A spending bill that would increase the National Institutes of Health 2009 budget by $1.2 billion over President Bush's proposed NIH budget was sidelined by partisan wrangling in the full House Committee on Appropriations today (June 26).

"[Bush's] budget would result in 6,000 medical research scientists who will no longer be able to get their research funded," said Representative ... Click to continue

The irascible conflict of interest hunter, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), has set his sights on a Stanford University psychiatrist who's running a federally funded clinical trial on a drug made by the same company in which he owns millions of dollars in stock.

The psychiatrist is Alan Schatzberg, and he is the chair of the psychiatry department at Stanford's School of Medicine.... Click to continue

The UK government will take steps to make sure patients are better informed of opportunities to participate in clinical trials, according to the country's health minister.

Doctors in the UK "already have a duty to advise patients, in each patient's best interest, about all aspects of their treatment, including research," a UK Department of Health spokesperson told The Scientist in an Email. But UK Secretary of State for Health ... Click to continue

A man attempting to cheat his way into a $500 prize for catching a hefty Chinook salmon was recently foiled by one of the most basic tenets of fisheries biology: if you know a fish's length, you can pretty accurately predict its weight.

You see, a primary tool that fisheries biologists use to assess the health or habitat quality of different fish species or populations is what they call a ... Click to continue

One of Great Britain's most media savvy psychiatrists, who confessed to plagiarizing other authors in articles he wrote in newspapers and medical journals, has been suspended from practicing psychiatry for three months.

The UK's General Medical Council (GMC) suspended Raj Persaud, a frequent commentator on British television and ... Click to continue

A microbiologist who changed science's understanding of cell signal transduction and protein structure has won the 2008 Kyoto Prize in Basic Science.

Anthony Pawson, a British-born scientist who now lives and works in Canada, received the award for "his proposal and proof of the concept of adapter... Click to continue

The US Senate and House of Representatives have approved a 14 percent funding increase for the National Science Foundation (NSF) for 2009. A Senate appropriations subcommittee approved the measure yesterday (Jun 18), and a House subcommittee passed the bill last week.

The bill will now move to the Senate floor for a vote, which has not yet been scheduled.

The spending bill would net NSF, which is the second largest federal funder of academic research after the National Institutes of Health... Click to continue

A rule meant to protect the privacy of medical patients impedes critical health research by limiting access to stored tissue and genetic datasets and by hampering research participant recruitment, according to an Association of Academic Health Centers (AAHC) report released yesterday (Jun 16). This sentiment echoes concerns previously voiced by US... Click to continue

The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG) will recover more than $2 billion through audits and investigations of fraud, waste and abuse in HHS programs, the office announced last Thursday (Jun 12).

"OIG's accomplishments reflect a robust oversight agenda implemented through audits, evaluations, and compliance and enforcement activities," said Inspector General... Click to continue

Biotech company Invitrogen announced today (Jun 12) that it will acquire Applied Biosystems in a deal valued at $6.7 billion.

"This transaction combines the industry's premier consumables provider with the industry's premier systems provider to create a world-class biotechnology tools company," said ... Click to continue

Trees from the Caribbean to Canada maintain a constant leaf temperature regardless of the ambient air temperature, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. The findings could dramatically alter interpretations of data used to approximate past climate from the composition of tree rings, the researchers say.

Scientists who measure cellulose... Click to continue

In another move to encourage innovation while trimming its research and development budget, pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline has announced that it will cut two percent, or 350 jobs, from its global R&D staff, according to The Wall Street Journal.

"These changes are part of GSK's longer-term strategy to ensure that we invest in key areas of future growth and evolve our business to compete... Click to continue

Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York City today (Jun 10), telling delegates and dignitaries that the key to controlling HIV/AIDS in developing nations is prevention, and especially the development of vaccine for the disease.

Fauci said that "a preventive HIV... Click to continue

Cosmetics company L'Oreal has launched a search for the most influential woman scientist of all time. The corporation, which for the past decade has sponsored a fellowship program for female researchers, unveiled a website listing the nominees last Friday (Jun 6).

Researchers and... Click to continue

More bad news from Australia's war on cane toads: Now they're killing freshwater crocs.

According to a blog on Nature's website, the invasive amphibians - which have recently hopped their way into the Northern Territory - are turning up in the stomachs of dead crocodiles.

A ... Click to continue

A new report from the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) paints a gloomy picture of how US medical schools are failing to craft policies that keep the pharmaceutical industry at arm's length.

The AMSA's PharmFree Scorecard 2008, released yesterday (June 3), surveyed 150 medical school's across the country, asking about the institutions' policies to limit ... Click to continue

The US government is poised to start a new AIDS vaccine trial, prompting some to caution that it is too soon to initiate such studies after a Merck vaccine not only failed to show effectiveness but also may have increased participants' HIV infection rate.

Late last week, the NIH's AIDS Vaccine Research Subcommittee voted 23-3 in favor of beginning the PAVE 100... Click to continue

In order to evolve novel traits, organisms may depend upon smaller, less dramatic mutations that they amass through their evolutionary history rather than suddenly acquiring a single mutation that gives them drastically different phenotypes, according to a study published online today (Jun 2) in PNAS.

Whether an organism arrives at major evolutionary innovations through a single key mutation or a history of many accumulated... Click to continue

A new genomics and systems biology journal will collaborate with an international, open access database to include a section devoted to publishing genetic datasets.

Human Genomics and Proteomics (HGP) was officially launched Saturday (May 31) at a human genomics symposium in Barcelona by editor-in-chief, George Patrinos, a geneticist at Erasmus University Medical Center in The Netherlands.

The new journal is the first offering from... Click to continue