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Billionaire's cash challenge intended to provoke new ideas for improving global health.

Mark Walport will head organization starting in June.

New Rockefeller chief Paul Nurse, known for his warm heart, likes to keep his hands wet.

2004 budget due Monday, but 2003 spending bills still far apart with more delays likely.

US Senate revisits issue of human cloning as Brownback introduces bill to ban it.

Leading UK research council announces research goals in five-year strategy.

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