All posts tagged "Animalresearch"

PHILADELPHIA — Every year, Katalin Karikó met with her University of Pennsylvania department chair to update him on her quest to treat disease with messenger RNA — fragile, inflammatory genetic molecules that were so difficult to work with that most scientists thought it was a waste of time. Every year, he listened to her passionate description of the science for a few minutes, then chastised her for not contributing to the department’s all-important metric: “dollars per net square footage” of lab space. The bottom line: Penn had rejected Karikó for a tenure-track position years earlier becaus......

COLUMBIA, S.C. — A series of experiments at the University of South Carolina in Columbia involving rats, cocaine and electric shocks has been stopped following a university investigation into complaints about lab-animal welfare. The experiments involved laboratory rats receiving electric shocks as punishment for seeking cocaine, according to records from the National Institutes of Health, which provided the experiment with grant funding. The experiments have been halted because the electric shocks were administered for longer periods of time and at greater strength than had been approved, acco......

DETROIT — A University of Michigan gastroenterology researcher is no longer employed by the university following the retraction of five academic papers in scholarly journals due to what one academic journal called the "falsification" and "fabrication" of data involving millions of federal research dollars. Chung Owyang — formerly chief of UM's Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, according to the Mayo Clinic, and a medical researcher — left the university as of Jan. 2, UM spokeswoman Kim Broekhuizen said Tuesday. He is listed as a retiree in online UM records. It was unclear how the pu......

PHILADELPHIA — People with diabetes, especially those with the type 1 form of the disease, are at increased risk of broken bones. A key culprit seems to be a type of inflammation in the stem cells that are responsible for forming new bone. So a pair of University of Pennsylvania scientists tried a logical experiment in lab mice: blocking that inflammation to see if the animals' bones would be less fragile. It worked, but something unexpected happened. The mice also developed scaly lesions on their skin. It turned out that by blocking one type of inflammation, the researchers at Penn's School o......

As if 2020 needed any more alarming headlines, each day brings news about the new “mutant” strain of the coronavirus identified in Great Britain, where health officials have proclaimed that it spreads far more readily than the microbe that has been crisscrossing the globe for months. Well, maybe. Scientists who study the biology of viruses say that so far, there is no proof that this new strain is more transmissible, only what amounts to circumstantial evidence. Human behavior and random chance also could explain the sudden emergence of the strain which, given that it was identified in a Color......