Stem-cell scientists still reeling from a judge’s ruling that their life’s work violates federal law received little reassurance about their job security from the nation’s largest funder of these studies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Describing stem-cell research as one of the more promising engines of scientific discovery, NIH director Francis Collins said the legal decision ‘poured sand into that engine of discovery.’

Late on Tuesday, a day after U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth filed his ruling that the NIH’s use of taxpayer dollars to fund experiments on human embryonic stem cells violates a 1996 law that prohibits the government from supporting any research that harms or destroys human embryos, the Obama Administration announced that it plans to appeal the judge’s preliminary injunction on all such government-funded studies currently under way in the U.S. Left unchallenged for the moment is the ban on pending studies – and there are a lot of them. According to Collins, about 50 new grant applications that were awaiting review by NIH experts were pulled from the agency’s evaluation queue and put aside. A planned September meeting of an NIH advisory council to consider an additional dozen grants worth $15-$20 million that have already passed […]

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Corneas made in the lab using genetically engineered human collagen could restore sight to millions of visually impaired people waiting for transplants from human donors, researchers say.

In a newly released study, investigators from Canada and Sweden reported results from the first 10 people in the world treated with the biosynthetic corneas.

Two years after having the corneas implanted, six of the 10 patients had improved vision. Nine of the 10 experienced cell and nerve regeneration, meaning that corneal cells and nerves grew into the implant.

‘This is the first time we have been able to regenerate a cornea in humans,

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Practicing yoga may do more than calm the mind - it may help protect against certain diseases, a new study suggests.

In the study, women who had practiced yoga regularly for at least two years were found to have lower levels of inflammation in their bodies than did women who only recently took up the activity.

Inflammation is an immune response and can be beneficial when your body is fighting off infection, but chronically high levels of inflammation are known to play a role in certain conditions, including asthma, cardiovascular disease and depression.
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Inflammation is known to be boosted by stressful situations. But when yoga experts were exposed to stress (such as dipping their feet in ice water), they experienced less of an increase in their inflammatory response than yoga novices did.

‘The study is the first one, I think, to really suggest how yoga could have some distinctive physical benefits in terms of the immune system,’ said researcher Janice Kiecolt-Glaser of Ohio State University. ‘It suggests that regular […]

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New U.S. single-family home sales unexpectedly fell in July to set their slowest pace on record while prices were the lowest in more than 6-1/2 years, government data showed on Wednesday.

Sales of single-family homes in July fell 12.4 percent.

The Commerce Department said sales dropped 12.4 percent to a 276,000 unit annual rate, the lowest since the series started in 1963, from a downwardly revised 315,000 units in June.

Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast new home sales unchanged at a 330,000 unit pace last month.

‘What we are seeing is the downside of government intervention. It had fanned expectations of a market bottom when in fact, it created a false bottom,’ said Tom Porcelli, a senior economist at RBC Capital Markets in New York. ‘We expect home sales to stay at this remarkably low range with remarkably high unemployment. There is also little demand for lending.’

U.S. stocks briefly stumbled on the report, but recovered losses as investors seemed to shrug off yet another spate of negative housing data. U.S. Treasury debt prices added to gains, while the U.S. dollar [JPY=X 84.65 0.07 (+0.08%) ] erased gains against the yen.

The housing market has wobbled following the […]

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When I was a boy, my father, who was an anesthesiologist and professor of medicine, in response to my questions, took me along to a research conference in Cincinnati, where we lived when I was young. It was only for the end of the morning and a bit of the afternoon, as I remember; part of my father’s gentle recruitment program in that long ago world of the 50s. I was about 12, I think. At lunch a number of the doctors retired to a delicatessen near the medical school, and over borscht and roast beef sandwiches whose height was measured in inches, I sat there on best behavior and absolutely silent unless spoken to. I listened to my father argue that physicians should get behind a single-payer private-practice universal coverage system, before the corporations moved in and ‘docs will be reduced to employees with limited practice authority.

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