NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 31st January 2008 09:00 PM GMT] Researchers report that they have overcome one of the major roadblocks to using small interfering RNA (siRNA) therapeutically - they have developed a new method to deliver siRNA to silence genes in specific cells in vivo, according to this week's Science.
"I'm really actually quite excited about the paper," said ... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 31st January 2008 04:34 PM GMT]
NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 30th January 2008 09:11 PM GMT] A story by the BBC last week reporting that a treatment of infrared light through the scalp could reverse Alzheimer's disease has scientists -- and skeptical science writers -- scratching their heads.
Gordon Dougal, director of a UK-based company called Virulite, is leading a study that tests whether infrared light, beamed on the head from a special helmet, might boost cell growth in the brain (Virulite currently sells a product also based... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 30th January 2008 05:57 PM GMT] A journal retracted a 2004 paper this week that was among the 70,000 papers flagged last week as potentially containing plagiarized material.
Last week's report, published in Nature, presented findings from a new text-search program that scanned medical literature for duplicate publication.... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 30th January 2008 05:48 PM GMT] 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
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 30th January 2008 05:25 PM GMT] While researchers agree that the birth of new neurons plays an important role in the adult brain, they have long debated to which aspects of learning, memory and behavior the process contributes. A new study published today (January 30) in Nature has used a gene knockout approach to link adult neurogenesis to spatial learning.
The paper showed that... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 29th January 2008 06:41 PM GMT] 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
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 29th January 2008 04:25 PM GMT] In his State of the Union address last night, President Bush asked Congress to double the funding of basic research in the physical sciences, but asked life scientists to keep their work "ethical," reiterating his stance on the need for legislation banning human cloning.
To bolster his call to ban human cloning, the President cited recent research by Yamanaka and Thomson, who both reported last November that stem... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 29th January 2008 03:39 PM GMT] The word "chameleon" is almost synonymous with camouflage. But the chameleon's famed ability to change colors may be more about sticking out than blending in: A new study in PLoS Biology suggests color change is a way for the lizards to send each other signals related to mating - but to do so quickly, so as not to attract predators.
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 28th January 2008 08:46 PM GMT] The National Institutes of Health is asking that the University of Connecticut return $65,005 in grant money for not complying with animal welfare laws, according to an Email sent to the university health center by the National Eye Institute.
The bulk of the money had been award to the university for research performed by neurologist David Waitzman. Between the fall of 2005 and summer of 2006, Waitzman received several citations from the... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 27th January 2008 06:05 PM GMT] With few approved drugs available to treat Alzheimer disease, researchers are working on new compounds that block amyloid formation. But many potential drugs in the pipeline for the disease and other amyloid-associated illnesses may not be as promising as thought, according to a new study published today (January 27) in Nature Chemical Biology.
The research, led by ... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 25th January 2008 04:52 PM GMT] 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
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 25th January 2008 03:59 PM GMT] You may remember the hubbub about four years ago, when it emerged that antidepressants can cause suicidal thoughts in kids. After investigating the issue, the FDA ordered companies to place a "black box" warning noting suicidality as a potential side effect of the medication.
But antidepressants aren't the only drugs that can cause psychiatric problems. The New York Times reported yesterday... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 24th January 2008 11:44 PM GMT] A new Web site launched this week from a biotech company around for nearly 50 years contains something you won't see on other biotech sites: A clip from one of the most popular television shows, watched by nearly 14 million Americans last week.
Yes, that's right: CSI. Approximately two years ago, the Newark, DE-based company Analtech,... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 24th January 2008 11:08 PM GMT] A researcher lost his legal battle with Washington University in St. Louis over the ownership of thousands of cancer tissue samples he had collected while working there. The US Supreme Court this week let stand lower court rulings that awarded ownership of the samples to the university, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 24th January 2008 06:09 PM GMT] 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
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 24th January 2008 05:03 PM GMT] If you thought that all it took to kick-start a signaling pathway was a ligand binding to a receptor, think again. How and when that binding occurs, it turns out, is what determines what happens inside the cell.
In a study published online in Cell today, Sherry LaPorte of Stanford University and colleagues describe the structure of the Interleukin-4 and Interleukin-13 (IL-4/13) cytokines and the complete set of... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 24th January 2008 04:51 PM GMT] A significant portion of biomedical research papers contain plagiarism, according to a report in this week's Nature.
Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center used a new text-search program to scan papers and now estimate that the 17 million articles on Medline may contain 200,000 duplicates.
One of the nabbed authors is a "big... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 24th January 2008 04:45 PM GMT] Researchers have long debated the presence of stem cells in the pancreas that generate insulin-producing beta cells. Now researchers have shown that beta cells are indeed produced in the adult mouse pancreas, which means the tissue must contain stem cells.
The paper, published today (January 24) in Cell, "reconciles some conflicting observations that have... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 24th January 2008 04:14 PM GMT] Comment on this blog
NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 23rd January 2008 04:53 PM GMT] When my editor forwarded me a press release yesterday promoting a series of articles in January's issue of Human Gene Therapy on informed consent, he mentioned that the authors of those pieces were the key players in the death of an 18-year-old in a 1999 gene therapy trial that had called informed consent into question.
The issue's editorial was written by James Wilson, the journal's editor-in-chief, and one of the articles was written by... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 23rd January 2008 03:17 PM GMT] 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
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 23rd January 2008 04:06 AM GMT] UK scientists are objecting to a new law that would require researchers wishing to work on embryonic stem cells to obtain consent from the cells' donors.
Yesterday (January 21), 29 researchers, including three Nobel laureates, published a letter in the Times arguing that while such consent should be required in the future, obtaining it retroactively for cell lines and disease-specific tissue banks already... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 22nd January 2008 07:09 PM GMT] NIH peer reviewers based on the West Coast now have less far to travel for study section meetings, according to the Center for Scientific Review, the gateway for all NIH grant applications.
For reviewers based far away from DC who have lamented the burden of traveling to Washington for study section meetings, the agency says half of scientific review officers will hold one meeting in Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, or San Francisco in 2008. All SROs will do so by 2009, according to in Peer... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 22nd January 2008 06:59 PM GMT] I just got a call from John Collins, former chair of the biochemistry and molecular biology department at the University of New Hampshire, who told me that as of today he is officially reinstated as a professor.
Collins had been banned from campus since last June after an incident involving another professor, and then dean of research, Stacia Sower, which you can read about here and... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 22nd January 2008 05:48 PM GMT] A nine-year-old girl enrolled in a stem cell therapy trial has died, according to the company running the trial, StemCells, Inc. An independent committee ruled that the death was not caused by the stem cell treatment.
The girl was one of six children being treated for a neurodegenerative disorder -- called Batten Disease -- with transplants of neural stem cells derived from fetal tissue. Nature's stem cell blog ... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 22nd January 2008 05:19 PM GMT] 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
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 22nd January 2008 04:46 PM GMT] A University of California, San Diego communications professor is starting an unusual experiment today (Jan 22): He's testing whether a large online community of academic bloggers are better at peer review than a few hand-picked experts.
To compare the two review methods, Noah Wardrip-Fruin is posting excerpts from his new book about video games onto the blog Grand Text Auto, run by himself and five colleagues. He... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 22nd January 2008 04:17 PM GMT] 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
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 21st January 2008 10:40 PM GMT] Two government agencies continue to bicker over how to protect US borders from agroterrorism and invasive species, which critics -- including a major congressional oversight committee -- say has left the country ill-equipped to handle either crisis.
In 2003, antiterrorist legislation transferred control of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which monitors the borders for agricultural pests and conducts much of the country's research relating to... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 19th January 2008 07:56 PM GMT] When we asked readers who their favorite science bloggers were last year, we started the discussion by reaching out to a number of leading science bloggers. The bloggers who responded were all men, and most of the blogs they recommended were written by men. So perhaps understandably, GrrlScientist and others ... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 19th January 2008 06:51 PM GMT] Do science bloggers need a code of ethics? Should they disclose conflicts of interest? Moderate comments? Protect anonymous colleagues?
Those were some of the questions raised at the first session, led by Janet Stemwedel, that I went to today at the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference. It's the second such conference, and I was stimulated enough by last year's to come back. (I... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 18th January 2008 10:42 PM GMT] 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
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 18th January 2008 06:05 PM GMT] A British regulatory agency this week granted two universities permission to develop human-animal hybrid embryos for stem cell research. Scientists intend to use the embryos, developed from human DNA in non-human mammalian eggs, for neurodegenerative and diabetes research.
According to a statement from Britain's Human Fertilsation and... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 18th January 2008 05:59 PM GMT] 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
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 18th January 2008 03:06 PM GMT] Lawrence Tabak, who is spearheading the NIH's review of peer review, has read every single one of the thousands of responses submitted to the NIH last year, after the agency asked the biomedical community to weigh in on how it should improve peer review.
Last month, I sat down with him to talk about what he plans to do with this information.
For starters, the "village vote" won't work,... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 17th January 2008 03:35 PM GMT] If you're interested in how your elected representatives feel about science, Scientists and Engineers for America have just launched a new wiki-type site that tracks how politicians have behaved. The network already includes more than 500 Web sites, and at least one for every senator, congressman, and Presidential candidate.
"Not sure what your congressman has said or done about global warming? Look it up on their SHARP page. If it's not there, then you can help by adding it,"... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 17th January 2008 03:13 PM GMT] A report published online today that researchers have cloned human embryos is not that much of an advance, according to one stem cell expert, Douglas Melton, at Harvard University.
Researchers at Stemagen Corporation in La Jolla, Ca, reported that they cloned human embryos from adult oocytes using somatic cell nuclear transfer, according to a report published... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 16th January 2008 06:04 PM GMT] 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
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 16th January 2008 04:49 PM GMT] The company that sells BiDil, the first drug to be marketed specifically for one race of patients, is pulling its marketing and sales support for the drug. While the approval of the drug just for African American patients was met with controversy, the company, Nitromed, cites a "challenging capital market environment" as the reason for pulling its marketing efforts, according to a... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 15th January 2008 10:37 PM GMT] This afternoon, I spoke with Harold Dvorak, a colleague of Judah Folkman's at Harvard, who reacted to his colleague's sudden passing yesterday. He said that he's spent the day thinking back over Folkman's generosity as a physician, not only his achievements as a pioneer in anti-angiogenesis therapy for cancer.
Hundreds of patients contacted Folkman with problems - an incurable case of cancer, for instance - and he stayed... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 15th January 2008 07:37 PM GMT] Judah Folkman, a proponent of the idea that halting angiogenesis could starve tumors, died yesterday at the age of 74. According to news reports, the cause of death was a heart attack.
The promise of anti-angiogenesis therapies led to many high hopes for Folkman's work, particularly when the New York Times ran a 1998 story quoting James Watson's prediction that Folkman would cure cancer in two years.... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 15th January 2008 07:36 PM GMT] 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
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 15th January 2008 05:01 PM GMT] This week's news about researchers growing a new heart from baby cells was exciting, no doubt - a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota, led by Doris Taylor, grew a beating rat heart by adding heart cells from newborn rats to the scaffolding of a dead rat's heart. After only two weeks, the authors report in this month's Nature Medicine, the organ began conducting electrical impulses and pumping blood.
The achievement, researchers said, suggests scientists could one day... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 14th January 2008 10:03 PM GMT] PhD students and postdocs who get training in responsible conduct in research (RCR) don't absorb the lessons, especially when they've seen others break the rules before, according to a recent report in the journal Accountability in Research: Policies & Quality Assurance. Main message: Getting rules in ethics classes is useless if the scientific community doesn't obey the rules, too.
The... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 14th January 2008 10:01 PM GMT] Researchers have identified a distinct group of early-stage neural stem cells, called neural rosette cells, that can form more types of neural cells than typical neural stem cells, reports a study published today (January 14) in Genes & Development.
As neural stem cells develop from embryonic stem cells, they form a radial pattern of epithelial cells, called rosettes. Scientists had seen the morphology... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 14th January 2008 03:48 PM GMT] The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has established a new five-year $100 million fast-track grant program for global health research. Each project will receive $100,000, with the option of additional funding if merited.
The program, which will adopt a fast-track review, is for scientists with "creative concepts" to fight global health scourges affecting developing countries, such as vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics.
One of... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 11th January 2008 05:48 PM GMT] In findings that confirm previous ones ultimately dismissed as hype in 2006, scientists have shown that it is possible to create stem cells from an embryo without destroying it.
In a study published online this week in Cell Stem Cell, scientists led by Advanced Cell Technology's Robert Lanza removed one cell from an eight-cell embryo and created viable lines of stem cells. The... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 10th January 2008 03:30 PM GMT] What are the most important questions and technologies that will hit your discipline within the next 10 years? Do you believe your NIH grant applications are aligned in the most appropriate study sections? Should grant reviewers serve as mentors to applicants?
Last month, I sat down with Antonio Scarpa, director of the Center for Scientific Review, the gateway for all NIH grant applications, to discuss these and other questions. The occasion was the agency's final open house, during which... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 9th January 2008 08:17 PM GMT] Drug companies should stop using a classic toxicity test, lethal dose 50 (LD50), to inform clinical trials, according to authors in an upcoming journal of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology report.
Mouse data of a drug's LD50, the dose of a drug that kills... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 8th January 2008 10:28 PM GMT] For those of you cheering the pygmy rabbit, you can let up a restrained cheer today - a small one, perhaps, in keeping with the size of the animals. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), bowing to a September court order, is reconsidering whether more members of the tiny species should be covered under the Endangered Species Act. The agency had previously denied coverage of... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 8th January 2008 05:33 PM GMT] Anyone get an Email that looks like it's from Elsevier, asking for papers? Only, it's not really Elsevier, and you shouldn't click on any of the links.
The Email, entitled "Elsevier: Building insights; breaking boundaries" and signed by Peter Throwher (Prof.), asks researchers to submit manuscripts in "all fields of human Endeavor."
The message is quite bizarre in spots. "Papers submitted will be sorted out and published in any of our numerous journals that... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 8th January 2008 01:53 AM GMT] 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
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 7th January 2008 09:23 PM GMT] 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
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 4th January 2008 07:57 PM GMT] The new mandate that requires NIH-funded researchers to make their published papers publicly available threatens publisher and author interests, according to a statement released yesterday (January 3) by the Association of American Publishers (AAP).
The mandate was signed into law by the president on December 26 as part of the 2008 appropriations bill, which went through many... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 4th January 2008 07:17 PM GMT] In an effort to keep good peer reviewers coming back, the National Institutes of Health is letting "permanent" reviewers, who typically serve for four years on chartered study sections, submit their own R01, R21, and R34 grant applications at any time, disregarding standard deadlines.
NIH spokesman Don Luckett told me the agency decided to adopt the change after receiving feedback from long-term reviewers that their service put them at a disadvantage by requiring them to review applications... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 3rd January 2008 03:52 PM GMT] It's the first day of voting today in Iowa, and a perfect time to talk about...science?
So says a group of scientists who have joined Sciencedebate2008, now urging the candidates for US president to debate their stance on the environment, medicine, and science policy.
This debate is vital, they argue, "given the many ... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 2nd January 2008 11:26 PM GMT] Research on bioterrorist agents at Texas A&M University is still suspended due to breaches in biosafety practices, although the university said last year it expected to be cleared to continue such work by the end of 2007. "The program continues to be on hold," Sherylon Carroll of the university's press office told The Scientist. "We are waiting for feedback from the Centers for Disease Control."
The CDC suspended the university's... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 2nd January 2008 04:31 PM GMT] It's the end of the year, so time to count the number of pennies the NIH has doled out in the last 12 months. Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News published a list of the top 20 PIs of the year, and Barton F. Haynes at Duke University ($46,482,429) sits at the top of that pyramid.
The best-funded institutions were Johns Hopkins University ($566,516,255) and the University of Pennsylvania ($434,874,723). The list... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 2nd January 2008 04:27 PM GMT] In case you missed this over the holiday, former Medical Research Council head Colin Blakemore was denied knighthood by the UK, where news reports have attributed the decision to his support of animal research.
In 2003, Blakemore was also denied knighthood for a similar reason. The snub smarts, especially since the chief of the MRC would normally automatically be granted a knighthood. That year, Blakemore threatened to resign as MRC... Click to continue
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