Stem Cell Policy Hampering Research
- NIH official speaks out against Bush’s plan

Better work through the network
-Using LinkedIn to expand your network.

Take aim…
- This month’s Economist includes a brief overview of the intrinsic difficulties developing cancer therapies.

Here’s a description from Nature’s blog Nascent-

Scintilla is an aggregator—of science weblogs, news stories and publication databases—but it works in a slightly different way from the existing online RSS readers that cover the whole internet. For a start, the sources are manually selected, and only related to science, so there shouldn’t be any trouble with spam when searching for stories. Also there’s no ‘unread items’ count, so you don’t have to feel like you have lots of reading to catch up on. Browse the site, add sources to your collection, and visit your ‘Read’ page on Scintilla whenever you’re looking for some juicy science stories to read.

The other important feature of Scintilla is ratings and recommendations. As you’re browsing through stories or papers, give them a quick rating: high if you think it’s interesting and you’d like to read more like this, low if it’s not your cup of tea. These ratings will be analysed alongside everyone else’s and used to recommend stories that you might like (if other people liked the same stories as you, you’ll hopefully like the other things they found interesting as well).

You can also manually recommend stories to other people: either to individual members of your social network, or to groups that you’ve joined. There are already groups for bioinformatics, pop science, images, visualisation and open science, but if your speciality isn’t covered then feel free to start up a group and invite your colleagues to join. The more interesting people in your network, the better your recommendations will be

I haven’t had an opportunity to take a close look at the service, but I like the concept. The true utility of the aggregator will ultimately determine whether or not scientists choose to use the service. The scientific community isn’t nearly as web-addicted as IT folks (for obvious reasons) so I don’t think it’s a given that the scientifically-inclined will adopt the numerous web services Nature is rolling out lately. However, I do think it’s high time that someone gave it a shot.

Additional reading:
Scintilla brings personalization to science

Scintilla, a science aggregator and recommendation engine freshly from the Natureplex

I don’t have a problem with companies lobbying for increases in the H1-B visa cap (that currently stands at 65,000.) Incredibly, the cap was reached on the very first day that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began accepting visa applications for 2007. I do take issue with corporations justifying a cap increase by claiming there is a “scientist shortage”. I can’t comment on engineering and IT fields, but there is certainly not a labor shortage in biomedicine as institutions around the country are saturated with scientists (mostly in the form of postdoctoral fellows) searching for gainful employment. Perhaps these corporations are really saying that there is a talented scientist shortage, and if that is the case action must be taken to amend the situation.

Avoiding competition by limiting the number of H1-B visas is not the answer. Talented scientists and engineers will take their skills somewhere and the US loses a competitive advantage by turning them away. The visa cap should not be abolished as Gates suggests. but a sustainable number should be identified. It is obvious to me as a graduate student that major systemic changes must be made to the current structure to make scientific training more desirable. I will abstain from pontificating on the numerous problems with graduate training at this time (perhaps I’ll address these issues in future posts!) Obtaining a PhD is far too lengthy and arduous to be greeted by a saturated job market and low wages. However, severely limiting foreign competition (in the form of foreign talent) is not the solution…systemic changes to increase US competitiveness is.

Scientists apply for first patent on synthetic life form
- Controversial issue that will certainly generate much discourse over the next several years.

- Biologists make skin cells work like stem cells
Potentially huge step for regenerative medicine.

- Venture fund seeks out cost cutters in health care.

- Is health care making you better–or dead?
Interview with Regina Herzlinger (author of Who Killed Health Care?). Long, but provides great insight into the problems with the US health care system.

I am well aware of the difficulties inherent in drug discovery and development, but I remain amazed that the massive efforts and resources put forth by thousands of very intelligent people continue to yield subpar results. Is it possible that expectations are too high? Perhaps the much more favorable ratio of investment to approved NME’s in the 90′s was a result of “low hanging fruit”? Is the current return on investment (or lack thereof) sustainable? If not, what is the breaking point?

I suppose this is good news if you own equity in a small biotech and hope to cash out by acquisition!

I believe there are 3 critical barriers that must be overcome to successfully foster entrepreneurship in science graduate programs:

1) Academic culture

2) Structure of graduate programs

3) Access to resources

I will address each of these issues in the coming weeks.

The prospect of open source biology is very intriguing, but fraught with complexities. I plan to post more on the biotech open source movement in the future.