July 2005

A clutch of research misconduct stories has hit the news in recent weeks.

wrote a case note on the first-ever biotech patent case, which involved a genetically engineered bacterium that consumed oil spills.

Re: "How to fix peer review."1 Your solution would certainly change the system, although I wonder if it might not exacerbate the existence of "camps" or "cliques" within each discipline. All one would need to do is get like-minded reviewers and then find a like-minded review editor at a journal.Michael Crichton suggested in State of Fear that two or three environmental research grants should be given to separate research groups to examine the same thing simultaneously – hopefully without e

Since when is moral and ethical conduct required to be efficient and helpful?

With reference to "Red in tooth and claw, and football shirts," the team with the most championships in any sport is the New York Yankees, and they wear pin-stripes.

A new "Manhattan Project" to combat bioterrorism has been proposed by US Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and many others.

Earlier this year, Dorota Tataruch spent two months lying around in bed with her feet up, 24 hours a day, all in the name of science.

Bryan Leonard, a PhD candidate in science education at Ohio State University (OSU), was scheduled to defend his thesis, which pits evolutionary science against intelligent design, on June 6.

late last month, but it is feeling less than privileged after the controversy surrounding the showing.

A global effort is underway to determine whether embryonic stem cells can be used to treat a variety of conditions, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and Parkinson disease.

It started as a matter of guilt by association.

Genetic elements that jump around the genome can influence brain circuitry, according to US researchers.

gene is involved in regulating the brain's dopaminergic reward pathway.

US researchers have evidence that damage to mammalian male fertility caused by transient exposure of embryos to endocrine-disrupting environmental toxins can be passed down to subsequent generations.1 "The endocrine disruptors appear to have altered the remethylation and permanently reprogrammed the germ line, that is, sperm," explains study coauthor Michael Skinner of Washington State University in Pullman.Skinner and colleagues exposed female rats in mid gestation to high doses of two endocrin

David Profitt was a little confused when a developmental biologist walked into his engineering shop and asked if Profitt could make an automated embryo sorter using a Fax machine.

Everyone knows that the first genome sequencing projects took years of work and represent the combined product of tens of thousands of individual fragments.

Atlantic salmon seems an unlikely source of inspiration for a research gadget.

Applied Biosystems of Foster City, Calif., has released a MALDI-TOF/TOF instrument that, according to the company, offers a 10-fold increase in sensitivity over current models.

To map most of the genetic variation in the human genome, scientists need to look at several hundred thousand single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) per individual.

The new CEO of a small private biotechnology company had failed to keep the board up-to-date on what was going on inside the company.

Celera Genomics made hundreds of millions of dollars by selling access to its proprietary genome sequence information.

European biotech companies are more likely than their American counterparts to fail at the 3- to 5-year stage, according to a UK-based think tank.

The University of Oxford is considering what to do about replacing the director of a high-profile center for studying ancient DNA, who resigned in the wake of an investigation into his conduct, according to a spokesperson.

Scientific academies from the world's leading nations issued an unprecedented joint statement in June urging the leaders of their countries to commit to taking prompt action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Craig Thompson didn't set out to be a spokesman for the importance of bioenergetics in determining cell fate.