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Putting secure labs in cities: universities seek to avoid PR problem now facing NIH.

Cochrane Review finds little evidence that peer-review ensures quality of biomedical research.

Committee on Publication Ethics says proposals are "toothless."

Foundations | A Look at the Discovery of HIV The goal, wrote Francoise Barré-Sinoussi in 1983 on her lab book page, was "to find an activity of reverse transcriptase type HTLV in the culture supernatants." Barré-Sinoussi, in her mid-30s at the time, found it. She, along with fellow Institut Pasteur colleagues Claude Chermann and Luc Montagnier, isolated this retrovirus from abnormally large lymph node cells that were taken from a patient dubbed BRU. The researchers called the

Courtesy of Peggy Greb, ARS Photo Library Picture an imperfect hall of mirrors, with gene sequences reflecting wildly: That's the human genome. The duplications that riddle the genome range greatly in size, clustered in some areas yet absent in others, residing in gene jungles as well as within vast expanses of seemingly genetic gibberish. And in their organization lie clues to genome origins. "We've known for some time that duplications are the primary force for genes and genomes to evolve ov

For many years physicists lagged way behind biologists in the perpetration of scientific fraud. But they have caught up in spectacular style with the ambitious opus of Jan Henrik Schon of Bell Labs, who placed seven of his fictive works in Nature and nine in Science. All those ad hoc explanations for biomedicine's leadership role in fraud--that entrance to medical school selected for corner-cutters, or that the mathematical structure of physics leaves little slack for fudging figures--must be

We surveyed 323 readers to find out how many peer-reviewed research papers they have published in the past year, and in their careers. Readers published a median of 2.1 papers in the past 12 months, and in a median career length of 12.5 years, they published 27.0 papers. That's an average of 2.2 papers per year throughout their research careers. Not surprisingly, a moderate linear correlation (r2=0.49) exists between career length and number of papers published. More than 10% of our readers ha

Microbiologist Riley D. Housewright dies aged 89

Executive leadership team formed to apply business model to disease agency's operations

Top-up fees, split between teaching and research, and new research grading among government's plans.

UK government endorses greater openness about the use of animals in research.

Leading candidate for second-in-command post is a policy expert and relative newcomer.