A couple of months ago I compared the ineptitude of the Philadelphia Phillies with the pharma industry.

Well, good news! The Phillies have turned things around. Having picked up the 10,000th loss of their history on 15 July, they today won the National League East title and head to the playoffs for the first time in 14 years.

We can all take inspiration from this. I can. The pharmaceutical industry can. There's a lot of talent in the... Click to continue

A report released today by the Department of Health and Human Services reveals that the FDA is woefully lax in monitoring clinical trials research, according to the New York Times.



The article reports that agency officials don't know how many clinical trials are going, and that just 200... Click to continue

Environmental Health Perspectives, a leading public health journal published by NIH's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, will have a new editor-in-chief soon. An NIEHS spokesperson Emailed the list of finalists for the position to The Scientist. The three finalists, all of them government employees, are:

Mike Cunningham - Toxicologist, National Toxicology Program,... Click to continue

Stephen Pincock reports:



Leszek Borysiewicz , deputy rector of Imperial College London, was officially named today (September 28) as the next chief executive of Britain's troubled Medical Research Council, replacing Colin Blakemore who steps down this month.

Borysiewicz is best known for his work on oncogenic viruses, including... Click to continue

Scientists say they were duped into agreeing to interviews for an upcoming movie promoting intelligent design. In a New York Times article today, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says he would not have agreed to appear in the movie had he known what it was about, while anthropologist Eugenie Scott claims she was also misled.... Click to continue

Samuel Wilson, acting director of NIH's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said today that he intends to restore cuts to NIEHS programs that focus on disease prevention, long-term epidemiological research, education and outreach. His comments came at a congressional hearing held by the House Subcommittee on Domestic Policy. ... Click to continue

Merck halted its Phase IIb clinical trials of an HIV vaccine last week, after data showed a lack of efficacy. According to a news release from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), "the vaccine cannot be shown in this trial to prevent HIV infection or affect the course of the disease in those who become infected with HIV."

This is the same vaccine The Scientist ... Click to continue

The plant barcoding group meeting here at the end of the 2nd International Barcode of Life Conference in Taipei was as addled with confusion and obfuscation as I had heard it might be. In supreme contrast to animal barcoding working groups (like FishBOL), that are humming along identifying species and thinking about how to attract funding agencies and end users, the plant working group seems to be straining under the... Click to continue

An interesting news release from the NIH landed in my inbox Tuesday (September 18). The headline said the agency "Announces Plan to Implement President's Stem Cell Executive Order." I know, I know -- the executive order came six years ago. But apparently, now the agency is taking new steps -- for instance, asking for grant applications to study non-embryonic sources... Click to continue

A University of Wisconsin researcher working with the Ebola virus operated his lab under lower biosafety standards than are required for working with the deadly pathogen, according to the Sunshine Project, an Austin-based biosafety watchdog group.

A press release posted on the group's Web site and an AP report filed late last night state that the lab,... Click to continue

Recent biosafety breaches have occurred at three University of Texas schools, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports . At UT Austin, officials failed to report 10 out of 13 incidents that took place over the last seven years. Incidents at the other two schools both took place in April: Workers at the UT Health Sciences Center in Houston were exposed to anthrax, and at UT San Antonio to... Click to continue

Played a rousing game of table tennis tonight. And by "rousing game" I mean to say that I was soundly drubbed by a Taiwanese gentleman (his name escapes me) who appears to be some sort of national champion. Even my scorching serves were parried with effortless flicks of his supple wrist.

Though my game may have been tough, it was nothing compared to the game that ... Click to continue

I spent Monday listening to ichthyologists and fisheries biologists discuss their efforts to barcode the planet?s fish species (an initiative called the Fish barcode of life, or FishBOL) . During the FishBOL session, researchers discussed the issue of seafood consumer fraud, where puffer fish might be mislabeled as monk fish or some lesser... Click to continue

A news story in this week's Nature reports on problems with research that in the last quarter-century has spawned a controversial but influential theory in neurophysiology. According to the theory, neurotransmitter is released at the synapse in discrete vesicles, each containing approximately equal amounts of neurotransmitter, and with each synaptic bouton... Click to continue

After a contentious search, the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine on Friday named Australian stem cell research Alan Trounson as the new president of the institute.

Trounson, director of the immunology and stem cell laboratories at Monash University, is a long-time expert in IVF and stem cell research and founder of the Australian Stem Cell Center. He has also started a handful of companies to commercialize stem cell research... Click to continue

Spent the night talking human disease vectors with Daniel Boakye, a Ghanaian biologist (I call him a mosquito man). I'm in Taipei, Taiwan attending the 2nd International Barcode of Life Conference.

What initially attracted me to the concept of barcoding is the sheer magnitude of taxonomic ignorance under which all biologists operate. Science has identified only about 1.8 million of the estimated 10 million species of plant, animal,... Click to continue

Discovery of dendritic cells, invention of prosthetic heart valves and programs in AIDS treatment and biodefense are honored

Ralph Steinman of the Rockefeller University in New York will receive the 2007 Albert Lasker Award for Outstanding Basic Medical Research for his discovery of dendritic cells and his work in elucidating their function as sentinels of the immune system, the ... Click to continue

Targeted Genetics officials anticipate that the cause of death of a subject in their gene therapy clinical trial in July will be disseminated histoplasmosis -- a fungal infection -- and not connected to the trial drug, H. Stewart Parker, CEO of Targeted Genetics, told The Scientist.

The finding will be announced at the Monday (September 17) National Institutes of Health Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee meeting.

"We believe strongly that it's very unlikely that this drug had anything to do... Click to continue

According to a news report in today's Nature, Leszek Borysiewicz, a vaccinologist and deputy rector at Imperial College London, has been selected to become the chief executive of the UK Medical Research Council. Colin Blakemore, who has held the post since 2003, plans to step down at the end of this month. The changeover comes amidst a period of turbulence at... Click to continue

The Association of American Publishers' campaign against open access has angered one member of an AAP division so much that he has resigned, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

James D. Jordan, president and director of Columbia University Press, told The Chronicle yesterday that he had resigned from the Executive Council of the AAP's... Click to continue

In July, The Scientist reported on plans for a collaboration between NASA and NIH to conduct life science experiments aboard the International Space Station. Those plans, it seems, are taking off, with the two agencies holding a public signing at the Capitol tomorrow (Sept. 12) of a memorandum sealing the deal.

The release from NIH does not specify projects for the... Click to continue

The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) on Friday released the findings of its investigation on the source of last month's foot and mouth disease outbreak that had been traced to three neighboring labs in Pirbright, Surrey, which worked with the virus.

As we reported at the time, original speculations faulted the site's drainage system, which, overwhelmed by heavy rains, could... Click to continue

South Korean universities are apparently cracking down on research fraud following the admission by several high-profile Korean scientists (led by Woo Suk Hwang at Seoul National University) that they fabricated findings that they derived embryonic stem cells from cloned human embryos.

According to The Korean Times, 96 public and private... Click to continue

The New York Times reports today that scientific and medical publisher Reed-Elsevier, which publishes 400 journals, has introduced ''a Web portal, ... Click to continue

The University of New Hampshire sent a letter Friday (September 7) to the banned chair of the biochemistry and molecular biology department, saying that he can be reinstated but no longer as the chair of the department, a faculty member in the department just informed The Scientist.

As I reported in July, John Collins, who has been chair of the department for two years, was banned from campus on June 29, a day after kicking a trash can,... Click to continue

The US Fish and Wildlife Service has released a draft recovery plan for the endangered Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit, a subject I wrote about in our June issue. The tiny rabbits -- on average, adults weigh just 400 grams and are only 25 centimeters long -- have been on the Federal endangered species list since 2001. That year, officials were only able to scoop up 30 of them when they searched throughout their native habitat of the Great... Click to continue

The House of Representatives this afternoon approved a bill outlining major changes to the patent process. Attempts at legislation reforming the system have been brewing for about five years, but biotech and pharma have vociferously protested some of the proposed changes. Chief among them is its proposal to reduce damages that can be demanded in infringement... Click to continue

A bit of good news for California's stem cell researchers who have watched as the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine has weathered some changes lately: California officials announced this week that $250 million in taxable general obligation bonds will be sold on September 27 with the proceeds going to CIRM, the regulatory body that oversees the state's stem cell... Click to continue

As Federal agencies and farmers call for removing the gray wolf from the US endangered species list, a member of a species appears to have killed a calf in rural Stevens County, Washington. According to a US Fish and Wildlife Service press release, the kill ''appears to be the first confirmed wolf depredation on livestock in Washington State.''

The kill, which happened sometime... Click to continue

Researchers have identified a virus that may be at least partially to blame for the dramatic disappearances of some honeybees in the United States recently. In a study published online today in Science, scientists report that they've found Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) in many of the US bee colonies that have been suffering from ... Click to continue

The National Postdoctoral Association is only four years old, but is already weighing in on serious issues in science. Last week, I received a white paper from the NPA suggesting the US make changes to visa requirements for foreign-born postdocs.

The... Click to continue

BioMed Central (a sister company of The Scientist) announced today that Microsoft will be sponsoring BMC's annual research awards -- funding two $5000 prizes for research of major significance published in any of BMC's open access journals in 2007.

Lee Dirks, the director of scholarly communication for Microsoft Research (a research branch of Microsoft that also collaborates with colleges and universities) said in the press release: "We... Click to continue

An outbreak investigation of a Maine poultry vaccine facility concluded last week that a spill infected about a third of the facility's 74 employees with salmonella poisoning, according to a notice on ProMED-mail, an information service of the International Society for Infectious Diseases.

The notice, also... Click to continue

J. Craig Venter, famed geneticist (and member of The Scientist's editorial board ) who this summer made headlines with the development of a technique for creating a synthetic bacterial cell, once again hit the news with today's publication of his own genome in... Click to continue