SCIENCE IN THE NEWS WEEKLY
FDA Restricts Antibiotics in Livestock
The Food and Drug Administration last week ordered farmers to limit the use of a certain type of antibiotics, called cephalosporins, they give livestock. The agency said the antibiotics may make people more resistant to antibiotics they may need to save their lives.
In other biomedical research, drug research routinely is suppressed, harming patients and increasing health care costs, according to new data highlighting an ethical controversy that continues to plague the field of medicine.
A paper on a new cancer biomarker has been retracted by the authors because they could not verify the data. Published in Urology in April 2007 by Johns Hopkins University researcher Robert Getzenberg and his team, the paper reported that a novel protein in blood could be used as a sensitive test for detecting early prostate cancer. Two years later a company called Onconome that helped fund the study and related research sued Hopkins, Getzenberg, and his former institution, the University of Pittsburgh, alleging that the biomarker test was "essentially as reliable as flipping a coin."
When a University of Pittsburgh research team injected prematurely aging mice with stem cells from normal, younger mice, classic signs of aging were delayed in three quarters of the mice. Even more dramatic were the results in another set of mice with a severe mutation that normally caused them to die after just 21 days. When those mice got an injection of the stem cells after 17 days of life, they lived three times as long as normal.
A moss spreading throughout the Hawaiian Islands appears to be an ancient clone that has copied itself for some 50,000 years. It may be one of the oldest multicellular organisms on Earth, a new study suggests.
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