A reviewer of last year's meta-analysis of GlaxoSmithKline's diabetes drug, Avandia, leaked the study to the company prior to its publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, according to a story appearing today (Jan. 30) in Nature.

Last year, Avandia, joined the ranks of blockbuster drugs... Click to continue

The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) has outlined its funding hopes for the 2009 fiscal year today (Jan. 29), just a few weeks after Congress passed the FY08 funding bill that bumped the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget up by a mere $130 million.

"Today we present, based on our expertise as scientists, what is necessary to reinvigorate and sustain our nation's extraordinary research enterprise,"... Click to continue

In yet another twist in an ongoing legal battle, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge yesterday (Jan. 24) reinstated a defamation lawsuit filed by Kwang Yul Cha, a fertility researcher who published a controversial 2001 study linking in vitro fertilization success to prayer.... Click to continue

Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., say they've joined together chemically synthesized fragments of DNA to assemble the synthetic genome of the world's smallest free-living bacterium.

Previously, only viral genomes had been synthesized in the lab, but synthesizing the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium, a bacterium that inhabits the genitals and respiratory tracts of primates, represents the first bacterial genome and the largest molecule of defined structure ever... Click to continue

A Stanford University official has denied allegations that the university's climate and energy research is influenced by its corporate sponsors.

The report, released by Center for Science in the Public Interest accused Stanford and other major US universities of granting energy company sponsors control over research and publication. But Franklin Orr, the director of Stanford's... Click to continue

An international consortium announced today (Jan 22) a plan to sequence at least 1000 genomes from people all over the world. "The 1000 Genome Project" seeks to assemble the most comprehensive map yet of human genetic variation. The project will be supported by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England, the Beijing Genomics Institute, Shenzhen (BGI Shenzhen) in China, and the National Institutes of Health's National Human Genome Research Institute... Click to continue

Petrochemical companies hold too much sway over research at some US universities, according to a science watchdog group. The Center for Science in the Public Interest released a report yesterday (Jan 21) that surveyed a handful of major universities and found that several grant large oil corporations access to the research and publication processes in exchange for funding biofuel or other global warming-themed research program. Among these... Click to continue

More than a year ago, Ned Feder, former National Institutes of Health researcher and now staff scientist at the Project on Government Oversight, wrote in a letter appearing in the The Scientist that NIH-funded scientists "have been filing financial disclosure statements within their own institutions. However, their disclosure statements are kept secret, within each institution." Feder asked... Click to continue

In membrane studies, pictures say thousands of words. Wednesday, the closing day of the Keystone symposium on the molecular basis for biological membrane organization, I watched a talk that contained millions of words worth of compelling images.

In his presentation on retroviral transmission from infected cells to uninfected cells, Walther Mothes of The Yale University School of Medicine featured several time-lapse movies of viruses... Click to continue

I've officially heard my favorite one-liner here at the Keystone symposium on the molecular basis for biological membrane organization. In her presentation on the molecular link between polycystic defects such as retinopathies and polycystic kidney disease, Angela Wandinger-Ness of the University of New Mexico offered this gem: "There is a connection between seeing and peeing."

After the giggles subsided,... Click to continue

In cell signaling, calcium is king. The flux of calcium ions across cell membranes regulates cellular activities from muscle contraction to neuron firing to immune cell function. A talk I saw here at the Keystone symposium on the molecular basis for biological membrane organization in Big Sky, Montana, presented some significant steps forward in understanding the molecular pathway whereby the cell senses the depletion of calcium from stores in the endoplasmic reticulum and in order to allow the... Click to continue

There's a new kid on the ever-growing virtual bock of social networking websites. Last year I wrote about how scientists might use these sites to optimize their impact in the scientific community, and a new social networking website geared specifically toward life scientists is set to go live this month.

BioMedExperts.com compiles information about authors whose research papers appear on PubMed,... Click to continue

Researchers have uncovered key genetic mechanisms underlying one of the most impressive feats of animal migration on Earth: the autumnal voyage of monarch butterflies from eastern North America to distant Mexican fir forests.

In this week's issue of PLoS Biology, neurobiologist Steven Reppert and colleagues from the University of Massachusetts Medical School... Click to continue