The tobacco industry produces a product that, used as intended, kills millions of people each year. So it seems a lot to ask the industry to assume ethical standards in another of its favorite endeavors—funding scientific research. Read more
Today is the 10th anniversary of the FDA’s approval of sildenafil nitrate for the treatment of erectile dysfunction. A decade and over 30 million users later, there’s very little left to say about Viagra that hasn’t been said before. Maybe that’s why the media coverage of the anniversary has been somewhat modest. I nevertheless found this pretty neat graphic in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. It’s, of course, in Spanish, but I hope you get the gist of it. Read more
Today’s announcement that the British Prime Minister is ready to compromise and have a free vote on parts of his government’s embryo research proposal is disappointing. Read more
I’m in the middle of preparing a talk that I’m scheduled to give in Madrid in a few days. The talk is called “Myths and realities of publishing in the Nature journals”, and its goal, at least in part, is to dispel the myth that our journals discriminate against, say, Spanish-speaking countries or developing nations, and that we favor countries like the USA and Britain. Read more
A lot has been said about the link between calorie restriction and aging — eat less, live longer. But if that wasn’t enough, there seems to be a new reason to do away with snacking: calorie restriction has an anti-depressant effect in mice, which depends on orexin-mediated signaling. Read more
There’s a remarkable number of drugs that people use for which the mechanism of action is unknown, and two papers in the Journal of Neuroscience illustrate this point from two different perspectives. Read more
Sighs of relief from the whole editorial community were heard this weekend, following a ruling denying Pfizer accces to confidential peer-review documents from the NEJM. Read more
This week’s issue of JAMA struck me as pretty interesting. They normally publish stuff that’s too clinical or epidemiological for my taste and in comparison to what we publish, but this time they had a themed issue on genomics with four articles reporting associations between gene variants and diseases of different systems. Read more
Recent comments
Real-time tissue analysis could guide brain tumor surgery
Bundled RNA balls silence brain cancer gene expression
Ebola outbreak in West Africa lends urgency to recently-funded research