Tomorrow (Dec. 1) is the 20th annual World AIDS Day, several health, advocacy, and research organizations are marking the event.

Several organizations, including The American Medical Student Association and the Global AIDS alliance, are staging a rally outside the White House to demand increased... Click to continue

The Indonesian health minister has criticized an American scientist for taking tissue samples from a man suffering from a severe viral infection and exporting them out of the Southeast Asian country.

The minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, said that foreign drug companies could use the samples, taken from the man named Dede, to develop profitable pharmaceuticals without remuneration for Indonesia.

"We are offended because the samples were taken from Dede without our permission," she told British... Click to continue

The US Food and Drug Administration is allowing a controversial gene therapy trial to resume, after the trial was halted when a 36-year-old participant died in July.

The therapy, developed by Seattle based company Targeted Genetics, seeks to treat inflammatory arthritis, and is delivered via an adeno-associated viral (AAV) vector through an... Click to continue

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge threw out a defamation suit today (November 20) filed by a Korean fertility researcher against a scientist who wrote an opinion piece criticizing his work.

Judge James Dunn upheld a motion filed by the defendant, Bruce Flamm of the University of California,Irvine. Flamm's motion claimed that the lawsuit sought to stifle Flamm's criticism of Kwang Yul... Click to continue

We at The Scientist take the time to carefully read each and every press release we're sent, especially those from our elected officials in Washington, D.C. (OK, not really.) Today, we got one from Capitol Hill that still has us scratching our heads.

An oddly worded press release from US Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) alleges that cloning pioneer Ian Wilmut is the biological father of Dolly the sheep.

The release begins by describing Brownback's pleasure with... Click to continue

A professional medical association has threatened to sue a scientific journal over an article accusing the group of pandering to industry.

The article was published in the most recent issue of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health (IJOEH), and it claims that members of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) have "deeply embedded" conflicts... Click to continue

On Tuesday (Nov. 13) President Bush signed a defense bill (HR 3222) that ups the 2008 Pentagon budget by $40 billion from last year and increases Pentagon-funded basic research programs by about $81.2 million, according to a spokesperson for the bill's sponsor, Representative John... Click to continue

Scientists in Oregon claim to have successfully produced rhesus macaque embryos using somatic cell nuclear transfer with egg and skin cells taken from adult monkeys. The Scientist first reported on this back in June when the head of the research team, Shoukhrat Mitalipov, presented the results at a stem cell meeting in Australia.

The paper is published online today (November 14) on... Click to continue

This morning (November 13), President Bush vetoed a bill aiming to increase 2008 NIH funding by $1.4 billon, from $28.6 billion in 2007 to $30 billion next year. The bill outlined a total of $150.7 billion which includes funding for the departments of Labor and Education. Bush previously threatened to veto the bill, which both houses of Congress... Click to continue

The votes are in, and Bad Astronomy, a site maintained by erstwhile astronomer Phil Plait, has just barely won the 2007 Weblog Award for Best Science Blog. Bad Astronomy beat out Climate Audit, a site that frequently posts entries downplaying human contributions to climate change, by only 0.1% or 45 votes.

The final days of voting were marked by a... Click to continue

Last night (November 8th) the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill aiming to increase NIH funding from $28.6 billion this year to $30 billion next year.

Jon Retzlaff, spokesperson for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), said he expects President Bush to veto the bill when it lands on... Click to continue

Looks like the 2007 Weblog Award for Best Science Blog has gotten ugly. Along with the usual suspects (last year's winner Pharyngula, among others), an apparent anti-science site focused on denying human-induced climate change has made it onto the ballot.

Climate Audit, a site maintained by... Click to continue

Hugh Tilson, an Environmental Protection Agency administrator, is the new editor-in-chief of Environmental Health Perspectives, the flagship journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. As we recently reported, he was on the short list of candidates for the position. Tilson will take up his post at NIEHS later this month and will officially start as EHP?s top editor at the beginning of 2008.

Tilson, a... Click to continue

We've seen (and some have felt) the destruction wrought by the wildfires that recently swept through Southern California: homes destroyed, communities displaced, and study sites burned.

But the National Institutes of Health is also considering the delay that the California fires may cause in grant application submissions from researchers in the area. The NIH issued a... Click to continue

Washoe, a primate pioneer in the study of non-human language acquisition, died Tuesday night (October 30th) of natural causes at her home on the campus of Central Washington University. She was 42 years old.

The chimp was one of the first to learn American Sign Language when, in 1966, University of Nevada researchers Allen and Beatrix Gardner began teaching Washoe to sign. Washoe, who was named after the Nevada county where she lived with the Gardeners until 1970, would eventually acquire a... Click to continue