Tomorrow (Dec. 1) is the 20th annual World AIDS Day, several health, advocacy, and research organizations are marking the event.

Several organizations, including The American Medical Student Association and the Global AIDS alliance, are staging a rally outside the White House to demand increased... Click to continue

Japanese researchers who reprogrammed pluripotency into adult human skin cells say they have improved the technique, according to a paper published online today (Nov. 30) in Nature Biotechnology.

Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and his colleagues originally used four transcription factors to induce pluripotency in... Click to continue

The NIH's safety assessment of a controversial Boston University laboratory did not thoroughly develop worst case scenarios or adequately compare safety risks at other proposed sites, finds a National Research Council report.

The council released its 28-page report yesterday (November 29th) after the Massachusetts government commissioned it to review the NIH appraisal, which had... Click to continue

For the next two weeks, if you want news about the World Health Organization (WHO), you may have to consult sources other than The New York Times. According to an Email I just received from the WHO, the organization has suspended the Times from its media distribution list for two weeks after the newspaper broke an embargo on a story on measles deaths. (They've dropped sharply, it turns out.)... Click to continue

A scientist that the University of Washington found guilty of research misconduct is now an employee of the pharmaceutical company, Schering-Plough. In an Email to The Scientist, a company spokesperson, Stephen Galpin, confirmed that Scott Brodie, a former UW researcher, "is a current employee and that we recently became aware of the University of Washington investigation."

The university's investigation into Brodie's work found 15 instances of faked data,... Click to continue

Do you use LinkedIn? What about Friendster? If the answer is "no" to both of these questions, or "what is LinkedIn?", you're probably in the minority. According to a survey by BioInformatics, a marketing research company, 77 percent of life scientists reported using social media -- tools like blogs, podcasts, online communities, Wikis, and networking sites -- to get tips and protocols and to share information.... Click to continue

After spending millions on behalf of a heart surgeon's legal dispute, the University of Minnesota has agreed to shell out another half million honoring his name. John Najarian, a heart surgeon formerly at the center of a major legal dispute between the University of Minnesota and the US government, will lend his name to a newly endowed chair at the university, the Pioneer Press ... Click to continue

Circulating stem cells from bone marrow recognize tissues in distress and stimulate an innate immune response, according to findings published today in Cell. The researchers identified new pathways for these circulating hematopoietic cells, and propose that their travels contribute additional immune cells to tissues experiencing damage or infection.

"Stem cells are much more adventurous in a way than... Click to continue

A former University of Washington researcher has lost a lawsuit against the Seattle Times over the disclosure of a report detailing his research misconduct. Scott Brodie, who studied HIV and herpes, sued the university and the newspaper to prevent the report from becoming public, but a judge decided in the newspaper's favor last week, the Times reported Wednesday (November 28).

According to the... Click to continue

The Indonesian health minister has criticized an American scientist for taking tissue samples from a man suffering from a severe viral infection and exporting them out of the Southeast Asian country.

The minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, said that foreign drug companies could use the samples, taken from the man named Dede, to develop profitable pharmaceuticals without remuneration for Indonesia.

"We are offended because the samples were taken from Dede without our permission," she told British... Click to continue

The tumor suppressor p53 is a crucial player in the successful impregnation of mice, and plays a surprising new role in reproduction, according to a study published today in Nature.

Arnold Levine's group at the University of Medicine and Dentistry, NJ, showed that p53 regulates a cytokine which is the most highly expressed at the onset of embryo implantation -- in fact,... Click to continue

A leading cancer center in Philadelphia appears to be winning a battle with city residents to expand its clinical and research facilities. Fox Chase Cancer Center received the green light from a City Council committee Monday night to go ahead with an $800 million expansion. The Ok has been three years in the making because of objections from people who live in the area. The expansion will take up 19 acres of a park in the city, and residents don't want to see the expansion ... Click to continue

New York Medical College in Valhalla announced yesterday that it will no longer use live dogs in physiology classrooms.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the school has come under fire from community groups and politicians for being the last medical college in the state to use live animals for teaching purposes. Only 11 medical schools around the country still use animals for... Click to continue

Videos are on the rise in science publishing, as we reported in August. On Friday, BioMed Central, sister company to The Scientist, joined the video crew with the launch of its YouTube channel. Unlike efforts such as the video methods journal, JoVE, the 45 videos hosted on the channel so far consist of authors and editors talking... Click to continue

A Surrey, UK, lab thought to be the source of a foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreak in August again ran afoul of biosafety practices last week, when a leaking valve likely released live FMD virus into a contained drainage system.

Merial, a company on the site that makes FMD vaccine, had been banned from using live virus after the August outbreak, but the government restored its license to work with FMD earlier this month when biosafety... Click to continue

The US Food and Drug Administration is allowing a controversial gene therapy trial to resume, after the trial was halted when a 36-year-old participant died in July.

The therapy, developed by Seattle based company Targeted Genetics, seeks to treat inflammatory arthritis, and is delivered via an adeno-associated viral (AAV) vector through an... Click to continue

The Council of the European Union released recommendations on Friday (November 23) encouraging member states to study open access, but open access advocates are calling this a weak approach.

The plan invites member states to support experiments in various open access plans, including a delayed open access plan; support research on how scientific... Click to continue

The fifth-largest academic journal publisher, SAGE, yesterday (November 20) announced an agreement with open access science and medicine publisher, Hindawi, to launch a new series of open access journals, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

Publication will be funded by author charges, using a ... Click to continue

Earlier this week, The Scientist reported on a trial comparing the efficacy of a hypertension drug, nebivolol, in African American and white American patients. It seems that Forest Laboratories, the drug's manufacturer, is making all kinds of comparisons for marketing purposes, and resorting to some questionable practices to do so.

The Wall Street Journal Health Blog... Click to continue

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge threw out a defamation suit today (November 20) filed by a Korean fertility researcher against a scientist who wrote an opinion piece criticizing his work.

Judge James Dunn upheld a motion filed by the defendant, Bruce Flamm of the University of California,Irvine. Flamm's motion claimed that the lawsuit sought to stifle Flamm's criticism of Kwang Yul... Click to continue

We at The Scientist take the time to carefully read each and every press release we're sent, especially those from our elected officials in Washington, D.C. (OK, not really.) Today, we got one from Capitol Hill that still has us scratching our heads.

An oddly worded press release from US Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) alleges that cloning pioneer Ian Wilmut is the biological father of Dolly the sheep.

The release begins by describing Brownback's pleasure with... Click to continue

A professional medical association has threatened to sue a scientific journal over an article accusing the group of pandering to industry.

The article was published in the most recent issue of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health (IJOEH), and it claims that members of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) have "deeply embedded" conflicts... Click to continue

Two studies published today report that human somatic cells can be reprogrammed into a pluripotent state that resembles human embryonic stem cells.

As reported in Cell , Shinya Yamanaka's group from Kyoto University reprogrammed adult human skin cells with four transcription factors to make them display human embryonic stem cell pluripotency. ... Click to continue

For those of you who have dreamed of doing science in Europe but don't know how to find the jobs, MIT is hosting a European Career Fair from February 2nd to the 4th, to introduce job-hunting researchers to European employers from academia and industry.

The fair is free to candidates and open to the public. No registration is required, but posting a resume online gives employers a chance to find promising candidates ahead of time. Sven Loebrich, the... Click to continue

Ian Wilmut, the Scottish scientist who championed somatic-cell nuclear transfer -- most famously with the cloned sheep Dolly -- is choosing a different technique for his future research in stem cells. Wilmut has said he will shift his therapeutic focus from embryonic stem cells to induced pluripotent stem cells. As opposed to nuclear transfer with embryonic stem cells, this technique transfects adult fibroblast cells with transcription factors... Click to continue

On Tuesday (Nov. 13) President Bush signed a defense bill (HR 3222) that ups the 2008 Pentagon budget by $40 billion from last year and increases Pentagon-funded basic research programs by about $81.2 million, according to a spokesperson for the bill's sponsor, Representative John... Click to continue

It's not every year you read "epigenetics" in a nomination for Time's Person of the Year. Duke professor Randy Jirtle sent an email this week to The Scientist's former intern Kelly Chi, letting her know that he had been nominated for Time Magazine's Person of the Year. Jirtle told me over the phone this morning that he was surprised and honored, but wasn't positive why... Click to continue

Laws intended to protect patient privacy are a hindrance to research, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Nearly 70 percent of 1,527 epidemiologists surveyed by the study author said that the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has made research more difficult since its enactment in 2003.

Study author Roberta Ness, from the University of Pittsburgh, told ... Click to continue

Scientists in Oregon claim to have successfully produced rhesus macaque embryos using somatic cell nuclear transfer with egg and skin cells taken from adult monkeys. The Scientist first reported on this back in June when the head of the research team, Shoukhrat Mitalipov, presented the results at a stem cell meeting in Australia.

The paper is published online today (November 14) on... Click to continue

The NSF is looking to save researchers time and effort by creating one standard progress report form for all granting agencies.

Currently each agency has its own interim report form. While agencies like the EPA or the NIH use different language to ask about scientific progress, they generally collect very similar information. The government estimates the new form will take scientists anywhere from 5 to 16 hours to complete, depending on the research project. One rationale for using a single... Click to continue

In July, we ran a story about John Collins, chair of the University of New Hampshire biochemistry department who had been arrested for disorderly conduct. His accuser -- Stacia Sower, dean of research -- subsequently filed for a restraining order against Collins, after he had been banned from campus by the university. You can read more of the details on the incident here .

Last month, I... Click to continue

Several news outlets keep misreporting the public access mandate of a congressional funding bill.

As open access blogger Peter Suber posted last week, Nature News, The Washington Post , the blog Slashdot and several others all reported that a provision in... Click to continue

This morning (November 13), President Bush vetoed a bill aiming to increase 2008 NIH funding by $1.4 billon, from $28.6 billion in 2007 to $30 billion next year. The bill outlined a total of $150.7 billion which includes funding for the departments of Labor and Education. Bush previously threatened to veto the bill, which both houses of Congress... Click to continue

The votes are in, and Bad Astronomy, a site maintained by erstwhile astronomer Phil Plait, has just barely won the 2007 Weblog Award for Best Science Blog. Bad Astronomy beat out Climate Audit, a site that frequently posts entries downplaying human contributions to climate change, by only 0.1% or 45 votes.

The final days of voting were marked by a... Click to continue

Last night (November 8th) the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill aiming to increase NIH funding from $28.6 billion this year to $30 billion next year.

Jon Retzlaff, spokesperson for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), said he expects President Bush to veto the bill when it lands on... Click to continue

The British government has added new requirements for visa applicants, which some say will restrict the flow of talented researchers into the country. All visa applicants from outside of European Economic Area and Switzerland who want to study toward a masters or PhD in fields like biology, botany and veterinary sciences, to name a few, will have to obtain an additional certification called the ... Click to continue

I just got a press release that made me go ''huh?'' That's ''huh,'' question mark. Not ''huh!'', or ''huh,'' exclamation point -- which is what I like from press releases. If you don't see what I mean, answer me this: Does dandruff have a genome?

According to the press release, from Procter & Gamble, it does. So I opened the Email to find out about this sequencing feat. It turns out, as you may have guessed, that scientists at Procter and Gamble Beauty had sequenced the genome of Malassezia... Click to continue

This week, Planktos, a nanotech company with the lofty goal of reducing carbon emissions, finally set sail.

Planktos aims to reduce carbon emissions by releasing huge amounts of iron into the ocean, with the hope that plankton will take up that iron, and absorb more carbon. According to the New York Times, Planktos' 115-foot ship, the WeatherBird II, launched from Florida on... Click to continue

Looks like the 2007 Weblog Award for Best Science Blog has gotten ugly. Along with the usual suspects (last year's winner Pharyngula, among others), an apparent anti-science site focused on denying human-induced climate change has made it onto the ballot.

Climate Audit, a site maintained by... Click to continue

Initial analysis confirmed that an HIV vaccine from a halted trial does not prevent or quell infection, according to data presented today at the HIV Vaccine Trials Network meeting.

According to the press release from Merck, the investigational vaccine (V520) was not shown to be effective at preventing infection or... Click to continue

New Jersey voters nixed Governor Jon Corzine's proposal to borrow $450 million over 10 years to fund stem cell research yesterday (November 6).

Voters defeated the measure by a 53-47 margin.

Corzine introduced the proposal in July, and supporters argued it would serve as an economic boon to the state. California, New York, and Massachusetts have already devoted extensive funds to stem cell research.

According to the New York... Click to continue

Hugh Tilson, an Environmental Protection Agency administrator, is the new editor-in-chief of Environmental Health Perspectives, the flagship journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. As we recently reported, he was on the short list of candidates for the position. Tilson will take up his post at NIEHS later this month and will officially start as EHP?s top editor at the beginning of 2008.

Tilson, a... Click to continue

We've seen (and some have felt) the destruction wrought by the wildfires that recently swept through Southern California: homes destroyed, communities displaced, and study sites burned.

But the National Institutes of Health is also considering the delay that the California fires may cause in grant application submissions from researchers in the area. The NIH issued a... Click to continue

In a talk Monday (Nov 5) that received a standing ovation by several hundred neuroscientists, Newt Gingrich urged scientists to pester lawmakers for greater research funding As the former Speaker of the House put it, "This is a multi-trillion dollar budget. They can always find the money if they want to."

Gingrich tasked audience members to spend at least 15 minutes every six months appealing to lawmakers for funding. "If those who know are... Click to continue

At the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting today (Nov 5), Kathie Olsen laughingly introduced Kwabena Boahen's talk with, "Good luck." Boahen, a Stanford bioengineering professor, went on to describe his ambitious goals of creating affordable supercomputers neuroscientists can use in... Click to continue

In case you missed it, Saturday (Nov 3) marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Wilhelm Reich, who passed away in federal prison. He was serving out a two year sentence for ignoring an injunction obtained by the Food and Drug Administration that outlawed his device that accumulated "orgone energy," which he described as a "universal life energy." (Saturday was also the 50th anniversary of the day when the ... Click to continue

This year's iGEM winners tackled a rather abstract information processing task, but many of the projects had direct health applications. In addition to the bactoblood and HIV project, there was a heart stem cell project, non-antibiotic resistant bacteria, a detection system for infections, and more.

I asked Jeff Way of Merck KGaA in Germany, who was at the Jamboree as a judge, whether pharma and biotech companies were starting to apply... Click to continue

The envelope please: This year's iGEM winner is Peking University.

The team's concept was to create division of labor among bacteria. A group of bacteria can respond to stimuli by adapting to different conditions. But what if the group could split into two, with each population able to behave differently in the same environment? So the team engineered two different systems, which controlled the spatial and temporal dimensions of... Click to continue

After yesterday's intensive day of presentations, some in the iGEM crowd this morning look a little worse for wear. Several are sporting a square orange and black stamp on their cheeks, the stamp of the UCSF all-high school team. It got a little crazy at the pub last night, one of the organizers told me. (I can only guess that it was the legal-aged mentors, and not the high school students, who stayed out late stamping faces.)

The UCSF team, whose project focused on intercellular organelles,... Click to continue

It's like a dorm party... but not. It's getting close to 9, the techno is blasting, a leftover spread of Mediterranean food goes dry on a long table, and hundreds of undergrads stand around talking in groups. Many of them are still standing by their posters -- their last chance to show off their work before the judges choose the winners tomorrow morning.

The team from last year's winning institution, the University of Ljubljana in... Click to continue

Some of you may have read a recent New Yorker expose adulterated olive oil -- in my family of cooks, it caused quite a panic. Well, one of the iGEM teams just presented a solution, and appropriately, it's the team from Naples, Italy.

The problem, they say, is that currently all the quality control methods for olive oil are done by large expensive machines. Technically, for an olive oil to be... Click to continue

A guy named Austin was wandering the halls of MIT's Stata Center this afternoon with a plasma bag. Its contents are a little darker and a little grayer than you'd expect blood to be - maybe the color of well-peppered Bloody Mary mix. It's also a little thinner. "We're having problems with the expression level of the hemoglobin," Austin told me when I poked at the bag.

Austin Day is the brains behind the bactoblood project - bacterially produced hemoglobin - brought by the UC Berkeley team. I... Click to continue

Covering iGEM is hard: choosing presentations based on what sounds cool won?t get you very far, because almost everything sounds cool. Who would say no to a microbial mass production system for blood (Berkeley) or RNAi components strung together to create a way to cure cancer (Princeton)? But with most of the projects so conceptually ambitious, one of the judges told me, sifting through them really requires squaring what was originally planned with what got accomplished.

Ten or so groups have... Click to continue

For most of the day today, the iGEM teams are breaking up into groups in which students present their projects. The range of projects is pretty dizzying. They are loosely divided into five tracks - energy, information processing, basic foundational projects, health and environment.

I started out with a team called the Missouri Miners, from the University of Missouri, Rolla, who showed off two projects they had attempted - a biological timer, which fluoresces for a set amount of time when a... Click to continue

I arrived in Cambridge tonight and headed out to a pub near MIT to find the iGEM crew, who were supposed to meet up for an informal get-together before the Jamboree, iGEM's international synthetic biology contest, starts tomorrow (Nov. 3). After peeking into a few bars I spotted a small group of young people wearing green t-shirts decorated with biotech company names and O-H molecules.... Click to continue

Last night (Nov 1), Princeton president Shirley Tilghman elicited an audible response from an audience at the Chemical Heritage Foundation when she announced that the average age at which investigators receive their first NIH grant has climbed to 42.9 years. We all duly murmured astonishingly, as she called this the "LaGuardia effect" -- as in, scientists are spending more time circling in the air before they can land. (This... Click to continue

A New Jersey court has ruled that an animal rights group cannot file a civil lawsuit against Huntingdon Life Sciences, a contract research organization in the U.S. and U.K. that has long been the target of militant animal rights group.

Wednesday (Oct 31) a three-judge panel in the Appellate Division threw out a lawsuit filed by the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals charging Huntingdon with animal cruelty and... Click to continue

This weekend, 59 teams of undergraduates will be descending on Cambridge, Mass., for the 4th annual International Genetically Engineered Machines competition, aka the iGEM Jamoboree. I'm heading up there tomorrow to blog the event live.

The event is a synthetic biology contest that grew out of a short course held at MIT in 2003. Students - mostly undergrads - spend the summer designing and building genetic machines from a standard set of... Click to continue

Washoe, a primate pioneer in the study of non-human language acquisition, died Tuesday night (October 30th) of natural causes at her home on the campus of Central Washington University. She was 42 years old.

The chimp was one of the first to learn American Sign Language when, in 1966, University of Nevada researchers Allen and Beatrix Gardner began teaching Washoe to sign. Washoe, who was named after the Nevada county where she lived with the Gardeners until 1970, would eventually acquire a... Click to continue