California’s $3-billion dollar stem cell agency plans to make a few changes in response to an assessment last month by the Institute of Medicine, an outside panel of scientific experts. Read more
A balanced California budget announced Thursday is good news for the state’s institutes of higher education. The University of California and California State University systems will each receive an additional $250 million in the 2013-2014 budget, partially restoring drastic cuts made during the fiscal crisis. The plan also includes an additional $2.7 billion for community colleges and K-12 schools, according to the Sacramento Bee. Read more
Days after declaring a voluntary moratorium on grants, the $3-billion Texas cancer institute has announced the appointment of two interim leaders with expertise in state finance. Wayne Roberts is a former associate vice president for public policy at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Former Texas Deputy Comptroller Billy Hamilton will serve as an advisor. Earlier in December, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) announced that it had hired a new chief scientific officer. Read more
Many a cancer study seeks to tally dangerous mutations, but factors besides genes may yield insights that are just as important. Two laboratories at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco this week presented work on cancer-relevant findings that are independent of particular mutations: one group shows that a few minutes’ compression reverts malignant cells to normal, another that changes in breasts’ cellular composition may remove barriers for malignant growth. Read more
Plaques and tangles pockmark the brains of people with Alzheimer’s. The extracellular protein beta amyloid makes plaques and the intracellular protein tau makes tangles, but how exactly these might kill neurons is unclear. Work presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco this week starts to connect some of these dots. Read more
A session on scientific reproducibility today quickly became a discussion about perverse incentives. Robust research takes more time and complicates otherwise compelling stories. This turns scientists who cut corners into rising stars while discouraging the diligent. It also produces highly-cited scientific publications that cannot be reproduced. Read more
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 California Institute of Regenerative Medicine received a mixture of praise and hard-to-enact recommendations from an august scientific body today. Read more
When 23andMe offered a few select clients the opportunity to have the protein-encoding portion of their genome sequenced, Gabe Rudy jumped at the chance. On Wednesday, he walked strangers through the results. His conclusion: most detected genetic “variants of interest” are either not variants or not interesting. “Clinics beware,” he writes in a blog post detailing the analysis. Read more
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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