Nitromed has been in trouble for several years now. They're a perfect example of a dog that caught a car: a company that was demolished by actually getting its drug on the market. No one wanted to...

So it was green fluorescent protein after all! We can argue about whether this was a pure chemistry prize or another quasi-biology one, but either way, the award is a strong one. So, what is the stuff and what's it do? Osamu Shimomura discov...

Resveratrol's a mighty interesting compound. It seems to extend lifespan in yeast and various lower organisms, and has a wide range of effects in mice. Famously, GlaxoSmithKline has expensively bought out Sirtris, a company whose entire research...

You're supposed to disclose conflicts of interest if you're the author of a scientific paper. For the most part, everyone does, but it's those times that the system breaks down that cause all the trouble. Does this author actually earn a side income...

Johnson & Johnson says that it could be cutting up to 8,000 jobs. This has been in the wind for a while, but I haven't had any reports yet of what it's doing on the ground to the research sites. Any news from the readers affected, or is that yet to...

Back in late September I wrote about a controversial paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It attracted comment for its way-out-there hypothesis: that caterpillars and other larvae arose through a spectacular interspecies gene...

There's a constant running battle in the drug industry between the two kinds of pharmaceutical companies: the ones who discover the drugs first, and the ones who sell the drugs cheaply after the patents have expired. It surprises me still how many...