After a long and successful career, a biochemist is shocked when his grants aren't renewed—and he seeks alternatives to stay in the game.

Scientists are looking for ways to spare women from aggressive treatment of ductal carcinoma in situ, a diagnosis that only sometimes leads to invasive breast cancer.

After a long and successful career, a biochemist is shocked when his grants aren't renewed—and he seeks alternatives to stay in the game.

For decades, experts have assumed that as capitalist economies grow, they reduce the income gap between rich and poor. That view has dominated academic thinking for 6 decades—but it's a "fairy tale," claims French economist Thomas Piketty. A group of researchers led by Piketty has put together a unique resource on income flows in more than 20 nations, called the World Top Incomes Database. Piketty says it demonstrates that over the long term, owners of capital inevitably acquire an outsize share of national income and wealth.

A controversial study of Romanian orphans reveals long-term harm to the intellect.

A California advocacy group, Consumer Watchdog, is arguing in a top U.S. appeals court that stem cells isolated by James Thomson should never have been patented.

When it comes to hitting targets, smaller missile defense systems appear to be far more reliable than the national system.

NIH builds ClinGen—a clinical reference site for all human gene variants.

The U.S. intercontinental missile defense system faces a crisis as Congress presses for an expansion, interceptors malfunction, and a basic targeting problem remains unsolved.

Two weeks after being sworn in as U.S. secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel made a surprise announcement on 15 March: the government would bolster its national missile defense system by buying $1 billion worth of new equipment. What Hagel didn9t stress is that the bulking up of U.S.-based defenses also appears to mark the end of an even more ambitious—and controversial—Obama administration plan to base interceptors in Europe that could protect the United States from a potential missile strike from nations such as Iran. As for the older U.S.-based system, critics say the Pentagon has seriously understated the time and money it will take to make it fully functional. But some scientists question whether the new plan is also deeply flawed.

Researchers say that gene patents impede data sharing and innovation; patent lawyers say there's no evidence for this.

Sequenom9s 2001 patent on a method of isolating fetal DNA from a mother9s bloodstream to test for Down syndrome was thrown out by a U.S. court in San Francisco. Judge Susan Illston rested her decision in part on the recent Supreme Court ruling that natural phenomena like genes cannot be patented. Illston also wrote that Sequenom9s patented idea was not sufficiently inventive.

Myriad Genetics, the Salt Lake City firm that built a $450-million-a-year business on gene analysis, lost a big patent fight on 13 June. The U.S. Supreme Court gutted five of its intellectual property claims on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, whose DNA sequences company scientists analyze to find mutations that raise a woman9s risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. Few doubt Myriad will survive the blow but the 9–0 ruling against Myriad more broadly overturned 3 decades of U.S. support for human gene patents, rattling patent lawyers and biotech executives.