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The article reports that immunologist Luk van Parijs was fired from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The school alleged that he had confessed to faking data in one published paper, several unpublished manuscripts and grant applications. Van Parijs's academic future may be shot to pieces. But his scientific past, so far is intact. He has contributed to roughly 40 papers stretching back to 1994, many of them in the blossoming field of RNA interference. None has been publicly labeled fraudulent or retracted. MIT has not said which paper it found to be problematic. Other investigations are continuing. One of the biggest problems in these fraud things says Kathleen Case, publisher at the American Association for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is that the investigations get finished. And the last thing people think of is the journals. Large-scale fraud cases are rare. But scientists whose work is challenged have often co-authored dozens or even hundreds of papers.

The article focuses on the effort of clinical researchers in the U.S. to understand how mild hypothermia therapy improves survival of people experiencing cardiac arrest and other types of trauma. With the growing use of hypothermia therapy and the number of high profile failures and some safety concerns associated with therapy, several researchers are conducting studies on the technique using animal models. Among the remarkable studies on hypothermia's beneficial effect was led by emergency medicine doctor Fritz Sterz, and a 2005 study that applied mild hypothermia therapy in babies deprived of oxygen before birth. Meanwhile, the study on hypothermia's application in head injury led by neurosurgeon Guy Clifton suggests that early cooling is the key to effective hypothermia therapy.

The article reports that as advocacy groups in the orphan disease world plunge into clinical trials, they are faced with a delicate balancing act. Gathered at the Manhattan restaurant were trustees of a patient advocacy group, the Foundation Fighting Blindness in Owings Mills, Maryland, and one of its founders, a wealthy New Jersey businessman, Gordon Gund. Gund lost his vision at age 30 from an inherited disease. The group was grappling with a question confronting more and more advocacy organizations, particularly those fighting rare orphan diseases.

The article reports on the investigation conducted by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) regarding the validity of two research papers on the new way to identify drug targets in Daejeon, South Korea. Probe result shows that such papers do not contain any scientific truth and will likely be retracted by the publication in which it appeared "Science and Nature Chemical Biology." The study was conducted by Te Kook Kim, a renowned senior author who studied in the U.S. and founded a business establishment in the country. According to Gyun Min Lee, chairman of KAIST's Department of Biological Sciences and head of internal investigation committee, the results are strong enough to convince them that the two papers do not contain scientific truth.

The article provides information on research carried out on T cells located near colorectal tumors in patients with colorectal cancer from banked samples of 415 patients. The research carried out by immunologists JérÔme Galon of the Institute for Health and Medical Research in Paris, Franck Pagès of the Georges Pompidou European Hospital and their colleagues showed that the density of T cells, cells that attack bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens, near tumor cells of patients infected with colorectal cancer, predicted the chances of survival of the patient. Patients with high densities of CD3-positive T cells had a higher rate of survival, in comparison to those with low densities of these cells.

The article focuses on a clinical trial led by Andreas Zeiher, a cardiologist at the University of Frankfurt, that aims to determine the outcome of the bone marrow that was directly injected into the heart of a human who suffered cardiac arrest. Zeiher, along with his colleagues from Norway, has hoped that such injection of the bone marrow may trigger the formation of new blood cells, new heart muscle, and send signals to damaged muscle to repair all by itself. The trial specifically involved bone marrow infusion into the affected artery and placebo injection revealing different assessment results.

The article reports on the citations of retracted papers in fields from physics to cancer research to plant biology. These citations were found with the help of Thomson Scientific's ISI Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar. Seventeen of 19 retracted papers co-authored by German cancer researcher Friedhelm Herrmann have been cited since being retracted. Together, two of those papers were cited roughly 60 times. Examination of one Nature paper by former Bell Labs physicist Jan Hendrik published in 2000 and retracted in 2003, revealed that it has been noted in research papers 17 times. Prior to being pulled, the paper was cited 153 times. According to Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, it is quite embarrassing. Paul Friedman, a former dean at the University of California, San Diego said that if people cite fraudulent articles then either their research is going to be thrown off or something will be wasted. He oversaw an investigation into papers by radiologist Robert Slutsky in the mid-1980s.

This article reports that the accusations surrounding South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang's discredited stem cell research have gone from bad to worse. Last week, a report from the South Korean National Bioethics Committee said that Hwang and his team seriously violated basic ethical rules in their collection of human oocytes and that some of the 119 donors became severely ill as a result of the procedure. The government's auditor also said on Monday that it so far could not account for $2.6 million in research funds that Hwang had received. Meanwhile, investigations are under way at the journal "Science," which published both of Hwang's now-discredited papers claiming to have derived embryonic stem cells from cloned human embryos, and at two U.S. universities where Hwang co-authors work. On February 6, 2006 the South Korean government's auditor said in a report that Hwang could not account for how he spent a significant sum of his research money, which included $31.8 million in public funds and $6.2 million from private sources.

This article reports that Pfizer Inc., maker of the COX-2 inhibitors Celebrex and Bextra, is placing a $100 million bet on a 20,000-person, international trial led by the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. But some experts are concerned that the design of the trial, announced last week, could load the dice in Celebrex's favor and put patients at risk. European Union countries have declined to participate because of their concerns about Celebrex's safety. The clinical trial is unusual for focusing on patients with heart disease, including those who recently underwent bypass surgery and those at risk of cardiac problems. The approach is meant to mirror conditions in the real world. Patients in the Celebrex trial will be randomly and blindly assigned to receive either Celebrex or one of two older anti-inflammatory drugs namely ibuprofen or naproxen. But some scientists wonder whether the study will really resolve questions about the drug's safety. That variable is aspirin, used by heart disease and at-risk patients to reduce clotting.

Prion diseases are thought to herald certain death. No therapy can slow or stop the progression of "mad cow disease" or other ailments linked to these misfolded proteins, which destroy swaths of neurons and punch spongy holes in the brain. By the time the earliest symptoms appear, such as forgetfulness and unsteadiness, brain tissue is already badly disfigured. John Collinge, head of the Prion Unit at the Medical Research Council in London, and Giovanna Mallucci, along with their colleagues, first created a mouse strain that enabled them to test whether eliminating the normal prion protein, called PrP, could alleviate disease. PrP is present throughout the body; when it morphs into a prion form called PrP-scrapie, it infects nearby healthy PrP.

Anxiety is running high in the more than 1000 laboratories funded by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). According to VA staffers, agency officials are planning to take money out of some basic studies and make it into outcomes research and targeted disease areas more directly related to veterans' health. The self-described architect is Nelda Wray, a health-outcomes researcher who in January moved from the Houston VA Medical Center in Texas to lead the VA Office of Research and Development in Washington, D.C. Wray and her deputy, Mindy Aisen, discussed some of their plans at a training session on June 23-24, 2003 in Washington for VA administrative officers and at a June 5, 2003 meeting of the VA's medical research council, a group of senior scientists. According to an internal memo from Wray, one goal is phasing out PhD scientists and concentrating on funding MD who conduct clinical research. Upset by what they've been hearing, many VA-funded scientists including those who double as clinical specialists in VA hospitals are threatening public action or privately saying they will quit. Another issue that upset meeting attendees, several VA scientists say, was Aisen's presentation of a proposal for restructuring the VA four research divisions. Wray confirms that she intends to focus VA research on certain diseases prevalent among veterans, such as diabetes.

The article reports that U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain have elucidated on how their Administrations would fight cancer. McCain plans to enhance access to clinical trials and research on the link between environmental conditions and breast cancer. Obama revealed his plan to increase the number of adults participating in clinical trials and doubling the funds for cancer research.

The article reports on the research conducted by 23andMe, a Parkinson's research and treatment center and the genetic testing company, regarding clinical trials on mice at the Silicon Valley in California. Researchers are experimenting on an unusual approach to clinical trials wherein researchers utilizes home computers ranging from videos of tremors to a mouse that senses motor abilities. Such move is undertaken with the hope that Web might enhance clinical trials, its ability to aggregate data from the thousands of people needed for studies tracking genetic and environmental factors linked to common diseases.

The article cites a study on the link between menin, a tumor suppressor protein encoded by the multiple endocrine neoplasia type 1 (MEN1) gene, and gestational diabetes, which occurs in pregnant women. Seung Kim, a developmental biologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and his team conducted a study which found that menin inhibits the replication of beta cells, and lessening it allows beta cells to proliferate, thus increasing insulin supply. Furthermore, the researchers discovered that prolactin, a hormone that is elevated during pregnancy, was the cause of decreasing menin levels.

The article reports on the steps taken by U.S. academic researchers in teaming up with health insurers to learn whether drugs used to treat hyperactivity also cause heart problems. Particularly, the team will be looking at the health records of 500, 000 children and adults who have taken any of a half-dozen drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in search of higher rates of sudden cardiac death, heart attacks and stroke. Moreover, the $4 million study may also provide clues about how risk changes with age and gender.

The article reports on an announcement by the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) of NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, regarding the recruitment of participants to conduct a clinical trial to test the efficacy of the nutritional supplement, Creatine, against Parkinson's disease. Earlier trials which began in the year 2000 focused on the futility of a drug to combat the disease, and found that of the four compounds only Creatine passed the test. NINDS will begin recruiting for the phase III of the trial, to test whether a purified medicinal version can slow the progress of the disease. According to Debra Babcock, scientific director of the creatine trial; at NINDS, the trial will recruit 1720 participants and is expected to last 7 years.

The article reports on the opposition of biomedical research experts on proposals by the U.S. government to reduce funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008. Senators Tom Harkin and Arlen Specter who head the subcommittee that handles NIH funding grilled NIH Director Elias Zerhouni on March 19 about the impact of the proposed subinflationary budget for NIH. They head senior scientists describe a bleak research climate in which the percentage of funded NIH grant applications has dropped from 30 percent to 20 percent.

The article reports that the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland, has requested U.S. cooperative groups that run clinical trials to slash patient enrollment to ensure financial sufficiency. Many cancer specialists are anxiously waiting to learn how the 2007 funding will be divided to provide adequate budget. Some large-scale cancer trials are implementing an NCI recommendation to cut down their costs by 10% because of increasing pressure on NCI's budget. According to William Woods, president of the American Society of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology, affected studies for clinical trials include protocols for relapsed T-cell leukemia, the brain tumor medulloblastoma, and a rare infantile sarcoma.

The article reports on the survey of senior U.S. researchers, which has found that although all believe conflicts should be disclosed to volunteers participating in clinical research, few thought that details of those conflicts were worth sharing. Thirty-four surveyed researchers believed that source of the funding should be disclosed, but many were afraid that given dollar amounts, research participants would overestimate the influence of the payment on the investigator's behavior. Meanwhile, an earlier research led by scientists at John Hopkins University has found that both healthy and ill people rated disclosure as more important rather than the risk of research rose.

The article presents information on a conference that was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in early May 2006, to discuss and study the next generation in genomics. The conference was attended by more than 200 people, where HapMap, a database that has several human generic variation was discussed. The HapMap was tested for several uses, including the determination of generic variants behind numerous common diseases and the control of the spread of Plasmodium falciparum, the deadly malarial parasite. The project is also known as the International HapMap Project, which was funded by five countries that amounted to $138 million.

The article informs that when the "New England Journal of Medicine" (NEJM) last week released a scathing editorial asserting that a study on the firm Vioxx had omitted safety data, the episode became the latest chapter in the efforts of medical journal editors to keep what they consider misleading drug studies from their pages. A string of similar cases have prompted journals to tighten requirements of authors, ask increasingly pointed questions before publishing, and require that clinical trials be publicly registered before papers are reviewed. The latest case came to light when Gregory Curfman, an NEJM editor, was deposed on November 21 in the third Vioxx lawsuit. Curfman learned from a Merck & Co. Inc. memo of three unreported heart attacks, which he realized had been deleted from a paper comparing the gastrointestinal effects of Vioxx with those of the anti-inflammatory naproxen, says Karen Pedersen, an NEJM spokesperson. In an e-mail to Science, Bombardier said that she and the other authors are preparing a reply to NEJM and declined to comment until that's complete. In a statement, Merck denied any wrongdoing, asserting that the three heart attacks occurred after the study's prespecified completion and thus did not warrant inclusion.

The article reports that frustrated by the sluggish pace of brain tumor research and the often dismal prognosis for those afflicted, eight brain tumor non-profits in the U.S. and Canada are pooling up to 6 million dollar total to finance risky, innovative research projects, potentially including mathematical modeling and studies of neural development and stem cells. The effort announced this week, called the Brain Tumor Funding Collaborative, is unusual in the disease advocacy world, where organizations in the same disease area are typically rivals competing aggressively for donations. Here, however, several foundations tentatively began discussing 2 years ago how to fuel brain tumor research. Brain cancer research is notoriously difficult, in part because the blood-brain barrier prevents easy access and because there's no good rodent model, says Susan Fitzpatrick, a neuroscientist and vice president of the McDonnell Foundation, another participant.

The article reports that the ALS Association is pushing for more research into why U.S. military veterans seem more prone to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. In 2004, a Department of Veterans Affairs report by an outside panel of veterans and scientists concluded that there was a probable link between neurotoxins and Gulf War illnesses, some of which resemble ALS symptoms. That finding was criticized by a number of researchers. At least two studies have found that veterans of the 1990-91 Gulf War were roughly twice as likely to develop ALS.

The article reports that two independent teams of Italians are asking the question whether a targeted cancer drug can help treat diabetes or not, after giving leukemia patients the drug Gleevec and watching their preexisting diabetes regress. One 70-year-old woman improved so dramatically that she could no longer be classified as a type 2 diabetic. Similar observations popped up in the November 2004 Journal of Clinical Oncology. There, Italian doctors at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" described seven patients with type 2 diabetes and chronic myelogenous leukemia, a cancer susceptible to Gleevec.

This article reports that five trade groups representing pharmaceutical companies worldwide are urging members to release more information about clinical trials. However, some see the proposals as a way to stay ahead of legislation that could compel the release of such information. The U.S. Congress failed to act last year on calls for a mandatory clinical trials registry, with penalties for noncompliance, but those bills are expected to reappear. Voluntary registries in the past have included only a fraction of ongoing and completed trials. Seven of the nearly 100 members of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry have participated in its registry, launched in May 2003.

The article reports that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) faces a push in the year 2005 from federal legislators bent on overhauling how the agency monitors drug safety. One vehicle may be a bill creating a mandatory clinical trials registry, an idea that picked up steam last year after the pharmaceutical industry and FDA ran into sharp criticism for their handling of anti-depressants linked to suicidal behavior in children and teenagers. Adding fuel to the fire is the ongoing debate over harmful side effects from anti-inflammatory pain medications, such as COX-2 inhibitors. How these proposals will fare is unclear.

This article reports that data from company-sponsored clinical trials are often treated as business secrets, but that practice may soon change. In the wake of allegations that a few companies have suppressed negative results to promote their drugs, some members of the U.S. Congress say they intend to make it easier for the public to track clinical studies. Democrats plan to introduce legislation in both the House and Senate this month to create a mandatory public registry. It would require that all clinical studies be described publicly at their inception and that results be added when a trial is complete. The proposal is part of a surge in efforts to overhaul the rules of clinical reporting. Last week, an international consortium of 13 medical journals announced that it would publish results only from clinical trials that were publicly registered when the trial began. One source of trouble, advocates of a registry say, is that clinical research suffers from "publication bias," a tendency to trumpet good results and bury the bad.

The U.S. Congress last week acted on an array of science-related bills as it readied to recess for the year. Lawmakers restored rules requiring drug companies to include children in clinical trials of compounds likely to be given to youngsters. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) imposed the so-called pediatric rule mandating the studies in 1998. But last fall, after a challenge from free-market advocacy groups, a federal judge struck it down, ruling that Congress hadn't given the agency authority to enforce it. Health advocates applaud the rule's return but fret about a "sunset" clause that will cause it to expire in 2007.

Announces Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) will provide the largest grant in United States history to support undergraduate education in biology. Number of colleges which will share the $91.1 million endowment; Existing HHMI-funded programs; HHMI announcement of its new round of awards one week after the National Research Council (NRC) released a report that pointed to a glut of life sciences Ph.D.'s flooding the academic job market.