Research Issues
Leading research centre bars execs from serving on corporate boards
January 16th, 2019 Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre, one of the world’s leading research institutions, has announced that it would bar its top executives from serving on corporate boards of drug and health care companies that, in some cases, had paid them...
Leading cancer expert resigns as journal editor after disclosure issues
January 9th, 2019 Dr José Baselga, the former chief medical officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre, resigned under pressure as one of the editors-in-chief of the American Association for Cancer Research's journal Cancer Discovery, after he failed to...
UCT professor warns about Africa's science brain drain
December 12th, 2018 Not only are many science graduates in Africa unemployed but the situation is getting worse, fuelling a brain drain to Europe, the UK and North America, warned Professor Kelly Chibale of the University of Cape Town at a ceremony awarding him...
Mischievous responders misleading LGBQ researchers
December 5th, 2018 Many research studies have reported on the elevated health risk and deviance of youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning (LGBQ). But a study using US national data suggests that many of those estimates may be overstated and that...
Doubts and outrage over genetically edited babies claims
November 28th, 2018 Significant doubts have been expressed, as well as international outrage, over unverified claims from a Chinese scientist that he has helped make the world's first genetically edited babies, reports BBC News. Professor He Jiankui says the twin...
Cochrane Collaboration in turmoil over expulsion of board member
September 19th, 2018 A the expulsion of a board member of the Cochrane Collaboration, one of medicine's most respected bodies for its reviews of clinical research, has raised questions on the limits of free speech, when it is perceived to damage an organisation's...
Top breast cancer researcher failed to disclose pharma payments
September 12th, 2018 One of the world’s top breast cancer doctors failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from drug and health care companies in recent years, omitting his financial ties from dozens of research articles in prestigious publications like...
Protecting pregnant women in clinical trials is a delicate balancing act
September 12th, 2018 Treatment decisions during pregnancy are a balancing act that should be informed by available data and expert input, notes an article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Shifting the default from exclusion of pregnant women to a careful...Financial disclosure lacking in publication of clinical trials
A substantial proportion of pharmaceutical industry payments to authors of oncology clinical trials published in major scientific journals are not disclosed, research shows. The publications focused on clinical trials that tested new cancer...
Unpaywall transforms research as academic publishers start to crack
August 22nd, 2018 Unpaywall is a free service locates open-access articles and presents paywalled papers that have been legally archived and are freely available on other websites to users who hit a paywalled version. Now, after years of resistance, firms like...
NIH shuts down controversial study funded by alcohol companies
June 20th, 2018 The US National Institutes of Health will shut down a controversial industry-funded study of moderate drinking and heart disease after a task force found severe ethical and scientific lapses in the study’s planning and execution. Stat News reports...Small MRI sample size studies lack sufficient statistical power
Small sample sizes in studies using functional MRI to investigate brain connectivity and function are common in neuroscience, despite years of warnings that such studies likely lack sufficient statistical power. A new analysis reveals that...
Human drug trials compromised by poor animal research reporting
April 18th, 2018 Poor animal study design and reporting thwarts the ethical review of proposed human drug trials, according to a study led by researchers at Hannover Medical School in Germany in cooperation with researchers from McGill University, Canada. The...Duke University faces new NIH requirements after research misconduct
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently imposed unusual new requirements on researchers based at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who receive federal funds. Science Mag reports that the changes are a response to concerns over...
NHS scepticism over study claiming heart benefits of fasting diet
March 21st, 2018 A University of Surrey study that compares the 5:2 fasting diet with a daily calorie restriction diet and concludes that fasting could have a beneficial impact on some important risk markers for cardiovascular disease, has come under NHS criticsm,...