News: New drug hopes for RNAi? Posted by Alla Katsnelson [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 ... Click to continue View comment (1) | Comment on this news story News: Should trial sponsors pay for treatment? Posted by Ivan Oransky [Entry posted at 31st January 2008 04:34 PM GMT] What is the responsibility of a company sponsoring a clinical trial when one of its participants gets sick? That's the theme of a ... Click to continue View comments (4) | Comment on this news story News: Light helmet to treat Alzheimer's? Posted by Andrea Gawrylewski [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 ... Click to continue View comment (1) | Comment on this news story News: Questioned arthritis paper pulled Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: NEJM reviewer leaked Avandia study Posted by Bob Grant [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Do adult brains learn by neurogenesis? Posted by Andrea Gawrylewski [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Biologists' FY09 funding wish list Posted by Bob Grant [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Life sciences lose in State of the Union Posted by Andrea Gawrylewski [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 ... Click to continue View comments (10) | Comment on this news story News: Chameleon colors let it all hang out Posted by Alla Katsnelson [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 ... Click to continue View comment (1) | Comment on this news story News: NIH asks UConn to return grant money Posted by Andrea Gawrylewski [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 ... Click to continue View comment (1) | Comment on this news story News: Amyloid blockers may be a dead end Posted by Andrea Gawrylewski [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 ... Click to continue View comments (5) | Comment on this news story News: Cha vs. Flamm: The endless lawsuit Posted by Bob Grant [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 ... Click to continue View comment (1) | Comment on this news story News: It's not just toxicity that gets you Posted by Alla Katsnelson [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: How biotechs get on CSI Posted by Alison McCook [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, ... Click to continue View comments (4) | Comment on this news story News: Researcher loses fight for cancer samples Posted by Alla Katsnelson [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Artificial life, a step closer Posted by Bob Grant [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 ... Click to continue View comment (1) | Comment on this news story News: Subtle cues prompt cell signals Posted by Edyta Zielinska [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 ... Click to continue View comments (2) | Comment on this news story News: Double vision in biomedicine Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: New evidence for pancreatic stem cells Posted by Andrea Gawrylewski [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 ... Click to continue View comment (1) | Comment on this news story News: Is blogging for biotech? Posted by Alison McCook [Entry posted at 24th January 2008 04:14 PM GMT] Should biotechs stake out real estate in the blogosphere? This question came up at a media panel I attended yesterday in Delaware, hosted by the Delaware ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Fixing gene therapy trials Posted by Alla Katsnelson [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 ... Click to continue View comments (4) | Comment on this news story News: Stanford denies Big Oil U. status Posted by Bob Grant [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 ... Click to continue View comments (4) | Comment on this news story News: UK proposes strict stem cell rules Posted by Alla Katsnelson [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: NIH meetings move west Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Banned UNH prof. reinstated Posted by Andrea Gawrylewski [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Stem cell trial death Posted by Andrea Gawrylewski [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: 1000 genome project launched Posted by Bob Grant [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Peer reviewed, or just blogged? Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Greasing the academic wheel Posted by Bob Grant [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: US Agro debate continues Posted by Alla Katsnelson [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 ... Click to continue View comment (1) | Comment on this news story News: Do women blog about science? Posted by Ivan Oransky [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 ... Click to continue View comments (9) | Comment on this news story News: Science blogging conf.: Ethics, please Posted by Ivan Oransky [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Report faults NIH on conflicts Posted by Bob Grant [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 ... Click to continue View comment (1) | Comment on this news story News: UK approves chimeric embryos Posted by Kerry Grens [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Surf's up for viruses Posted by Bob Grant [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: What should NIH peer review look like? Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Your candidates on science Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue View comments (2) | Comment on this news story News: Human cloning achievement? Posted by Andrea Gawrylewski [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Cilia link seeing and peeing Posted by Bob Grant [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Race drug marketing dropped Posted by Kerry Grens [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Folkman remembered as creative, kind Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue View comment (1) | Comment on this news story News: Judah Folkman dies Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue View comments (3) | Comment on this news story News: Calcium signaling: STIM revisited Posted by Bob Grant [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 ... Click to continue View comment (1) | Comment on this news story News: Let's grow organs Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: How useful is ethics class? Posted by Edyta Zielinska [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 ... Click to continue View comments (4) | Comment on this news story News: True neural stem cells? Posted by Kerry Grens [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: $100 million more from Gates Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Embryo biopsy harmless -- really Posted by Kerry Grens [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: NIH peer review: An inside look Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue View comments (4) | Comment on this news story News: Goodbye to LD50? Posted by Edyta Zielinska [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 ... Click to continue View comments (3) | Comment on this news story News: Pygmy rabbits may get reprieve Posted by Ivan Oransky [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Elsevier gets spammed Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue View comments (2) | Comment on this news story News: New networking site for scientists Posted by Bob Grant [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 ... Click to continue View comment (1) | Comment on this news story News: Clocking monarch migration Posted by Bob Grant [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Publishers object to OA mandate Posted by Andrea Gawrylewski [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Reviewer rewards from the NIH Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Science vs. science Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue View comments (4) | Comment on this news story News: Still no bioterror work at Texas A&M Posted by Alla Katsnelson [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Top NIH grants, grantees in 2007 Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story News: Blakemore denied Sir - again Posted by Alison McCook [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 ... Click to continue Comment on this news story

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