarma,... Click to continue

Some potential cancer therapies may do more harm than good: A class of compounds intended to boost tumor suppressor p53 activity may actually promote mutant versions of the gene, a study published tomorrow in Genes and Development reports.

p53, the tumor suppressor found in roughly half of all human cancers, works by signaling cell death, thus keeping cell growth in check. But p53 can be deleted during transcription or... Click to continue

An Australian research group is proposing a surprising technique to alleviate the ecological damage that the invasive cane toad has caused to many regions of Australia.

Rick Shine at Sidney University suggested yesterday in a lecture to the Australian Academy of Sciences that researchers introduce tiny cane toads to areas where they have not yet been found, reasoning that it will help animals learn to avoid the toxic creatures, the... Click to continue

A medical publisher has changed its copyright policy to ease the process for authors to comply with the federal public access mandate. Starting today (May 1), authors will automatically retain copyright of manuscripts submitted to Rockefeller University Press journals, according to an editorial published yesterday in the Journal of Cell Biology.

Giving copyrights to authors streamlines the process of submitting articles to... Click to continue

Before therapies using human embryonic stem cells can be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, researchers will have to answer one key question: where do the cells go when they are injected into the patient?

During an FDA meeting earlier this month on the safety of embryonic stem cell therapies, the agency grappled with the issues of tracking stem cells in vivo. ... Click to continue