Articles by Tabitha M. Powledge

Prostate cancer is increasingly looking like an infectious disease, a new study shows, and may be sexually transmitted

Prostate cancer is increasingly looking like an infectious disease, a new study shows, and may be sexually transmitted

Biofuel: The Potential Magic Bullet By Tabitha M. Powledge RELATED ARTICLES Innovative Technology Daniel Skovronsky: Scientist and leader Turning Tobacco into Therapies Britton Chance: Still searching for answers Art Caplan: Penn's renowned ethicist Technology Roundup DuPont's experimental station in Wilmington, Del., sprawls over more than 150 acres, one of the largest nonacademic research campuses in the world. Its roots lie in the 19th c

Metagenomic analysis shows bacteria, Archaea perform several crucial functions in human metabolism

Scientists wage ongoing debate over tiny hominid's origins in Science

Hormone may work with progestin, genetics to raise disease risk

So, just how untrustworthy is the stem-cell literature? Very, according to one of the field's leading lights, David Shaywitz of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He's the author of linkurl:an op-ed piece;http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/11/AR2006011102040.html that was meant to defend the beleaguered field of stem-cell research, despite linkurl:fraudulent papers;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/browse/blogger/13/date/2006-01/ from the lab of Korean researcher Hwang

An entirely appropriate stew of scientific vexation and mortification has accompanied revelations that the incredible Korean achievements in human embryonic cloning and stem cell research are exactly that: incredible. But midst the hand-wringing over failures of peer review--and justified alarm over the future of human embryo clones and stem cell research--an intriguing fact has been obscured. Woo Suk Hwang would still be a rock-star equivalent, and frustrated researchers would still be trying

A piece in this morning's New York Times is reporting that, despite what you've been hearing, the Intelligent Design take on evolution "is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for." As my Mom used to say, "From their lips to God's ear."

The US National Academy of Sciences just issued one of its matchless Big Fat Reports, this one on intellectual property rights, patents, and patenting related to genomics and proteomics. Don't nod off; the report came to a couple of intriguing conclusions that are likely to have a big impact on the life sciences.One surprise is this: the conventional wisdom that US patenting has interfered with or somehow prevented academic research, especially in genomics, is wrong. Not so, the report sai

Yeah, right. That?s the assessment on the just-published hapmap papers from a headline writer at NorthJersey.com, the Web site for several newspapers in the region. And the headline writer is not alone; the story that follows is pretty uncritical too.This reflexive applause?and there were other enthusiastic media reports about this latest analysis of the human genome--generates ridiculous expectations of immediate cures. That?s bad news for scientists who can?t possibly meet them. It?s lou

A nice thing about being a blogging journalist is that it gives me a place to put selected juicy bits and ruminations that there?s no space for in the "real" article. So here is some Supplementary Information on my most recent piece about the Hobbits, those minuscule possible-humans who seem to have survived on the Indonesian island of Flores nearly into the Holocene.Where did the Hobbits (officially designated Homo floresiensis) come from? All the answers so far have big problems. The dis

Many of the headlines suggested that the proposed ethics rules for NIH employees have been relaxed. But that's not quite true, as Ted Agres pointed out here. The rules on stock ownership have loosened, yes. But the most important restriction remains. That's the one forbidding those who labor at NIH to do outside consulting for businesses with a stake in NIH's labor.These decisions are a smart move for NIH director Elias A. Zerhouni. The previous proposed stock ownership rules were needl

I see that the $1000 genome is now an official US government project. NIH's genome institute (NHGRI) just announced this genetic equivalent of going to the moon. The agency is spending $32 million to develop technology aimed explicitly at sequencing genomes of individual patients for $1000, long an informal goal among genome scientists. NHGRI's announcement comes on the heels of (and was perhaps provoked by?) papers describing two new sequencing methods that would bring the cost of the Human

So did President Bush really advocate teaching "intelligent design" in his interview with Texas reporters the other day? Or were his musings about exposing students to different ideas simply a better-than-average example of political weasel-speak? The fact is the remarks gave comfort to his religious political base while disclosing nothing of his actual beliefs about creationism. And they were mushy enough to permit a semi-benign gloss from Bush science adviser John Marburger, a professed