NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 27th March 2008 06:16 PM GMT] Recent comments by California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) President Alan Trounson imply that the agency may be looking for ways to pay women for their eggs for stem cell research.
Currently, laws in California and Massachusetts — two leader states in stem cell research — prohibit compensation for eggs. But with a shortage of available human eggs for research purposes, the issue remains a national sticking point to the progress of stem cell research and... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 25th March 2008 07:39 PM GMT] Labour party politicians can vote with their conscience on three "ethical" parts of the proposed legislation on embryo research, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced today (March 25).
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which has been mired in controversy, proposes to legalize new areas of research, including the creation of hybrid animal-human embryos, and to... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 18th March 2008 08:06 PM GMT] Tomáš Grim, an ornithologist at Palacky University in the notoriously beer besotted Czech Republic, came down with a bad case of mononucleosis in 1999. His illness prohibited him from drinking for about a year. Soon after he recovered, he began publishing papers in more high profile scientific journals, such as Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 18th March 2008 01:57 PM GMT] Mammals lost their egg yolk genes after acquiring genes for milk proteins, according to a study published yesterday in PLoS Biology. The results pinpoint an important step in how mammals evolved, the authors say.
Lactation is "what makes us mammals, basically," said Henrik Kaessmann, who led the study. "Using egg yolk genes as markers,... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 17th March 2008 06:08 PM GMT] A federal judge in Chicago last Friday denied Pfizer's efforts to obtain confidential peer review documents related to two of its drugs from the New England Journal of Medicine, stating that any benefits of disclosing the subpoenaed documents would be "outweighed by the burden and harm that would result" to the journal.
In January, Pfizer filed a motion to force the... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 13th March 2008 09:12 PM GMT] Though bacteria usually reproduce asexually, they do occasionally yield to baser desires and have sex; or at least they exchange DNA through a sex-like process known as conjugation, or horizontal transfer. For the first time, scientists have filmed Escherichia coli in the act. The videos —... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 13th March 2008 08:56 PM GMT] The oblong shape of some tomatoes arose from a gene duplication caused by a selfish genetic element, according to a study published today in Science.
Before tomatoes were cultivated and grown around the world, wild tomatoes were a little-known, small, round South American fruit. But go down to the market today and you'll find juicy, ripe tomatoes of all... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 12th March 2008 05:07 PM GMT] The "shabby and dilapidated" animal disease research laboratory in Pilbright, UK — the site of last summer's foot-and-mouth disease leak — must be replaced by a new, expanded research center for infectious human and animal diseases, an official report said yesterday.
The independent inquiry into last summer's outbreak in southeast England said that a "creeping degradation of standards" at the government-funded... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 10th March 2008 07:33 PM GMT] The British government said yesterday it is considering lifting a ban that prevents babies from being conceived using sperm and eggs derived from stem cells.
Currently, gametes derived from stem cells are used for medical research, but British law imposes a blanket ban on their use in assisted reproduction. Following pressure from MPs to relax the ban, the Department of Health has agreed it will "look further into this matter," according to the ... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 7th March 2008 10:42 PM GMT] Members of the British government will be able to abstain from voting on the controversial Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, senior Labour MP, Geoff Hoon, announced today.
The bill aims to update the regulation of embryo research and assisted reproduction in light of new attitudes and technological developments. The legislation will allow research using human-animal hybrid embryos, created by inserting animal cells or DNA into... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 7th March 2008 01:05 PM GMT] A comparison of transfer RNAs has revealed the roots of the tree of life, indicating ancient origins for Archaea and viruses, according to research published yesterday in PLoS Computational Biology.
Since the discovery that ribosomal RNA can reveal evolutionary relationships between organisms, researchers have split the universal tree of life into three main branches: the superkingdoms Archaea,... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 6th March 2008 09:51 PM GMT] The co-lead author of an olfactory paper retracted yesterday from Nature by Nobel laureate Linda Buck says he stands behind the conclusions and does not admit any wrongdoing.
Zhihua Zou, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, wrote in a statement E-mailed to The Scientist by the University of Texas that he is "disappointed" by the retraction. In the... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 5th March 2008 08:08 PM GMT] Nobel laureate and olfactory researcher Linda Buck has retracted a paper published in Nature in 2001, after her team failed to reproduce the results. In the retraction, published in the March 6 issue of Nature, the authors report "inconsistencies between some of the figures and data published in the paper and the original data."
In the... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 5th March 2008 06:45 PM GMT] Brazil's Supreme Court will rule today (March 5) on the legal status of scientists using human embryos, following an appeal that embryonic stem cell research is "unconstitutional."
In March 2005, the Brazilian parliament passed legislation allowing scientists to work with stem cells derived from human embryos. That law approved research with embryos produced by in vitro fertilization and frozen for at least three years. But... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 3rd March 2008 09:19 PM GMT] A South Korean scientist who once said he wanted "to become another Hwang Woo-Suk for Korea" has come ironically close to his goal. Kim Tae-kook, a bioscience professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in the central South Korean city of Daejeon, was suspended on Friday for fabricating data in two papers, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
One of the papers published in Science in... Click to continue
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