A Massachusetts federal court judge last week (April 22) dismissed the case against a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who allegedly fired a postdoc in his lab because of the postdoc's creationist beliefs. The postdoc, Nathaniel Abraham, was dismissed from his position in the lab of molecular toxicologist linkurl:Mark Hahn;http://www.whoi.edu/science/B/people/mhahn/hahnm.html#Interests in November, 2004, after revealing that he believed in the literal truth of the Bible a

An artist who was linkurl:charged with mail and wire fraud;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22260/ for receiving postal packages of bacteria to be used in his artwork has been cleared. A federal judge on Monday (April 21) dismissed the case against Steven Kurtz, an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, saying that the government indictment against him "is insufficient on its face," The Buffalo News reported. Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers Univ

A New York-based biotech company announced today (April 8) that it has received approval for the first linkurl:therapeutic cancer vaccine;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/18859/ -- in Russia. It is the first approval by a regulatory body of a cancer immunotherapy. The therapy's approval in Russia won't in itself boost its chances for approval in the US or the EU, or improve the prospects of other cancer vaccines that are in the biotech pipeline, Ren Benjamin, senior biotech analyst

A Virginia court struck down today (April 1) linkurl:new patent rules;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/53497/ which pharma and biotech companies argued would have limited their ability to protect their intellectual property. The new rules, which were finalized by the US Patent and Trademark Organization (USPTO) last August, limit inventors to two continuing applications, which add claims to an existing patent, and cap the total number of claims in a patent at 25. "Specifically in lif

The Indian government is moving towards approving a law that will create a framework for universities to patent their discoveries. Currently, ownership of innovations made through government-funded institutions belong to the Indian government, much like the situation in the US before the Baye-Dole Act was passed in 1980. That law stated that technologies developed with federal funding at a university belong to the institution. Its passing spurred universities to establish linkurl:tech transfer

Researchers have identified a small group of neurons in Drosophila that are key to determining how female flies choose where to lay their eggs, a study in Science reports. The neurons are part of a neural circuit that could serve as a model to probe the molecular basis of decision-making, the study's authors say. Chung-hui Yang, a postdoc in linkurl:Yuh-Nung Jan's;http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/janyn.html lab at the University of California, San Francisco, was intrigued by the fact

A nuclear watchdog group filed a federal lawsuit on Monday (March 10) to suspend work at a Biosafety Level 3 lab at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which opened to little fanfare earlier this year and conducts research on pathogens such as Ebola, anthrax and Q fever. The suit, filed by linkurl:Tri-Valley CAREs,;http://www.trivalleycares.org/pressRelease/prmar08.asp a Livermore-based community group that monitors nuclear weapons and environmental cleanup activities locally and nation

NIH has established a new panel to review safety considerations in the linkurl:biocontainment lab;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/home/27378/ currently under construction in a densely populated Boston neighborhood, the agency announced today in a linkurl:press release.;http://www.nih.gov/news/health/mar2008/od-06.htm Boston University has had plans to build the Biosafety Level 4 facility since 2003, when it received a $120 million grant from the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious

Researchers have proposed a new scheme for ranking the quality or impact of scientific journals that they say is more accurate than the Impact Factor, according to a linkurl:paper;http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal published last week in PLoS ONE. Rather than relying on an average of citations to rate a journal, the system uses a mathematical model to characterize the typical number of citations that papers in specific journals are likely to r

Credit: © Phil Mynott" /> Credit: © Phil Mynott The University of Cambridge climbed to first place this year among international institutions, up from 9th last year and 25th in 2006. One reason for the jump, says Oliver Jones, a postdoc in biochemistry and leader of the university's postdoc society, is the university's new focus on professional training. "If you want to learn some new skill there's usually some way of doing it." Rel

A company developing therapeutics using RNA interference (RNAi) today (February 29) linkurl:announced;http://phoenix.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=148005&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1113937&highlight= positive results of a clinical trial in humans ? marking a first for the much-touted promise of RNAi-based therapies. Alnylam, based in Cambridge, Mass., exposed 88 male volunteers to respiratory syncytial virus, which affects mostly young children and the elderly. Half of the subjects received the

Scientific and medical publisher Wiley-Blackwell announced this week (February 20) that they will work with the linkurl:Journal of Visualized Experiments;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/37167/ (JoVE), the first online video methods journal, to add methods videos to the journal linkurl:Current Protocols.;http://www.currentprotocols.com/WileyCDA/ Rumors of JoVE's deal with Wiley-Blackwell and other mainstream science publishers have been circulating in the blogosphere since late January