A company developing therapeutics using RNA interference (RNAi) today (February 29) announced 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... Click to continue

Developing policies on conflicts regarding financial interests held by US medical colleges, teaching hospitals and research institutions has proven a much thornier task than targeting conflicts among individual faculty members.

Institutions "are struggling with determining how best to deal with these kinds of institutional conflicts," David Korn, point man on conflicts of interest at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), told The Scientist. "The uptake of those policies has... Click to continue

Big tobacco is pulling its money out of academic research -- kind of. Tobacco company Philip Morris told researchers in September of last year that it was ending its controversial extramural research program, Science reported today. But some funding from the company remains.

The news of the ended sponsorship spread this month when University of California President Robert Dynes noted in a February 5 letter to the UC... Click to continue

Two national academic associations have called on US academic institutions to develop and implement rules that manage institution-wide conflicts of interest and refine rules that deal with conflicts among faculty of medical schools, teaching hospitals, and research universities.

The report, issued today (Feb. 28) by the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American... Click to continue

Massachusetts' $1 billion life sciences bill is inching closer to approval. A preliminary vote yesterday in the House of Representatives supported the measure, which is being debated further today, according to the House clerk's office.

The bill, which is expected to pass in both the House and the Senate, would provide $500 million toward building facilities and buying equipment, and $250 million would go towards creating tax benefits... Click to continue

One of three stem cell patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) is valid, according to a non-final ruling issued on Monday by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The three WARF patents have been under examination by the USPTO, beginning in October, 2006, when challenges were brought by the Public Patent Foundation in New York and the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) in Los Angeles. ... Click to continue

In the first ever functional imaging study of the communicating chimpanzee brain, researchers have found that brain function in grunting and gesturing chimpanzees closely parallels that in actively communicating humans, according to a paper published online today in Current Biology.

"A set of brain areas were active in the chimps that have also been reported to be active when humans are communicating,"... Click to continue

A California biotech announced at the Stem Cell Summit in New York City on Tuesday that they have successfully reprogrammed human skin, kidney, and retina cells to a stem-cell-like state without using potentially cancer-causing retroviruses. But experts say their claims are impossible to evaluate since the work has not been peer-reviewed. The company researchers did not say these new cells produced teratomas -- the sign that cells are truly pluripotent.

The company, PrimeGen Biotech based in... Click to continue

The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) cancer researcher whose home was invaded last Sunday, has commented on the attack to the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

The researcher, who remains unnamed for security purposes, told the Sentinel that her family was celebrating the birthday of one of her two small children in the front of the house Sunday afternoon, when... Click to continue

Just what is it about autism that produces the three hallmark behaviors of social impairment, language difficulties, and rigidity, or an "insistence on sameness'? Scientists at this year's Keystone meeting on the pathophysiology of autism in Santa Fe, NM, are looking for clues from a molecule we hear an awful lot about in discussions of non-autistic brain activity: Serotonin.

It turns out that a significant number of children with autism -- up to 30% -- have elevated levels of... Click to continue

Attackers broke into the home of a University of California, Santa Cruz scientist who uses animals to study breast cancer and neurological disorders, on Sunday (Feb. 24), according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

Another California animal researcher - UCLA neurologist, Edythe London - has been the target of vandalism recently, with an animal rights group claiming responsibility for... Click to continue

This morning's session at the Keystone meeting on the pathophysiology of autism in Santa Fe, New Mexico, focused on the disorder's link to Fragile X syndrome. Like autism, Fragile X is associated with behaviors such as high social anxiety, gaze avoidance, and speech problems. A significant number of people with Fragile X - estimates range wildly from 5 to 60% - have autism, but a smaller number of ... Click to continue

Autoimmune diseases may not stem from defects in the immune system alone. Rather, developmental genetic abnormalities in organ tissues may make those organs more susceptible to autoimmune disorders, according to a paper published online today in Immunology and Cell Biology.

"The former explanations of how these [autoimmune] diseases occur weren't... Click to continue

More questions have come up over the new National Institutes of Health public access mandate and its fairness to journal publishers. Two weeks ago Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter sent a letter to NIH director Elias Zerhouni questioning whether the NIH had adequately discussed the mandate with journal publishers before implementing it.

Specter is a ranking member of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees NIH funding.

The NIH public access mandate was passed with the congressional... Click to continue

It's a small Keystone meeting on the pathophysiology of autistic syndromes here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but you can feel the excitement among the 100 or so attendees, as they muddle their way through early data in this growing area of research. There are only nine posters being presented today -- but, according to co-host Pat Levitt from the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, all are important. This is in contrast to the last Keystone I attended on stem cell biology in Whistler, British Columbia, in... Click to continue

Almost one year after the Encyclopedia of Life announced its plan to construct a comprehensive, online catalog of biodiversity, the website will unveil its first 30,000 species pages tomorrow (Feb. 26).

With $50 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and other funders, and scientific support from a gaggle of universities and museums, the Encyclopedia of Life began digitizing and organizing scientific... Click to continue

The sanctity of peer review is under scrutiny again.

Last month Pfizer filed a motion in federal court to force the New England Journal of Medicine to turn over confidential peer review documents for two of their products, Celebrex and Bextra. The company said they need the reviews to help defend themselves in lawsuits involving the two painkillers. But Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science, writes in an... Click to continue

Scientific and medical publisher Wiley-Blackwell announced this week (February 20) that they will work with the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), the first online video methods journal, to add methods videos to the journal Current Protocols.

Rumors of JoVE's deal with Wiley-Blackwell and other mainstream science publishers have been circulating in the blogosphere since late... Click to continue

In an intriguing election-year twist, James Watson, the renowned biologist who made headlines last October when he told the Sunday Times that people of African descent were less intelligent than white people, has supported a person of African descent for President of the United States, according to the... Click to continue

A California judge issued a temporary restraining order yesterday (Feb. 21) against three underground animal rights groups and five individuals associated with these groups to prevent them from harassing and threatening UCLA scientists who conduct experiments with animals, according to the university. The restraining order prohibits members of the UCLA... Click to continue

For 25 years, a university town in Illinois has become insect central for day thanks to entomologist May Berenbaum's Insect Fear Film Festival at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The festival - which will celebrate its 25th year tomorrow (Feb. 23) - usually features a few campy films starring insects (more Mothra, less ... Click to continue

NIH needs to make life easier for everyone involved in the peer review process - a not surprising conclusion of the agency's peer review working group, which it announced today (February 21) after reviewing thousands of suggestions from stakeholders.

Broadly, the recommendations include:

-Reduce the administrative burden of applicants, reviewers and NIH staff: Give applicants unambiguous feedback about whether to resubmit or develop a new idea (including the option "NRR'- not recommended for... Click to continue

Science and medical publishing giant Reed Elsevier has announced that is putting Reed Business Information (RBI), the largest business-to-business publisher in the US, up on the auction block. The sale will include New Scientist.

Although Reed Elsevier also owns The Lancet and Cell, among other journals, as well as science and medical textbooks, none of those titles are for sale.

RBI also publishes Variety and other... Click to continue

DNA damage resets the circadian clock in mammals, researchers report in this week's online issue of Current Biology.

Previous studies have shown that DNA damage affects circadian cycles in the fungus Neospora. Here, Malgorzata Oklejewicz at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands and colleagues demonstrated the effect not only in mammalian cell lines, but also in mice in vivo. "This interaction between DNA damage... Click to continue

In response to several recent attacks on University of California, Los Angeles researchers, the school is suing three animal rights groups and several people associated with the groups.

"Enough is enough," UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said in a university press release. "We're not willing to wait until somebody is injured before taking legal... Click to continue

Have you ever wondered how your day-to-day work in the lab can contribute to health and science efforts in the developing world? The New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) is inviting scientists to offer up their skills and resources toward an effort called "Scientists Without Borders," an online portal that will go live this spring.

Not only will researchers be able to offer their skills and expertise, they can also set up collaborations and request patient samples or specimens from... Click to continue

Texas A&M University will pay an unprecedented $1 million in fines for more than a dozen safety violations in its research program on bioterrorism agents, the university announced today (February 20).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suspended the university's bioterrorism research efforts in July, 2007, after an inspection prompted by the biosafety watchdog group, the ... Click to continue

Last night, I and other attendees of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships 25th Anniversary Symposium in Boston were introduced to an interesting idea, courtesy of Clive Thompson, science writer extraordinaire for Wired and other outlets: Write blogs to get ideas.

It's a basic concept. Thompson -- a surprisingly dapper (for a writer), well-coiffed, quick-talking presenter -- explained that he constantly feeds his blog,... Click to continue

Who should the next US president appoint as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy?

That and more than 50 other science-related positions in the executive branch will more than likely be up for grabs come next January.

The scientific community has already called for a science debate by presidential candidates. But policy experts at this weekend's meeting of the... Click to continue

The US Food and Drug Administration admitted yesterday that it never inspected a Chinese facility supplying the active ingredient in heparin, a widely used blood thinner recently implicated in more than 350 adverse reactions and four deaths in US patients. The oversight resulted from a case of mistaken identity, according to a... Click to continue

Geneticist and genetic engineering pioneer Ray Wu died on February 10 of cardiac arrest. He was 79.

In 1970, Wu developed a new location-specific primer-extension technique that became the first method of sequencing DNA. In the following decade, Frederick Sanger adapted the approach for faster sequencing, and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the work in 1980.

Wu's lab also devised other approaches that were used to analyze genetic sequences and to construct vectors for cloning... Click to continue

Another microbicide to prevent HIV transmission has been deemed ineffective. The Population Council, a nonprofit research organization, which has been developing the microbicide Carraguard, announced today that phase III clinical results show it ineffective in preventing HIV transmission.

The trial, which ended in March of last year, involved 6,202 women and cost around $40... Click to continue

A South Korean biotech company has announced it will, for the first time ever, commercially clone a pet dog, according to reports coming out of the country.

RNL Bio said last week that it received an order from Californian Bernann McKunney, to clone her deceased pet pitbull, Booger, to the tune of $150,000. Booger died in 2005, but not before McKinney had tissue from his ear preserved.

The Korean company told the... Click to continue

The images you see in [Creature, a new book of photographs by Andrew Zuckerman] are the product of a journey of discovery and of learning how to connect with the soul and essence of all creatures. In animals, as in humans, the eye connects the creature to the outside world and centers our focus to see deeper into the heart and very nature of the creature. The goal of these images is to intensify the viewer's connection to the animals and inspire new perspectives on the familiar and... Click to continue

A team of Japanese researchers has changed epithelial cells from the livers and stomachs of adult mice into pluripotent cells that resemble embryonic stem cells, according to a paper in this week's Science.

In 2006, the Kyoto University team, led by Shinya Yamanaka, used retroviruses to transfect adult mouse fibroblasts and embryonic cells with four transcription factors,... Click to continue

Can plants suffer from autoimmunity? The term is generally reserved for organisms with an adaptive immune system, but one of the speakers last night at the Keystone meeting on plant signaling and immunity described a scenario that she called "the plant world version of autoimmunity."

Farmers as well as plant researchers have long known that every once in a while, when two healthy plants are crossbred, the offspring (called F1) is inexplicably sickly - maybe its leaves are necrotic, or maybe... Click to continue

Some organisms adopt an unusual strategy to make sure the genetic code is translated accurately, according to study that will be published tomorrow in Molecular Cell. These findings suggest that ancient organisms may have used different techniques to maintain accuracy in translation before settling on the predominant strategy.

In most organisms, the start of translation is coded by the sequence AUG. This sequence triggers the binding of tRNA that carries... Click to continue

A company that aimed to reduce global warming by creating blooms of carbon dioxide-absorbing phytoplankton in the ocean has sunk, according to the New York Times.

The company, Planktos, posted a statement on its Web site yesterday (February 13) saying that it had decided to "indefinitely postpone its ocean fertilization efforts" as a result of a "highly... Click to continue

Last night's session (February 12) on hormones networks at the joint Keystone meeting on plant signaling and immunity in Keystone, Co, began with Charlie Chaplin. Specifically, the audience was treated to a video clip of the scene in Modern Times where Chaplin, a worker on a factory assembly line, becomes curious about the gears that drive the machinery, and to the horror of other workers, dives onto the assembly line and down the chute to explore.

It was a clear metaphor for what's... Click to continue

All papers by Harvard scholars accepted for publication as of today will be freely available to the public. The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously passed a motion last night (February 12) that requires all arts and sciences faculty articles to be made publicly available.

Harvard is the first US university to mandate open access to its faculty publications, Peter Suber, open access advocate, wrote on his... Click to continue

Most US medical schools excel at keeping an eye on conflicts of interest among their faculty. But they're not so good at keeping an eye on themselves, according to a study out today.

In a 2006 survey of the nation's 125 accredited allopathic medical school deans, only 38 percent of survey respondents said that they had adopted institutional conflict of interest policies applicable to their institution's own financial ties. In contrast,... Click to continue

What if our textbooks aren't quite correct, and the plant cell wall isn't just the purely structural organ it's thought to be? That's the theory Shauna Somerville of Stanford's Carnegie Institution described yesterday (February 11) in her talk at the Keystone joint meeting on plant signaling and innate immunity in Keystone, Co.

Somerville studies powdery mildew, a fungal disease that infects as many as 9,000 different... Click to continue

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) director David Schwartz, who officially resigned from the agency last Friday, told The Scientist that NIEHS "could do better" and will "be more successful" under new leadership.

Schwartz also said that the environmental health community misunderstood his goals as director of NIEHS. "There was a belief that I was creating a clinical institute," he said, "when I had no... Click to continue

A geneticist was sentenced to one year of unsupervised release (no jail time) and a $500 fine for supplying bacteria to an artist, according to the Buffalo News, bringing to an end a well-publicized case that began more than three years ago.

Robert Ferrell, based at the University of Pittsburgh, pled guilty in October to a misdemeanor, after he supplied Steven Kurtz with... Click to continue

After a tumultuous three-year stint, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) director David Schwartz officially stepped down on Friday (Feb. 8).

During his time as NIEHS director, Schwartz's leadership was often questioned. Scientists and lawmakers criticized Schwartz in 2005 when he pushed for privatizing the institute's journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, and last August more than 100 NIEHS researchers ... Click to continue

Frank Dixon, a Lasker winner and founder of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., died on Friday (February 8) of heart failure. He was 87 years old.

Dixon was best known for his work showing that immunologic responses can cause harm, including kidney and cardiovascular diseases, among others. That research earned him the 1975 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.

Dixon's colleagues remembered him as a "no-nonsense," focused scientist. Dixon was a "very severe, very... Click to continue

NIH-funded postdocs won't be getting a raise this year. The agency announced last week that it would freeze National Research Service Award (NRSA) stipends for postdocs and trainees in 2008.

Because the NIH froze NRSA funding last year also, first-year postdocs will get $36,996 in stipends, the same they received in 2006. These budget amounts fall short of the 2001... Click to continue

The Sunshine Project, a Texas-based group that has monitored safety and oversight issues in research on bioterror agents, suspended operations on February 1, according to the group's Web site.

Ed Hammond, who heads the non-profit operation and whom I've spoken with a handful of times, has gained a reputation as something of a pitbull tearing on the pantleg of the US's growing biodefense research program. One of the group's main strategies has been... Click to continue

It was the days before the two competing groups of researchers published the first draft of the human genome (released in February, 2001), and Don Kennedy was stressed out. As editor of Science, he was trying to get both groups to publish simultaneously, and in his journal. In the end, he got his first wish, but not his second.

"I told somebody that if we had succeeded in that venture it would have made an issue of Science bigger than the Christmas issue of Vogue,"... Click to continue

In a time when all coral news is bad news, a new study that will be published online Saturday in Geophysical Research Letters (read the press release here) suggests that areas of open ocean can act as a natural thermostat, protecting corals from bleaching by preventing surface water temperature from going up.

(You can read more about coral bleaching and about the other effects of global warming on the biome in our ... Click to continue

Researchers have identified a new strategy for circumventing the safety problems that have plagued gene therapy according to a study published online in Cell today.

The study reports that adenovirus, a common vector for delivering gene therapy, transfects liver cells by a different mechanism than previously thought. That mechanism offers a new target... Click to continue

The Wellcome Trust, the UK's largest independent funder of biomedical research, announced yesterday (Feb 5) that it will increase its spending from about £2.5 billion (roughly 4.9 billion USD) over the last five years to about £4 billion (roughly 7.8 billion USD) over the next five years.

The trust said that it will put more money towards large-scale genetic studies, neuroscience research, and new technologies and facilities... Click to continue

Alzheimer's disease researchers have long tried to address a key question: Do amyloid plaques cause the disease, or do other disease mechanisms come first? A new study published today (February 6) in Nature reports that plaques form immediately before neurite damage, suggesting that amyloids do... Click to continue

A fire was set at the home of a University of California, Los Angeles, neuroscientist targeted by animal rights activists in the past.

The fire was caused by a device left on the house's front porch on Tuesday (Feb. 5), FBI officials told the Los Angeles Times. No one was home at the time the device ignited, and no one was hurt in the fire. UCLA addiction researcher Edythe London owns the house, which was... Click to continue

As a young lab leader at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s, Joshua Lederberg and his first wife Esther, a microbiologist, would invite lab members to their home once a week to discuss significant recent advances in microbial genetics. Lederberg would sit silently on the floor, listening, recalled Gaylen Bradley, who was a postdoc in Lederberg's lab between 1954 and 1956.

"Josh would listen, and then at the end make some sort of... Click to continue

In a story that probably hit close to home to anyone who ever clicked on the wrong email recipient in Outlook, it turns out that attorneys for Lilly sent confidential documents to a New York Times reporter named Alex Berenson instead of an attorney named Bradford Berenson.

Katherine Eban, who has written for us about biosecurity, ... Click to continue

The less-than-reputable entrepreneur at the helm of a company peddling hypo-allergenic cats is under scrutiny again -- this time for fraudulent "designer cats." But now he's taking the offensive by making allegations against journalists who have covered his company.

In January of last year, The Scientist staff writer Kerry Grens investigated a company called Allerca that claimed to have created the world's first hypoallergenic cat. Grens uncovered a string of shady dealings and... Click to continue

In response to a petition from researchers, the UK government has backed down on restrictions to stem cell research proposed in a new bill.

The revision of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, currently being debated in Parliament, stipulates that tissue donors must give explicit consent for use of their cells in embryonic stem cell research.

But objections from scientists, including a... Click to continue

Free radicals are often blamed for causing cellular damage that promotes aging. A new study published today in Cell Metabolism suggests that they don't wreak cellular havoc, but plug into specific signaling pathways involved in aging.

Gaelle Laurent at the Curie Institute in Paris and colleagues created knockout mice missing gene that protects cells... Click to continue

Still undecided about who to vote for in today's Super Tuesday election? Here's another source from Research!America and its partners called "Your Candidates-Your Health."

The site, which has already polled the public and elected representatives about their attitudes towards research and healthcare, has now invited every presidential candidate to weigh in on key... Click to continue

Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist who shaped the field of bacterial genetics, and served as chair of The Scientist's advisory board since 1986, died on Saturday (February 2). He was 82.

Lederberg shared a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1958 for the discovery that certain strains of bacteria reproduce by mating, thereby exchanging their genetic material. This overturned the... Click to continue

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, so who are you going to vote for?

Yesterday, Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, told Wired that he plans to cast his ballot for Senator Barack Obama on Tuesday, February 5. Obama represents "a new kind of leader, one without ties to a divisive past and one who portrays through his personal history a global perspective that is both crucial... Click to continue

In his FY 2009 budget, released this morning, President George W. Bush calls to freeze the National Institutes of Health's budget at last year's level of about $29 billion while shaving more than $370 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2008 budget.

The president's budget also suggests decreasing research funding at the US Department of Agriculture by more... Click to continue

The first keynote presentation of this week's Keystone meeting on autoimmunity and transplantation tolerance ended in a rather surprising way -- the speaker was actually heckled during the question answer session for comparing autoimmunity to cancer.

When the mechanisms that keep the immune system from attacking itself break down, diseases like diabetes type 1, lupus, and psoriasis can result. Many in the field have focused on how particular inherited mutations change the immunological... Click to continue

The editor of The Lancet has banned members of international aid group Doctors Without Borders (Medicins sans Frontieres or MSF in French) from publishing articles in the journal, according to a story in Science magazine today (Feb. 1). Did members of the aid organization break an embargo? Fail to disclose conflicts of interest? Fabricate data? Nope. They just posted... Click to continue

Additional safety studies for Boston's planned Biosafety Level 4 lab, demanded by the Massachusetts Supreme Court last year, will further delay the opening of the facility, according to court documents filed by the NIH this week.

In November, 2007, an outside scientific panel concluded that the NIH had flubbed the safety evaluations for the lab, and in December, the Massachusetts Supreme Court... Click to continue

I've been looking into how global health programs evaluate the effects of their interventions for a story that will appear in our March issue. Public health experts have told me again and again that too little attention has been paid to evaluation across the board.

This morning (Feb.1), both The Washington Post and ... Click to continue