“These big acquisitions don’t do a thing for research. I don’t think anyone should be fooled into thinking these big acquisitions have anything to do with innovation or increased research and development capacity.”

Kenneth Kaitin, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, comments on suggestions that Pfizer could cut its research spend by up to $3 billion after merging with Wyeth (Bloomberg).

“At the input end, we need to figure out how the tongue knows what it’s tasting – what are the basic tastes, how are the cells organized, and what are the encoding properties for taste and flavour. At the other end, we need to understand how the cortex takes information from our peripheral senses and transforms it into a percept, an internal representation of the outside world.”

Charles Zuker, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has just published a paper explaining how we taste carbonation in drinks (press release).

“Even a small amount of exposure to second-hand smoke can increase in blood clotting, constrict blood vessels and can cause a heart attack. Short-term exposure can make a big difference.”

Neal Benowitz is a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco and a member of a panel from the Institute of Medicine which has just issued a report calling for smoking bans in all restaurants, offices and public buildings (NY Times).

“Although febrile reactions significantly decreased, prophylactic administration of antipyretic drugs at the time of vaccination should not be routinely recommended since antibody responses to several vaccine antigens were reduced.”

Researchers writing in the Lancet say that the children should not be given paracetamol to control fever after vaccinations as the drug may reduce the effectiveness of the vaccine.