A Massachusetts federal court judge last week (April 22) dismissed the case against a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who allegedly fired a postdoc in his lab because of the postdoc's creationist beliefs.

The postdoc, Nathaniel Abraham, was dismissed from his position in the lab of molecular toxicologist Mark Hahn in November, 2004, after revealing that he believed in the literal truth of the Bible... Click to continue

Nearly half the voting members of a Department of Health and Human Services stem cell advisory council have financial conflicts of interest despite the committee's pledge to limit these types of conflicts, according to a survey conducted by a science watchdog group.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest polled the 25 voting members of HHS's ... Click to continue

Patents should be granted only for genetic tests, not for genes and DNA sequences, a working party from the European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG) and EuroGentest, a European Union-funded initiative to improve genetic testing in Europe, said at a press conference on Thursday (April 24) according to ... Click to continue

Ever seen a colossal squid dissected? Me neither. In fact, few biologists have glimpsed an intact specimen of the rare and elusive squid species, much less observed one being probed and prodded on the dissection table. That's the reason a webcast beaming from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa recently caught my attention.

Scientists there are defrosting a colossal squid that fishermen pulled from the icy waters of the Ross... Click to continue

Can the biotech and pharma make money in space? That was the question Congress posed at a hearing on the International Space Station's future, held on Thursday (April 24).

"I think I can," Tom Pickens, CEO of a spaceflight services company-turned biotech called SPACEHAB, told Congress. SPACEHAB has been sending up science payloads for the past 23 years. The company has mostly worked with government scientists, but when Pickens... Click to continue

The US House of Representatives passed a bill yesterday (Apr 23) that extends two programs providing federal grants to early-stage biotechs and other startups with promising ideas.

The bill reauthorizes both the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and the Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) programs, which were due to sunset this year. The programs aim... Click to continue

HIV/AIDS researchers are despondent over the waning prospects of ever creating an effective vaccine against the virus, according to a survey conducted by British newspaper The Independent. But can it really be all that bad?

"Most scientists involved in Aids research believe that a vaccine against HIV is further away than ever and some have admitted that effective immunisation... Click to continue

Plant cellular responses are much more locally and temporally specialized than previously thought, a new study suggests. In growing Arabidopsis roots, different tissue layers respond to stressful conditions in highly cell-type specific ways, according to research published online today (April 24) in Science.

"By and large, plants have been viewed as single, uniform entities," said ... Click to continue

What keeps stem cells pluripotent? In the past six months researchers have reprogrammed human progenitor skin cells and fully-differentiated Beta cells back into a pluripotent state. Despite these advances, little is known so far about how pluripotency is regulated. To find out, researchers have set their sights on a group of mammalian regulator genes known as the Polycomb Complex,... Click to continue

An artist who was charged with mail and wire fraud for receiving postal packages of bacteria to be used in his artwork has been cleared.

A federal judge on Monday (April 21) dismissed the case against Steven Kurtz, an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, saying that the government indictment against him "is insufficient on its face," The Buffalo News reported.

Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at... Click to continue

It appears that the US Senate is going to finally cast its vote on a 15-year-old bill with wide bipartisan support against genetic discrimination. According to Scientists and Engineers for America, Senator Tom Coburn has agreed to lift his hold on the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA, which prevents insurers and employers from discriminating based on genetics.

The bill has passed the House of... Click to continue

The ongoing legal battle between a fertility researcher who published a controversial 2001 study linking in vitro fertilization success to prayer and University of California, Irvine professor Bruce Flamm, who has been openly critical of that study, appears to be over for now.

Los Angeles Superior Court judge James Dunn dismissed... Click to continue

A University of Georgia (UGA) microbiologist and whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency is suing the university Board of Regents, the university research foundation, and five faculty members for accepting federal grant money to publish fraudulent research, according to court documents.

David Lewis, an adjunct professor in the university department of ecology, conducted EPA-funded research in the 1990s on the harmful effects of sewage sludge, and in 1996 wrote a commentary in... Click to continue

University scientists in California who use animals in their research may get some legal protection from animal rights groups, which have attacked and harassed researchers there in recent months.

On Thursday (Apr 17) the California Assembly Judiciary Committee unanimously passed the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, a bill sponsored by the University of California system that aims... Click to continue

Aldo Leopold is widely considered the father of the conservation movement. This Monday (Apr21) marks the 60th anniversary of his death. He died of a heart attack at age 61 while helping a Wisconsin neighbor fight a brush fire.

Leopold's lasting gift was his enunciation of what he called a "land ethic" in his classic treatise on conservation, 1949's ... Click to continue

Partially or fully differentiated cells can acquire, or be reprogrammed for, stem cell-like pluripotency, according to two studies published this week.

The research adds to a growing body of work on the subtleties of pluripotency, since last November's landmark somatic cell reprogramming achievement.

The first group, led by Rudolph Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute,... Click to continue

Researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences are saying the recent NIH report on mismanagement at the agency fails to pinpoint some root causes of the problems.

The report pointed out several problems at NIEHS, including a failure to consider conflicts of interest among NIEHS employees, a lack of documented justifications for out-of-rank-order... Click to continue

SARS, avian flu, and other lung diseases destroy the lungs via a common mechanism, researcher report in Cell today. That mechanism, based on innate immunity, could provide new targets for treating severe lung damage, the researchers say.

Joseph Penninger, from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and colleagues set up an intensive care unit for mice in his lab in order... Click to continue

For the first time, scientists have identified in mammals an essential mechanism used by amphibians to adjust to low-oxygen environments.

According to a study published today (Apr 17) in the journal Cell, the skin of mice can sense oxygen levels in the air and helps the rodents cope with oxygen-poor conditions.

While science has long-known that epidermal gas... Click to continue

Last week, the University of Nevada, Reno, fired and banned from campus an animal nutrition researcher, according to a university spokesperson.

Hussein Hussein, associate professor in the department of animal biotechnology, told the Reno-Gazette Journal: "I was fired by President (Milton) Glick and escorted from my office by campus police as if I were a criminal." Hussein also said he... Click to continue

Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration named cancer biologist Frank Torti as the agency's first ever Chief Scientist. Torti, who is also the director of Wake Forest's Comprehensive Cancer Center, will leave North Carolina and begin work early next month at the FDA. The researcher and clinician took time to talk with me and share... Click to continue

A report from the National Institutes of Health has detailed a suite of management and ethics problems at the agency's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

The report, which was sent to Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) yesterday (Apr 15), unearthed apparent grant funding irregularities at NIEHS. The agency awarded grants to 45 applications that had scored beyond the payline between FY 2005 and FY 2007, without... Click to continue

Umpires at Wimbledon, Roland Garros, and Arthur Ashe Stadium might deserve a break, according to a new study published online this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The study found that disputes over close calls during professional tennis matches arise because of double faults in the way information is processed in the brains of players and umpires. Nonetheless, both perceptions are remarkably accurate, though... Click to continue

The Haitian HIV/AIDS clinic that I visited earlier this year and wrote about in the March issue of The Scientist has resumed normal operations after rioting over rising food prices rocked the capital, Port-au-Prince, last week.

When I heard of the turmoil in Haiti, I e-mailed Jean Pape, the director... Click to continue

The brain's sound processing areas are split into two distinct regions — one which determines what a sound is, the other which tracks where it's coming from, according to research published online today (April 13) in Nature Neuroscience.

For decades, scientists have racked their brains to determine how the mammalian cerebral cortex handles different... Click to continue

We here at The Scientist do our best to keep an eye out for instances of scientific misconduct and publishing irregularities. In the past we've not only reported on Woo-suk Hwang's fraudulent human cloning research, but we've brought you news of other misconduct, such as the Egyptian paleontologist who allegedly plagiarized previously published photos.

We may have a lot less... Click to continue

Earlier this week I posted a blog on the digital security problems at NIH, which revealed the agency cannot encrypt sensitive data, such as the personal information (including social security numbers) of clinical trial patients, on Macintosh laptops used by NIH employees.

So how many Mac laptops do NIH employees use? I had a hard time uncovering that number, until I got a call today from NIH spokesperson, Don Ralbovsky, who gave me a... Click to continue

With biotech companies inching up on clinical trials for human embryonic stem cell-based therapies, the US Food and Drug Administration held a meeting yesterday to discuss scientific issues in properly deriving and characterizing the cells, as well as appropriate clinical trial monitoring.

Three biotechs, Geron Corporation, Advanced Cell Technology, and Novocell presented some of their scientific work on spinal cord injury, vision impairment, and diabetes, respectively, at the meeting. Geron... Click to continue

The German parliament voted today (April 11) to ease restrictions on stem cell research, according to Reuters.

The existing law in Germany requires researchers to limit importation of human embryonic stem cell lines to those created abroad before 2002. Under the new bill, which was decided by a 346-228 vote in the Bundestag lower... Click to continue

Giuseppe Attardi, the California Institute of Technology researcher who identified all the genes in human mtDNA and uncovered the mitochondrial genome's role in degenerative diseases and aging, died Saturday (Apr 5), according to the university. He was 84 years old.

Caltech said that Attardi died at his Altadena, CA home but... Click to continue

When I profiled Millennium Pharmaceuticals' chief scientific officer, Joe Bolen, in last month's issue of The Scientist, he described some amusing airport foibles that had taken place during a recent trip to Japan. Now the whole company is going to Japan - at least on paper. Today, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, one of the first genomics companies in the US, was... Click to continue

Two bacterial species found in the guts of chickens, pigs and other animals are merging into a single species after the domestication of livestock brought the two microbes together, according to a study published today in Science. The research indicates that "despeciation" can be an important consequence of environmental changes in bacterial evolution.

Bacteria ... Click to continue

Plant biologists have withdrawn a study on Arabidopsis thaliana evolution published in a 2004 issue of Science, saying one of its conclusions was marred by contamination, according to a retraction appearing today (Apr. 10) in the journal.

The original paper, authored by then North Carolina State University genomicist ... Click to continue

The National Institutes of Health this week warned its employees that Apple Macintosh laptops cannot be encrypted using the agency's software, leaving unprotected sensitive data such as personal information (including social security numbers) from thousands of clinical trial participants.

In February, a laptop containing the unencrypted personal information from more than 3,000 patients participating... Click to continue

Last August, I reported on Mohammad Sajid, a UK citizen who was barred from returning to the US pending several months of background checks - twice. On Monday I got an e-mail from Sajid saying he is leaving his lab in the US, where he works on anti-malarial drugs, to take a job at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

"It's been a really tough choice," Sajid said. "The main reason is the travel. It's as simple as that." When I last... Click to continue

A significant portion of American high schoolers have seriously flawed ideas about genetics, according to a study conducted by the country's largest society for genetics professionals.

The study, which was published in this month's issue of Genetics, contained some fallacy-ridden quotations from the student essays. Here are some of the notable examples:

"When people who cannot have children and want their own from their own... Click to continue

Two Christian groups launched legal action today (Apr. 9) challenging licenses granted to UK scientists to create human-animal hybrid embryos for research purposes, according to the The Press Association.

In January, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), Britain's oversight body for stem cell research, awarded licenses to research... Click to continue

The supply of scientists and engineers continues to grow in the US, and that unemployment rate, at 2.5 percent, is the lowest it's been since the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation reported last week. There's no need to worry about the US's ability to fill science jobs, the agency said in a press release which described a recent analysis of its 2006 science and engineering surveys.

Not everyone... Click to continue

A New York-based biotech company announced today (April 8) that it has received approval for the first therapeutic cancer vaccine -- in Russia. It is the first approval by a regulatory body of a cancer immunotherapy.

The therapy's approval in Russia won't in itself boost its chances for approval in the US or the EU, or improve the prospects of other cancer vaccines that are in the biotech pipeline, Ren Benjamin, senior biotech... Click to continue

This report in from Editorial Administrator and journalist Margaret Guthrie:

Earlier this year, we reported on a company called Vet-Stem which has devised a treatment for horses using the animal's own stem cells to heal tendon and ligament injuries. In some cases it's been an unqualified success. One of those successes was part of our story - a big gray gelding named Greg's Gold. When we posted the story online, Greg's... Click to continue

Nature Neuroscience is joining an alliance of journals that share manuscript peer-reviews, according to the journal's April editorial.

The Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium (NPRC) is a group of neuroscience journals that have agreed to accept reviews from other members of the Consortium in an effort to accelerate and improve the... Click to continue

Today (April 7) is the start day of the National Institutes of Health mandate requiring that all research funded by NIH dollars be deposited into PubMed Central within one year of publication.

Any articles arising from NIH funds that are accepted for publication starting today must be submitted to the database. The policy is part of a mandate issued in January by the NIH in accordance with the Congressional appropriations bill for... Click to continue

Though Australian scientists are working to engineer a virus to control the invasive pests, an Aussie politician has suggested a less subtle solution: kill 'em all.

Shane Knuth, a legislator in the northeastern state of Queensland (where cane toads thrive), has proposed and official day for residents to hunt down and kill the exotic invaders.

Cane toads have plagued the land down under for decades, and their increasing numbers and... Click to continue

Wouldn't it be nice to have thousands of collaborators, collecting data and sharing observations, who didn't demand a salary at all? A nation-wide initiative called Project Budburst is enlisting the help of so-called "citizen scientists" to nip the effects of climate change in the bud. But is using the public as a data source scientifically sound?

The idea of citizen science is... Click to continue

Hundreds of bacteria isolated from soil samples are able to live exclusively on antibiotics as a food source, according to a report published today (April 3) in Science.

The researchers, led by George Church of Harvard Medical School, isolated bacteria from 11 distinct soil types. They showed that these bacteria could subsist in culture dishes exclusively on, in some cases,... Click to continue

A signaling molecule commonly found in cancerous tissue primes some breast tumor cells to metastasize to lung but not bone tissue, according to a study to be published in Cell tomorrow (Apr. 4).

"This work basically provides a deeper understanding of how breast cancer spreads throughout the body," said ... Click to continue

Can the blogosphere work as well as the traditional peer review system? Over the past two months one researcher has been trying to find out. Based on his and his publisher's early assessment of the experiment, using blog-based peer reviewing is only partially helpful, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported today.

The experiment was run by University of California, San... Click to continue

Hybrid embryos containing both human and animal material have been created for the first time in the UK, the BBC reported yesterday (April 1).

Scientists at Newcastle University led by Lyle Armstrong inserted nuclei from human skin cells into hollowed-out cow eggs to create cytoplasmic hybrids, or "cybrids." Some of the human-animal embryos lived for three days, and the largest grew... Click to continue

A Virginia court struck down today (April 1) new patent rules which pharma and biotech companies argued would have limited their ability to protect their intellectual property.

The new rules, which were finalized by the US Patent and Trademark Organization (USPTO) last August, limit inventors to two continuing applications, which add claims to an existing patent, and cap the total number of claims in a patent at 25. "Specifically in... Click to continue

Thomas Cech, a Nobel laureate who studied the catalytic properties of RNA, has announced plans to step down from the top spot at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, according to the organization's website.

Cech, who has been HHMI president since 2000, said in a communication to institute staff that the time had come for a change. In the spring of 2009, Cech will return to his... Click to continue

Ever had trouble transporting DNA across international borders?

I was in Taiwan last year covering a conference on DNA barcoding, which was attended by scientists from all over the world. Most of them were studying cryptic flora or fauna endemic to far-flung countries; usually not their own.

A few researchers told me... Click to continue