Today’s News Round-Up

Today’s News Round-Up

Forgive me for putting a lot of small stories together in one entry. There’s simply not much research news today.

There are stories here and there about stem cell money/legislation in various states—universities are pushing for state funding in New York (see CBS radio 1010 WINS), the Washington Post had an article about Governor Ehrlich’s proposed stem cell plan, and the Macon Telegraph reports that Georgia Democrats want to create a state commission to organize, fund and oversee embryonic stem-cell research. The bill is given little chance of passage, according to the article. These are all developing issues, but there’s little actual events tied to them yet that mean research funding will be distributed.

Hwang Woo Suk finally got fired, along with some other members of his research team. There’s an AP story on Canada.com, and the BBC also reports.

A couple things that might be of general interest—an article in MIT’s Technology Review about using embryonic stem cells to study disease (as the Australians I blogged about yesterday hope to do). The website for the Scientist magazine has a lengthy blog entry about a symposium on stem cell research that took place in San Francisco yesterday. Questions that were discussed included research issues, funding issues, collaboration, business activities, and so on. Wish I’d been there, it sounds like it was interesting. One of the points the blogger made was that participants see the US as falling behind the rest of the world in research.

There’s a stem cell study going on in Florida to test a new drug for patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and multiple myeloma patients. The drug is being tested to see if it can increase the number of stem cells harvested from the bone marrow prior to the patients undergoing chemotherapy. The Bradenton Herald reports.