By Ariel Fernández By now, many of us have heard of Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, the company awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant that subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. Like Anthony Fauci, his boss at NIH, Daszak vociferously denied he had any responsibility in the […]
It now turns out that the American biophysicist Michael W. Deem from Rice University was far more involved in the widely condemned “CRISPR babies” experiment than was previously known. STAT learned that Deem was the senior author on a paper entitled “Birth of twins after genome editing for HIV resistance” submitted to Nature in November, 2018. The first […]
The genetic editing of human embryos through a molecular biology manipulation known as CRISPR surely sent shock waves across the globe. Many felt that He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who carried out the experiments had opened Pandora’s box. Yet, as people had now some time to ponder over the events, the scientific establishment has […]
Last week The New York Times published a front-page story entitled “Years of Ethics Charges but Star Cancer Researcher Gets a Pass“. The article grossly disparages Prof. Carlo Croce, a towering figure in cancer biology and genetics, and his home institution, The Ohio State University. It describes in some detail multiple accusations of misconduct and […]
Hilda Bastian is an NIH contractor for PubMed Health and PubMed Commons at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). She also seems to be a prolific science writer. Bastian recently informed the blog Retraction Watch that the NLM is planning a prominent display of Expressions of Concern (EoC) published by […]
Ariel Fernandez Drug designers often implement molecular therapies to block malfunctioning proteins that are causing disease. They do so by creating small molecules that bind to the intended protein target when suitably delivered. The procedure has its risks as unintended targets (off-target proteins) may also be hit or impaired, especially when they are structurally similar (homologous) […]
In a striking analysis published in Nature, Stanford University researcher John Ioannidis, the expert on metadata investigation at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, has seriously questioned the way the National Institutes of Health fund research proposals. He and his colleague Joshua Nicholson have argued in what seems like a rousing condemnation of the status quo that peer-review, the process by which study sections […]
