A company developing therapeutics using RNA interference (RNAi) today (February 29) announced positive results of a clinical trial in humans ? marking a first for the much-touted promise of RNAi-based therapies.

Alnylam, based in Cambridge, Mass., exposed 88 male volunteers to respiratory syncytial virus, which affects mostly young children and the elderly. Half of the subjects received... Click to continue

Scientific and medical publisher Wiley-Blackwell announced this week (February 20) that they will work with the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), the first online video methods journal, to add methods videos to the journal Current Protocols.

Rumors of JoVE's deal with Wiley-Blackwell and other mainstream science publishers have been circulating in the blogosphere since late... Click to continue

Texas A&M University will pay an unprecedented $1 million in fines for more than a dozen safety violations in its research program on bioterrorism agents, the university announced today (February 20).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suspended the university's bioterrorism research efforts in July, 2007, after an inspection prompted by the biosafety watchdog group, the ... Click to continue

Who should the next US president appoint as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy?

That and more than 50 other science-related positions in the executive branch will more than likely be up for grabs come next January.

The scientific community has already called for a science debate by presidential candidates. But policy experts at this weekend's meeting of the... Click to continue

Geneticist and genetic engineering pioneer Ray Wu died on February 10 of cardiac arrest. He was 79.

In 1970, Wu developed a new location-specific primer-extension technique that became the first method of sequencing DNA. In the following decade, Frederick Sanger adapted the approach for faster sequencing, and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the work in 1980.

Wu's lab also devised other approaches that were used to analyze genetic sequences and to construct vectors for cloning... Click to continue

Can plants suffer from autoimmunity? The term is generally reserved for organisms with an adaptive immune system, but one of the speakers last night at the Keystone meeting on plant signaling and immunity described a scenario that she called "the plant world version of autoimmunity."

Farmers as well as plant researchers have long known that every once in a while, when two healthy plants are crossbred, the offspring (called F1) is inexplicably sickly - maybe its leaves are necrotic, or maybe... Click to continue

Last night's session (February 12) on hormones networks at the joint Keystone meeting on plant signaling and immunity in Keystone, Co, began with Charlie Chaplin. Specifically, the audience was treated to a video clip of the scene in Modern Times where Chaplin, a worker on a factory assembly line, becomes curious about the gears that drive the machinery, and to the horror of other workers, dives onto the assembly line and down the chute to explore.

It was a clear metaphor for what's... Click to continue

What if our textbooks aren't quite correct, and the plant cell wall isn't just the purely structural organ it's thought to be? That's the theory Shauna Somerville of Stanford's Carnegie Institution described yesterday (February 11) in her talk at the Keystone joint meeting on plant signaling and innate immunity in Keystone, Co.

Somerville studies powdery mildew, a fungal disease that infects as many as 9,000 different... Click to continue

The Sunshine Project, a Texas-based group that has monitored safety and oversight issues in research on bioterror agents, suspended operations on February 1, according to the group's Web site.

Ed Hammond, who heads the non-profit operation and whom I've spoken with a handful of times, has gained a reputation as something of a pitbull tearing on the pantleg of the US's growing biodefense research program. One of the group's main strategies has been... Click to continue

Researchers have identified a new strategy for circumventing the safety problems that have plagued gene therapy according to a study published online in Cell today.

The study reports that adenovirus, a common vector for delivering gene therapy, transfects liver cells by a different mechanism than previously thought. That mechanism offers a new target... Click to continue

As a young lab leader at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s, Joshua Lederberg and his first wife Esther, a microbiologist, would invite lab members to their home once a week to discuss significant recent advances in microbial genetics. Lederberg would sit silently on the floor, listening, recalled Gaylen Bradley, who was a postdoc in Lederberg's lab between 1954 and 1956.

"Josh would listen, and then at the end make some sort of... Click to continue

In response to a petition from researchers, the UK government has backed down on restrictions to stem cell research proposed in a new bill.

The revision of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, currently being debated in Parliament, stipulates that tissue donors must give explicit consent for use of their cells in embryonic stem cell research.

But objections from scientists, including a... Click to continue

Additional safety studies for Boston's planned Biosafety Level 4 lab, demanded by the Massachusetts Supreme Court last year, will further delay the opening of the facility, according to court documents filed by the NIH this week.

In November, 2007, an outside scientific panel concluded that the NIH had flubbed the safety evaluations for the lab, and in December, the Massachusetts Supreme Court... Click to continue