I realize that my previous blog entry makes it sound as if HIV researchers are a complaining and bitter bunch. Far from it. They do complain, but they are also one of the friendliest and most unpretentious group of researchers anywhere. They can go from discussing how quickly HIV can wipe out the immune system to the latest in footwear and eyewear in a flash.

Last night was the finale of the HIV meeting — and may I just say, these scientists also know how to party.

Earlier in the week, bigwig HIV researcher Bruce Walker hosted his annual keystone bash. Here are a few things that should tell you it was a great party: there was much spilled drink; people sang Happy Birthday to Philip Goulder at midnight (it really was his birthday); everyone with a camera or cellphone snapped incriminating pictures of everyone else; one noted scientist was so falling down drunk that he really did fall down and had to be escorted home; and the police came — twice.

Last night's was almost a repeat performance, but the police didn't make an appearance — not that I know of anyway. In between their drunken revelry, these scientists also managed to put on one of the most interesting conferences I've ever been to. As per keystone rules, I can't really write about the specifics, but among the topics I found most interesting were those that delved into why sooty mangabey monkeys infected with SIV, the monkey version of HIV, never progress to a disease like AIDS and on elite controllers, a group of people who, despite being infected with HIV for more than a decade, have undetectable levels of the virus in their blood.

Figuring out what protects the monkeys or the elite controllers could be the key to a good vaccine. And this week's talks made me feel optimistic that at some point in my lifetime, even if not in the next 15 or 20 years, we'll know the answer.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Straight from the TB meeting last week, I've been at a HIV keystone meeting all week that has two parallel tracks — one focusing on the molecular aspects of the disease and the other on strategies for making a vaccine.

The big question on everyone's lips is, why is no one from the biggest HIV vaccine project here?

In 2005, NIH created CHAVI, a $350 million behemoth led by a small group of scientists. With that kind of money at stake, particularly at a time when funding is tight, many scientists were understandably outraged — so much so that it seemed like it might split the field into bitter, warring factions.

This meeting tells me that sadly, it already has.

Last year, we reported researchers' fears that CHAVI was cutting into individual grants. Two years into CHAVI almost no one, including some people at the NIH, has anything good to say about it. The project has already taken up about $70 million, and judging by CHAVI leader Bart Haynes' presentation yesterday, doesn't have much that's new to show for it. Haynes says most of the first year went toward setting up collaborations and infrastructure — and that may be true. But why isn't his team here to share what they're doing with the rest of the field? Even Haynes flew in just for his talk and flew back the same night, which didn't really give people much time to interact with him or ask questions.

The coffee breaks are rife with rumors that even though four fabulous teams applied for the CHAVI grant, the NIH had decided months before who they would give the grant to — and that the decision was entirely political. People are also saying that any project grant that competes with CHAVI's domain automatically gets rejected.

This being a particularly gossipy community, there's little proof of any of this — grants may be getting rejected simply because these are tough times, for example — but it almost doesn't matter whether it's true. The point is, many of the scientists here are feeling betrayed by the NIH's decision to fund CHAVI and worse, afraid of what they see as its favoritism.

This cannot be good for the field. Far as I can see, if the NIH doesn’t soon make an effort to be more open — and more inclusive — about what CHAVI is doing, this important field will split into the CHAVits and the CHAV-nots.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, sort of. For the past few days, I've been in rainy Vancouver, where TB researchers from all over the world have gathered for a Keystone meeting on the topic. As we reported in our free TB special this month, TB kills 4,400 people every day and together with HIV, is creating a serious crisis in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe.

Not that you would know it from the WHO's press release on the occasion of World TB Day (today, although the release came out Thursday). The WHO takes a self-congratulatory tone, announcing that TB has leveled off for the first time since 1993. It's not until the third para that you find out in actual numbers, TB continued to rise in 2005, just more slowly than it had in 2004. That's worth trumpeting?

TB scientists complain that one of their biggest obstacles is the abysmal funding, about a tenth of the money available for research on HIV/AIDS. It seems to me that the WHO's positive spin is going to make donors even less likely to chip in. I don't doubt that the situation could be worse, but when a disease kills nearly 2 million people a year, that's no time for pats on the back.

A few scientists at the meeting have said that they find the WHO's stance unhelpful and demoralizing. Fortunately, it dosn't seem to be affecting their research too much. This is my first TB keystone meeting, but people here have been marveling at how well attended it is this year.

Even better, many of the attendees are young grad students and postdocs. After decades of no drugs, no vaccines and absolutely no money, TB is making a comeback. You could almost say that attention from celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Bono has made TB sort of... sexy.

As offensive as that might sound, anything that brings this horrible killer more attention is all right with me. I'm heading back now to hear more about clinical trials for new TB vaccines, the first good candidates to be tested in almost a 100 years.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 07:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Conflict of Interest is a touchy matter. Just crack open the pages of Nature Medicine and you’ll see that scientists who publish topnotch research regularly declare financial conflicts. It’s a fact that drug companies seek out the best physician-scientists—and so do agencies in need independent scientific advice, such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

So what to think of the new FDA proposal limiting conflict of interest on its advisory panels? The proposal would prevent researchers from serving on panels if they receive more than $50,000 from a company or competitor whose product is being discussed. Those who receive less than that amount can participate in the committee but cannot vote.

The agency is in a tough position: it’s been slammed repeatedly over lax conflict of interest rules. Yet agency officials are right when they say that the best advisors may often have financial conflicts.

The Institute of Medicine recognized this dilemma in its recommendations for FDA reform last fall. They recommended capping the percentage of individuals with a ‘significant’ financial conflict of interest at 60 percent.

The proposed guidelines seem to follow the spirit, if not the letter, of this recommendation. It’s possible the guidelines go too far--considering that it seems that no one with any conflict whatsoever can vote—or that the guidelines will lose their teeth after the 60 day comment period. For a breakdown of the pros and cons, see Derek Lowe’s blog “In the pipeline.”

Either way, it’s good to see the FDA is responding to legitimate criticism of its current system, as well as threats from Congress to impose more draconian conflict of interest rules through legislation.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's hear it for Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health. He came out strongly in support of stem cell research at a Senate hearing this Monday, bucking the official line of the Bush administration.

"It is in the best interests of our scientists, our science, our country," he said, "that the nation finds a way to allow the science to go full speed on both adult and embryonic stem cell research." Zerhouni also denounced the notion that adult stem cells hold just as much promise as embryonic stem cells.

Whether the NIH director is being flogged right now in a back room at the White House is unclear. But administration officials were quick to try and repair the damage. “There was only one moral line the President said that he would not cross," said a White House spokesperson, "and that is that federal taxpayer dollars should not be used in the destruction of embryos.”

A few years ago, when stem cells seemed the biggest thing on the President’s agenda, Zerhouni’s statement might have caused a massive uproar. But now it seems that it’s getting lost in all the other dramas going on, from the Scooter Libby trial to the Supreme Court case on “Bong hits 4 Jesus.” Maybe, just maybe, there’s change—or at least rebellion—brewing on the stem cell front. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to what happens next.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

By now, there's mountains of depressing evidence that in the Bush administration, ideology always trumps science.

Nowhere does this seem more cruelly short-sighted than in the administration's approach to AIDS. I've written here before about the government's insistence that any groups that receive federal funds have to formally oppose prostitution.

Here's one more disheartening report: after a year-long investigation, the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit based in Washington DC, has found that PEPFAR, the administration's $15 billion AIDS initiative, "has not worked out the way it was envisioned."

One of PEPFAR's most criticized aspects is the ABC approach for prevention: abstinence, be faithful and condoms. Neither abstinence nor being faithful is much of an option for a married woman whose husband is unfaithful, but let's not get bogged down by practical details.

The center's Consortium of Investigative Journalists filed two dozen Freedom of Information Act requests, FOIA lawsuits against the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Health and Human Services. After more than 100 interviews, examination of thousands of pages of documents and reporting on the ground in affected countries, they say that:

In fact, the actual prevention practices stress the "AB" messages — abstinence until marriage and being faithful to one partner. The "C" has moved to a small c, and the use of condoms is lumped into the category of "other preventions" that includes prevention of mother-to-child transmission, blood safety, safe medical injections and control of intravenous drug use.

It's nice to see that tomorrow, this ambitious project, dubbed "Divine intervention", is set to win the first prize in online and trade journals category from the Association of Health Care Journalists.

On another positive note, I mentioned before that Brazil had turned down money from the US rather than meet the ideological demands. Looks like even within this country, there's some rebellion afoot.

On March 5, Wisconsin turned down about $600,000 in federal "abstinence-only-before-marriage" funds because the money would have prevented programs from teaching kids about contraception or sexually transmitted diseases. California, Maine, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have also turned down the funds and another dozen are set to do the same, according to Madison's The Capital Times

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

People being treated for cancer often become anemic, meaning their blood oxygen levels fall too low, which is partly why they feel exhausted during treatment. To ease the anemia — and the fatigue — doctors prescribe erythropoietins, which stimulate the production of red blood cells.

On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration warned that these drugs, sold under the brand names Epogen, Procrit and Aranesp, are doing more harm than good in some cases. Doctors have apparently been over-prescribing the drugs, using them to reverse anemia, instead of just alleviating it enough to avoid blood transfusions.

The agency says that the drugs carry a higher risk of blood clots in the legs and the lungs, could make tumors grow faster, and could even cause people being treated for cancer to die more quickly. The drugs will now be sold with a black-box warning that highlights these risks.

Here's what I don't understand: we first reported on the risks with these drugs in 2003, when a couple of trials unexpectedly showed that people taking erythropoietin died faster than those taking the placebo.

We quoted experts who had found that many tumor cells have receptors for erythropoietin and that the cells grow faster in response to erythropoietin, and we reported — perhaps naively, in retrospect — that the mounting evidence might have an effect on how the drugs are prescribed.

As I said, that was in December 2003, more than three years ago.

Why has it taken so long for the FDA to act?

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The Stanley Medical Research Institute, a Maryland-based philanthropy, is donating $100 million to uncover the genes important in mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, according to an article in today's Boston Globe.

The money is going to the Broad Institute, led by genome bigwig Eric Lander, who was one of the driving forces behind the cancer genome. I've already noted the criticisms against that project, and some of the same apply here. Sure, technology now allows us to find the genetic variations between different people and the researchers will no doubt find masses of data.

But these are extremely complex disorders, each involving multiple genes. What roles do those genes play in the disease? Without understanding how the different genes interact and what the impact is of the different variations, the data will be all but meaningless. For example, scientists from the cancer genome project are reporting in this week's Nature that the number of mutations that drive cancer is much larger than they expected.

To the institute's credit, the mental illness project's results will be publicly available — the more scientists who can analyze the data the better. Lander is quoted in the Globe as saying, "If you're looking for a needle in a haystack, and you can sift the whole haystack, you'll find the needle."

Hmmm.... I don't think that was the message of the idiom.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My New Yorker mag arrived Monday with an article about a topic that's all too familiar to us, here at Nature Medicine. Science reporter Michael Specter wrote about AIDS denialists — or dissenters as they like to call themselves — who say either that HIV does not cause AIDS or that antiretroviral drugs do more harm than good, and that most scientists are in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. That last bit may be debatable, but to us and to everyone we consider credible, there's no doubt that HIV causes AIDS or that antiretroviral drugs are safe.

I'm happy the New Yorker gave this urgent and deeply troubling issue some much-needed attention, but I'm a bit disappointed with its tepid tone. If you get through the whole article — and I suppose many of the magazine's readers do — you come away with the feeling that the denialists are certainly wrong. But the first few pages give so much space to Peter Duesberg, the most famous denialist, and to the potential benefits of South Africa's traditional medicines that you might almost be tempted to think these people have a fair point. After all, who among us hasn't thought that scientists can be too harsh on those who don't agree with the reigning hypothesis or that they don't pay enough attention to traditional therapies?

But this is not your average scientific disagreement. There is NO question that HIV causes AIDS and to follow the "he said-she said" school of journalism in this case, strikes me as tame and... well, I'll leave it there. I hope the New Yorker piece goes some way to repairing the damage caused last year by an article in Harper's by dissenter Celia Farber.

For our part, we've covered the resurgence of denialists and the activities, in particular, of one Matthias Rath, who markets multivitamins as a cure for AIDS. Scientists and AIDS activists have sued the South African government and Rath for conducting trials of the so-called vitamin cures.

These denialists like to distort scientists' own statements to support their theories and have even misappropriated sentences from one of our scientific reports, which we explicitly countered in an editorial last year after the Harper's piece appeared. And we hope more of the mainstream press steps up to cover this issue.

Update: We have decided not to accept any more comments on this post, as the discussion between the two camps is not productive. We don't want this blog to perpetuate a discussion that has already received too much attention

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

What are FDA officials thinking?

The FDA is poised to approve a front-line antibiotic used for mengingitis and other human infections for use in cattle, according to a report in Sunday’s Washington Post. Approval of the antibiotic could lead to antibiotic resistance developing in animals, and then spreading to people.

Apparently the agency is not thinking; it seems instead to be following a ‘guidance document'.

And that document goes against the advice of the agency’s own scientific experts, the American Medical Association and about a dozen other health groups.

These health groups point to evidence that antibiotic use in animals is linked to the development of antibiotic resistance in the human population. In fact, an FDA advisory committee voted 6 to 4 against approving animal use of the antibiotic, cefquinome, a fourth-generation cephalosporin.

Nonetheless, Stephen Sundloff, the head of the FDA’s Veterinary Medicine Center, told panel members that their vote was “not binding”. Instead, he told the committee that the FDA was bound by “Guidance for Industry #152” which limits bans on antibiotic use in animals; the details are a bit mind-numbing but it seems that it’s only easy to ban an antibiotic for animal use if the drug threatens treatments for food-borne illnesses.

That’s way too narrow a definition, given the ability of bacteria to exchange resistance genes. Let’s hope that, in the end, the FDA is able to make a common-sense and scientifically sound decision.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last week, the Office of Women's Careers at Massachusetts General Hospital showed that with a little bit of financial help, young women scientists who temporarily leave the lab can successfully reclaim their careers when they come back.

When I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the biochemistry department had 30 faculty members — and only 2 were women.

The situation seems to have improved somewhat and 8 of the 37 principal investigators are women. The graduate student pool, in contrast, was half women when I was there and is at least that now.

You know where this is heading. Women are overwhelmingly the majority among biology majors in college, many make it to graduate school but then drop out along the way to the top. There are a hundred opinions — some, like Larry Summers', quite controversial — about why that happens. And we'd like to hear your views about that too.

But one indisputable factor is that when women scientists leave the lab to have a baby, it's very difficult for them to maintain research productivity. There are a scattered few programs to help women at this vulnerable point in their careers, which we wrote about in 2004 in the news feature, A lab of her own.

The MGH program, described in a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine, gives two-year "bridge grants" of up to $50,000 to junior researchers who also care for young children. In the first nine years of the program, 90% of the recipients have remained at the MGH and more than half have received academic promotions at Harvard Medical School.

The amount is modest to be sure, but it helps the recipients — 40 so far — find practical solutions to their quandary. For example, Karen K. Miller, a 1999 recipient, applied her grant toward hiring a research assistant who continued Miller's work on anorexia nervosa while she was away. It also shows an institution's commitment to helping them with their careers — something many women scientists say is sorely needed.

Good news is that Harvard University, which recently found itself a woman president, is already exploring a similar model to help women at the university.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

You probably know that pondering the universe and its mysterious ways can soothe a broken heart. Apparently, it can also physically heal the heart.

Scientists are reporting in the journal Ethnicity & Disease that practicing transcendental meditation improves the heart's functioning (as measured by a six-minute walk test), helps relieve depression and generally improves the quality of life in people with congestive heart failure.

The randomized study has a small sample size: 23 African American men and women with the average age of 64, who had all been hospitalized for heart failure, abd observed for three and six months.

But this strikes me as one of those win-win strategies. Even if the physical improvement is small, I buy the lifestyle effect. I'm one of those New Yorkers who can never fully shut down, but I bet meditating every day would make me more er, serene, and indirectly more healthy.

(And for those of you who're Seinfeld fans, yes, that's a shout out to the show.)

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 03:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Did you know that one out of every three people is infected with the bacteria that cuase tuberculosis (TB)?

There's this mistaken impression that TB is no longer a problem, that 'consumption' as it was once called, long ago lost its power to kill. But in fact, 125 years after Mycobacterium tuberculosis was identified, the disease kills nearly 2 million people a year.

24 March 2007 is World TB day and partly in recognition of that, we've put together a special supplement about TB in our March issue.

News from the special is chock full of statistics, features and profiles of key players. One feature article exposes a power struggle between scientists who work with HIV and those who work with tuberculosis (TB), which is undermining the fight against both diseases.

TB is the leading cause of death among those infected with HIV and in some African countries, about 60% of those with TB are also HIV-positive. Yet, the two communities continue to work separately, diagnosing and treating one disease without taking the other into account.

One sore point for TB scientists is that TB research gets less than a tenth of the money allotted to HIV/AIDS each year. Existing drugs and vaccines for TB were developed decades ago so the infrastructure and expertise for TB need to be built up from scratch. But without enough money, says another article in the special, researchers are struggling to do the research needed to find new drugs and vaccines.

Other news articles describe the public-private partnerships that are helping to solve this funding crisis and the new drugs, vaccines and diagnostic tests in the pipeline.

The special also carries scientific commentaries about the threat of extensively drug-resistant TB, which is virtually incurable, and about the scientific challenges in developing new TB drugs.

We'd love to hear your thoughts about this special. Tell us what you liked--and what you didn't like--about our coverage.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some people have been picking on those adorable girl scouts for peddling their cookies—as if every little girl were really some sort of evil trans-fat pusher, single-handedly blimping up America. Ok, the main force behind this anti-American sentiment seems to be one woman who set up a small activist group and website, “National Action against Obesity.” But she managed to get herself on the O’Reilly Factor.

Like good citizens, the Girl Scouts have responded—reducing the levels of trans-fats in their cookies. According to FDA standards for ingredient labels each cookie contains zero trans-fat. Well, the trans-fat is not quite gone, since the FDA counts less than 0.5 grams of trans fat as “zero”. Just don’t eat the whole box.

Way to go girl scouts—give me a double order of those Do-Si-Dos.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Almost any day of the week in Washington, DC you can go to a public hearing—and if you’re lucky you’ll be entertained at the sight of some harried public servant squirming under the relentless questioning of our elected representatives. Last week’s intended victim was Andrew von Eschenbach, head of that beleaguered agency, the US Food and Drug Administration.

Von Eschenbach appeared before Senate and House appropriations subcommittees to defend the proposed 2008 FDA budget. On Wednesday I wandered down to the capitol—source of straitjacket dull fashion and casualty of a recent impertinent smoking ban, courtesy of Nancy Pelosi—to check out the action at the House.

I have to admit that I should have taken better notes. But every time von Eschenbach opened his mouth I wanted to fall asleep; he must have used the word “system” about 18 times and “process” at least 22.

Still, I woke up when representatives began grilling von Eschenbach about news reports that he planned to cut funding for the FDA’s Office of Women’s Health—ostensibly in retaliation for the office’s support for over-the-counter “Plan B” contraception.

He called the reports, “inaccurate.” but he failed to assuage the committee, saying, “I haven’t made that decision yet.” Congress will have to wait till March 15 to learn if funding will be retained. I must admit I was a bit disappointed: He obviously wasn’t squirming enough.

Von Eschenbach also faced a phalanx of representatives concerned about food safety. He could not say when a long-overdue report on this summer’s spinach outbreak would appear, had no opinion on whether irradiation was underused to zap food, and I'm still not sure what he would do if he was, hypothetically, given $20 million more for food safety. But he did use one of those words again. How to shore up the food supply? “This is a systems problem that requires a systems approach.”

Representative Sam Farr from California’s spinach district was not impressed, “It’s a mystery why they [the FDA] would come before us with so few concrete answers,” he said in a press release.

Committee members also did not let von Eschenbach off lightly when it came to drug safety, grilling him about the approval of the antibiotic Ketek—itself a subject of separate hearings. Von Eschenbach defended the FDA’s record on conflict of interest among members of its advisory committees, saying it was broadening access to experts and that the agency “Is taking a process improvement approach to this.”

The committee’s chair, Rosa DeLauro from Connecticut, seems like the smartest of the bunch, bristling with sharp questions and a record of sponsoring a measure to grant the agency greater authority over post-marketing surveillance.

She and other committee members could be strong advocates for positive change at the FDA, especially if von Eschenbach begins to work better with the congressmen who have authority over his budget. Now that’s a process worth improving.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Scientist recently published a "Guide to retractions" written by Andrea Gawrylewski.

She makes a good point that there has been a proliferation of terms to create awareness that something's not right about a paper. "Expression of Concern Reaffirmed"? That's one I hadn't heard before.

In our neck of the woods, I'm embarrassed to say that we are rather old fashioned. We only have Addenda, Corrigenda, Errata and Retractions (which, for consistency, we should start calling 'Retracta', I guess).

I suspect that this paucity of terms will be a bit disappointing to some of our readers, particularly to those who write to alert us that someone committed some form of misconduct that invalidates the conclusions of a paper and then discover that we didn't even "express our concern", let alone reaffirm it.

This is not to say that we don't care when someone lets us know that a paper may have fraudulent data. But the reality is that many of the allegations we receive are not documented at all and/or are anonymous. In other words, it's hard to take seriously an e-mail saying:

"Please be aware that the paper by Hornmeister et al. is the result of scientific fraud.

Sincerely yours,

A friend of Nature Medicine"

Sometimes, people accuse colleagues of what one could call 'fraud by proxy':

"Please be aware that the paper by Hornmeister et al. that you are currently considering may be the result of scientific fraud, as he has a paper under investigation at another journal.

Sincerely yours,

Another concerned friend of Nature Medicine"

It's then amusing to discover that, roughly half the time, we are not even considering a paper by Dr. Hornmeister.

Retracting, expressing concerns or writing an editor's warning about a paper is a serious matter, not only for the authors, but also for the journal that published the work. Of course, all of us want to get the scientific record straight, but I don't think that making ill-documented, anonymous accusations is a good beginning. We have previously published in the journal suggestions about what to do when you suspect someone has committed fraud. If I'm not mistaken, throwing the stone and then hiding around the corner was not one of them.

We welcome your "expressions of concern", but please back them up with evidence and be prepared to stand behind them. As long as we continue receiving vague accusations from "friends of Nature Medicine", Dr. Hornmeister can continue to sleep peacefully.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Can the US government compel non-governmental organziations (NGOs) to condemn prostitution?

Yes, if those NGOs want to qualify for government funds. That's the upshot of a ruling on Tuesday by a federal appeals court.

Since 2003, the US has required that to qualify for funds from the $15 billion PEPFAR program for AIDS, nonprofit groups abroad have to explicitly oppose prostitution and sex trafficking.

NGOs say that taking an explicit antiprostitution stance would make it harder for them to work with sex workers, one of the highest risk groups for HIV infection. In 2005, Brazil refused $40 million from the US rather than comply with the requriements.

Even within the US, the law has been controversial and has gone through a long process of rulings and counter-rulings.

In 2005, after the law expanded to include US groups, DKT International, a Washington D.C-based organization, sued the government, arguing that the law violated its free speech rights.

Last year, a lower court agreed and ruled that the law is unconstitutional. But on Tuesday, US Circuit Judge A Raymond Randolph reversed that ruling, saying that the US Congress has authorized the Bush administration to fund these groups "on such terms and conditions as the President may determine."

What do you think? Are these acceptable strings?

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)