In a letter to employees, sequencing company Complete Genomics CEO Cliff Reid predicts that the acquisition of his company by Chinese sequencing giant BGI will win approval by national security regulators and be completed by the end of March in 2013. Read more
The WWF is stepping up pressure on European politicians ahead of a crucial vote on fisheries reform, with an analysis compiling a picture of persistent ignoring of scientific advice. Read more
A grim update on biomedical progress on the ‘neglected diseases’, which account for more than 2.6 million deaths per year, confirms how appropriate the name is. Just 3.8% of the 756 new drugs approved for use by US and Europe between 2000 to 2011 treat neglected diseases. Read more
A landmark court ruling this week has ended uncertainties in Germany about who may decide the permissible level of animal suffering in experiments. On 11 December, Bremen’s administrative court said that local health authorities had been wrong in 2008 to block a licence for neuroscience studies on macaque monkeys. Read more
Germany’s main funding agency, the DFG, has imposed sanctions on Silvia Bulfone-Paus, the immunologist from the Research Centre Borstal who was at the centre of a data-manipulation scandal two years ago. An investigation committee commissioned by the centre had found that two lab members had manipulated data in four papers involving DFG-funded research on which they were first authors and lab-chief Bulfone-Paus was last author. In total 13 of her papers were retracted during 2011. Read more
When Bill Gimson, the executive director of the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), submitted his resignation on Monday, he wrote, in part, that he has “been placed in a situation where I feel I can [no] longer be effective.” … Read more
This morning, North Korea announced that it had successfully launched an Unha-3 rocket carrying a small satellite into orbit. Claims of success are nothing new for the regime, but this time, NORAD (the U.S.-Canadian defense radar network) confirmed that the nation had succeeded in placing a small object into orbit. Read more
The European Parliament yesterday ended decades of wrangling over how to streamline the European Union’s patent system. On Tuesday 11 December it approved an ‘EU patent package’, an agreement among 25 member states to roll out a new unitary patent that will be valid in all signatory nations, and will be overseen by a single patent court. Read more
Margaret Kripke, the newly appointed chief scientific officer at the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), took questions from reporters in a 25-minute teleconference this afternoon. Kripke takes the job on 7 January, filling the shoes of Nobel laureate Al Gilman, who resigned in October. Since Kripke accepted the job a couple of weeks ago — a fact only announced yesterday — the agency’s chief commercialization officer has left, and, today, the departure of its executive director, Bill Gimson, was announced. Thirty of its scientific reviewers have also resigned. Here is a summary of today’s news conference … Read more
The first apparent case of ‘mad cow’ disease in Brazil has sent reverberations halfway around the world and left agricultural officials scrambling to reassure the public that the county’s prodigious volume of exported remains safe. Read more
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The report produced by the investigators does not say so explicitly, probably out of fear of prejudicing future criminal/civil inquiries,… ... Read more
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Experiments reveal that crabs and lobsters feel pain
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