Four British animal rights activists were found guilty today (Dec. 23) of blackmailing companies that supplied Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), a contract animal-testing company based near Cambridge, England.

The activists, part of a group called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), led a campaign from 2001 to 2007 to intimidate several companies with ties to HLS in an effort to shut down the laboratory. Their tactics involved... Click to continue

How much can you see with non-functioning visual cortex? A clinically blind man, with lesions on both sides of his visual cortex, was able to flawlessly navigate an obstacle course, a paper to be published tomorrow in Current Biology reports.

The patient, called only TN in the paper, is a former doctor, who had suffered two strokes that damaged both sides of his striate cortex, the brain region dedicated to processing vision. The findings reinforce previous observations that other... Click to continue

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama named more scientists to top posts over the weekend: Harold Varmus and Eric Lander will serve as co-chairs of the president's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, headed up by Harvard physicist John Holdren.

Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist and former head of the AAAS, will also lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

These scientists are no strangers to our pages: Two years ago, Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan... Click to continue

President-elect Barack Obama plans to nominate Harvard physicist John Holdren for role of presidential science advisor, according to Science's blog ScienceInsider.

Holdren is the director of the Science, Technology and Public Policy program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He is also a professor of environmental science and public policy.... Click to continue

We at The Scientist are all a-flitter because we're now on Twitter. Starting this week, you can sign up to receive our "tweets" at twitter.com/TheScientistLLC.

Twitter is a simple messaging service that allows users to share brief text updates -- otherwise known as tweets -- of up to 140 characters. (The last sentence was exactly 140 characters.) Readers can receive Twitter posts on the Web, on their mobile phones, via instant... Click to continue

A team of French life sciences grad students has launched an online repository of fraudulent scientific papers, and is calling on researchers to report studies tainted by misconduct.

The website -- called Scientific Red Cards -- is still in a beta version, but once it's fully operational it should help the scientific community police the literature even when problems slip past journal editors, the students claim.

The database might also prevent... Click to continue

Another case of a potentially fatal brain infection has been reported in a patient taking the multiple sclerosis drug Tysabri, the biotech who developed the drug announced yesterday.

This is the fourth case of infection, called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) this year. They are the only cases reported since the drug was taken off the market in 2005 because of three cases of infection. The FDA allowed Tysabri back on the market in 2006 with restrictions and stronger warnings.... Click to continue

D. Carleton Gajdusek, a virologist and anthropologist who won the 1976 Nobel Prize for his work on the infectious brain agents now known as prions, died last Friday (Dec. 12) in Tromso, Norway. He was 85.

"He was a genius," Robert Klitzman, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York and Gajdusek's biographer, told The Scientist. "His brain was faster and at a higher level than anyone I've ever met."

In the 1950s,... Click to continue

Six California stem cell biotech companies received more than $5 million in funding last week from the state's stem cell funding body -- the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), according to a news release from the agency.

The money represents the first major pay out to companies from the state's $3 billion research enterprise. Until now, only Novocell Inc. had received a small grant of $50,000.

The grants are part of 23... Click to continue

University College London is offering new unorthodox research grants for its staff without peer review, deadlines, directives, or milestones.

The funding, which is open to any UCL employee, is in in the ballpark of £100,000 ($150,000) per year for at least three years for each awardee, according to UCL visiting earth sciences professor Don Braben, the scheme's brainchild and the founder of Venture Research International, a company... Click to continue

Two employees in the pediatric neurological research department at Columbia University were arrested Wednesday (December 10) for scamming the institution out of more than $200,000.

John Bzdil, the former manager of the pediatric neurosciences department at the university's Neurological Institute, and his wife, Heather Rinehart, will be presented with charges today (Dec 12) of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, a press officer from the US Attorney's office, Southern... Click to continue

Officials have halted enrollment in more than 600 human research studies taking place in Seattle this week after a federal audit found shoddy paperwork in some consent forms.

The Department of Veterans Affair's Office of Research Oversight determined in a November audit that the VA Puget Sound Health Care System should be more careful in documenting that human subjects are competent enough to make reasoned informed consent.... Click to continue

Parasites can confuse their hosts' immune system by switching the proteins they display on their surface. But how? The intestinal parasite Giardi lamblia harnesses RNA interference to target which surface proteins to shut down, a study published tomorrow in Nature reports.

"I actually think it's a superb paper," Therdore Nash, chief of gastrointestinal parasitology at the National Institute of Allergy... Click to continue

Biotech industry executives are beseeching Congress today (10 Dec) for a temporary change in the tax code that would give some struggling biotech companies a cash boost.

The plan would funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to some biotechs in exchange for tax credits that the companies would not take if they make money next year and beyond.

Nearly a third of publically traded American biotech companies have a six month's or less supply of operating cash, The New York Times... Click to continue

Merck is planning to sell generic copies of blockbuster biotech drugs, the drug maker announced today (Dec. 9) at the annual business briefing at its New Jersey headquarters.

Through the newly announced Merck BioVentures division, the company is setting its sights on biotech copycats, which still require their own clinical trials and cost millions to develop. As a result, these drugs are generally priced only marginally lower than branded versions and can still be a lucrative venture.

The... Click to continue

The dearth of new drugs coming to market is forcing some drug companies -- and their investors -- to rethink R&D.

For instance, at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR), the focus has shifted from trying to develop the next blockbuster to reexamining well understood disease pathways to identify drug targets. In a presentation to investors last month, Mark Fishman, president of NIBR, reported that the company has boosted its portfolio of new molecular entities by 40%, and its... Click to continue

A highly cited Nature paper that identified a long-sought receptor critical for mediating plant response to stress is being retracted after researchers were unable to reproduce the results.

Corresponding author on the paper, Robert Hill from the University of Manitoba, first discovered a problem with the results over the summer when one of his students failed to reproduce the findings. "The binding assay procedures, at least in our hands, did... Click to continue

Researchers at NIH's long-beleaguered National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) are hopeful that the institute's new head, toxicologist Linda Birnbaum will be able to right the ship after the rocky tenure of ex-NIEHS director David Schwartz.

Chris Portier, associate director of NIEHS, said that there are key differences between Schwartz and Birnbaum.... Click to continue

Chemists have created a device -- using little more than paper and sticky tape -- that can precisely separate liquids for further medical or environmental analysis.

The scientists write in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper published today that they made their small, lightweight microfluidics chips for about $0.03 a piece. Similar "lab-on-a-chip" devices made of glass and polymers can cost hundreds of dollars... Click to continue

Henry Molaison (HM), a patient with amnesia who helped scientists to unlock the secrets to how the brain processes learning and memory, died last week at the age of 82.

HM participated in thousands of memory studies over the past 50 years, after a surgery to cure his debilitating epilepsy in the early 1950s altered his ability to form new memories.

"[HM] was an extremely cooperative and gentle human being," Brenda Milner, a... Click to continue

A malaria vaccine for infants and children -- the group most vulnerable to the disease -- may be heading to phase III trials, according to authors of two studies published online today (Dec. 8) in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"The research results show we are one important step closer to malaria joining diseases like small pox or polio that have been either controlled or eliminated by vaccine," said Christian Loucq, director of ... Click to continue

Big pharma is once again fighting with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over controversial changes to patent regulations that the USPTO tried to institute last year.

The new rules would limit the number of times a patent could be reevaluated to two, and limited the number of claims that could be filed on a patent to 25. University tech transfer offices and biotech companies have argued that those changes will make it difficult and expensive to defend patents in the life sciences --... Click to continue

The National Institutes of Health may change its regulations for managing financial conflict of interest among extramural grantees within 12 months, the acting director of the NIH said today (Dec. 5).

"In roughly six months to a year, we're going to have action on this," NIH's acting director Raynard Kington told an advisory committee, adding that there may be legislative action forcing the NIH to alter... Click to continue

Twenty-two leaders from the British biotech sector pleaded for a government bailout yesterday (Dec. 4) to save the industry's "survival and future viability" in the face of the global financial crisis.

The dossier sent to the UK government called for two funds, each worth over £500 ($730) million. One would help smaller companies consolidate, with grants between £10 ($14.6) to £40 ($58) million; the other would give biotechs up to £100 ($146) million to fund acquisitions... Click to continue

Britain's largest ever single-shot investment in doctoral student training will be rolled out today (Dec. 5th) by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), with goodies in store for prospective applied biology PhD students.

The £250 ($370) million initiative will create 44 centers across the UK that will train more than 2000 PhD students across five yearly cohorts starting in fall 2009.

Most of the multidisciplinary centers -- which provide funding for three and a... Click to continue

The immune tricks that keep HIV in check in long term non-progressors (LTNPs) -- people who carry the virus but don't get AIDS -- have been a mystery for decades. It turns out that T cells in LTNPs destroy the virus by punching holes in infected cells and injecting a strong dose of apoptotic proteins, according to a study to be published in the December 19th issue of Immunity.

"This study brings us closer to a potential vaccine or cure for AIDS," ... Click to continue

Manhattan, Kansas has been chosen as the site for the much-contested $450 million government biolab, which will house research on some of the most highly infectious human and animal pathogens, according to a draft document from the Department of Homeland Security leaked to the press.

(Click here for the document, posted by the Lawrence Journal World and News.)

The decision on the... Click to continue

Tenured professors who were given the pink slip last week by the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston said they felt "shocked" and "betrayed" by the action, and have been given little rationale for why they were singled out, and little direction on what to do until they leave.

In total, the medical school fired more than 3,000 people -- around one-third of its total staff, including 83 tenured and tenure track faculty and 44 non-tenure track researchers -- after Hurricane Ike... Click to continue

Linda Birnbaum, a toxicologist and former head of EPA's Experimental Toxicology Division, will be the new head of the NIH's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), ending a period of turmoil under her predecessor David Schwartz, who resigned from the institute early this year amidst allegations of mismanagement.

Raynard Kington, acting head of NIH,... Click to continue

A Texas stem cell researcher falsified data by mucking around with her results in Photoshop, according to an Office of Research Integrity (ORI) ruling.

Peili Gu, a postdoc in Austin Cooney's lab at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in Houston, Texas from 2000 to 2007, falsified images in three papers that investigated the role of the germ cell nuclear factor on the expression of pluripotency genes... Click to continue

An association representing faculty members at 85 University of Texas institutions is suing university officials on behalf of more than 3,000 University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) employees given the pink slip last week in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike.

"[The University of Texas officials] had a predetermined agenda that had nothing to do with Ike" that included efforts to privatize universities and weaken the tenure process, Tom Johnson, executive director of the ... Click to continue

The wave of pesky cane toads that is spreading across the Australian landscape with a rapacious disregard for the continent's delicate ecological balance might be slowed by a complaint familiar to anyone who travels frequently: a sore back. And one cane toad biologist is suggesting that this weakness may be the key to reining in the invasive amphibian's impact on native Australian species.

University of Sydney biologist ... Click to continue

Los Angeles-based extremists who oppose the use of animals in scientific research destroyed a car, which they thought belonged to a University of California, Los Angeles, biologist Goran Lacan.

The arson attack, which occurred on November 20th, also badly damaged two nearby cars, but none of the cars belonged to Lacan, according to Los Angeles police.

Apparently, an LAPD spokesperson told the ... Click to continue

The European Patent Office (EPO) issued its final ruling last week rejecting a much-contested embryonic stem cell patent -- a decision that will likely be cheered by researchers and jeered by biotechs.

The patent covered technology developed by James Thomson, a University of Wisconsin researcher, to culture primate embryonic stem cells derived from pre-implantation embryos. In last week's ruling, the EPO upheld a previous decision, made last... Click to continue