Research funding
terrasig | October 4, 2007Although the dichloroacetate (DCA) horse has been beaten beyond recognition, PharmCanuck sends some interesting news from north of the border about how University of Alberta researchers have generated funds to support their clinical trial of this unpatented compound.
Our correspondent writes:
I was a stunned this morning when I read an online article on the CBC website (http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2007/10/04/fundraising-dca.html) revealing the source of the trial funding. Amazingly, almost 1/3 ($250K) of the $800K raised has come from the efforts of the small town of Peace River, Alberta…
terrasig | September 17, 2007Brian C. Martinson has written an excellent commentary that appears in the 13 September issue of Nature. The topic of "Universities and The Money Fix" is the discordance between the goals of NIH and research universities in conducting biomedical research and, as a result, generating research trainees at a rate whose absorption by the system is unsustainable.
Since the early 1980s new investigators have been entering NIH funding at a more rapid rate than experienced investigators have been exiting, leading to a population increase...
...We need to look at both the supply and the demand sides…
terrasig | September 12, 2007Just a quick post about observations I had at a recent prostate cancer meeting conducted by the US Department of Defense's (DOD) Congressionally-Directed Medical Research Program (CDMRP). In the US, DOD is second only to NIH in the amount of funding provided for breast and prostate cancer research.
The meeting was held in Atlanta and spread over three days - a nice small meeting with few overlapping sessions and great opportunities for interaction with speakers and fellow scientists.
Most impressive, however, was the heavy presence of the cancer patient community in the proceedings. The…
terrasig | January 10, 2007This blog was established originally to discuss the promise of natural products in human therapeutics, particularly to identify those herbal medicines that might have some potential for utility as medicines. However, a quick review of my posts reveals a majority of reports of negative outcomes of efficacy or other problems with herbal medicines.
Well, as many of my readers and fellow bloggers down under are aware, the situation in the US is not unique. According to this news report out of Australia:
Popular folk remedies such as aloe vera and lavender oil may not possess healing properties…
terrasig | November 30, 2006FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, November 30, 2006
CONTACT: NIH News Media Branch, 301-496-5787
NIH ANNOUNCES MORE THAN 50 AWARDS IN THE PATHWAY TO INDEPENDENCE PROGRAM
Five-Year Grants Foster Transition to Research Independence
Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., director of the National Institutes of Health, today named 58 recipients of the NIH Pathway to Independence Award.
The Pathway to Independence Program, announced in January of this year, offers a new opportunity for promising postdoctoral scientists to receive both mentored and independent research support from the same award.
"New…
terrasig | September 1, 2006Interesting to see the Wall Street Journal this morning with an article carrying this title (here, but subscription req'd - hence, I will quote heavily).
Everyone knows that US NIH funding cuts have made it difficult for all academics who depend on the nation's health agency for research support.
When 27% of proposals were funded, it wasn't that hard to separate the top quarter, says molecular biologist Keith Yamamoto of the University of California, San Francisco. "There was a natural cutoff," he says. But at 10% "the ability to distinguish a grant that deserves funding from one that does…
terrasig | August 14, 2006She could've joined the lab of a Nobel laureate at Yale.
She picked me instead.
This is my thank you.
Regular readers may recall my post earlier last month about the tragic, heart-wrenching loss of the brother of my former student, Jen, a Morehead Scholar and sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Her brother Jon was a 23-year-old Carnegie-Mellon University graduate student and crew team coach. After completing the Chicago Marathon last fall, some nagging persistent pain in his femur turned out to be the bone cancer, osteosarcoma.
After months of hospitalization…
terrasig | August 11, 2006Welcome feminist bloggers and commentors from Coturnix's guest post at Echidne of the Snakes.
Howdy, folks. Let me introduce myself. I'm the guy who got this discussion started at Terra Sigillata, where Coturnix's home blog is hosted by ScienceBlogs.com.
Short story is that I asked a rhetorical question about a single Hooters establishment (on the San Antonio, TX, Riverwalk) that sits within two blocks of the world's largest international breast cancer research conference held every December, the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS).
My wife is a medical oncologist specializing in…
terrasig | August 7, 2006...all without being perceived as capitalistic, misogynistic, or otherwise demeaning to women?
This is an open thread for y'all because I have to go to a funeral and won't be able to oversee the discussion today.
I brought this point up over the weekend with my ScienceBlogs.com colleagues and it got such a passionate response that I thought I'd open it up to the blogosphere.
I have a very serious question (below) related to breasts, and I really hope the women bloggers and readers will weigh in. I know that there are many high-profile female bloggers out there with a heavy feminist worldview…
terrasig | August 2, 2006SciBlings Alex Palazzo (The Daily Transcript) and Mike the Mad Biologist have both held forth recently on Robert Weinberg's editorial in Cell. Weinberg, one of the big daddies of early oncogene research and mentor to some of the best cancer researchers of my generation, expressed his fears that the US investment in training biomedical researchers in the 1990s is going to waste as these trainees move through postdocs and toward faculty positions that simply do not exist. The problem: so-called "Big Biology" initiatives and failure to protect the basic mechanisms of investigator-initiated…
terrasig | July 15, 2006I've gotten a few raised eyebrows this week as to why a modestly-compensated, mid-career cancer researcher would choose to (or could afford) to vacation in Aspen, Colorado. I'll have more to say about this, but just one example of why this is such a worthwhile place to visit comes from my 2 hours yesterday at a free Aspen Institute lecture listening to financier, venture philanthropist, and prostate cancer survivor, Michael Milken, talk about how to revolutionize the pace of scientific discovery and implementation of medical innovations.
Many people remember Mr Milken incorrectly, or at…