Embryonic stem cell (ES) research: California endorses it, and New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts seem likely to follow suit, even though the next session of Congress may see it banned at a federal level. But problems establishing a consensus on regulation for this type of study aren't limited to the United States. The European Union also has a major problem on its hands with ES research. New guidelines proposed by the European Commission last month, aimed at appeasing Catholic countries and stemming a scientific ‘brain drain,’ are set to be vehemently opposed by some member states. “It’s an absolute disaster,” says Christine Mummery, a senior investigator at the Hubrecht Laboratorium in the Netherlands. Her country, along with Sweden, Finland, Greece, and Britain, permits the derivation of cell lines from embryos left over from in vitro fertilization research, so-called supernumerary embryos. However, at the present time, a moratorium on EC funding means that she is reliant on ready-made Australian/Singaporean cell lines, as she has no money to derive her own lines. The one-year moratorium was introduced in September last year when the European Council of Science Ministers approved Europe’s current four-year research program (Sixth Framework). The moratorium was instigated on the understanding that provisions for funding ES research would be established before the end of 2003. These were announced on July 9, and, if ratified, they will form the guidelines under which some forms of ES research will receive EU backing. The problem is that countries that have banned embryo research — notably Germany, Italy, Austria, and Ireland — do not want their communal EU taxes supporting this work in other countries and are likely to oppose the guidelines.

It is off-putting, to say the least, to see your work criticized in the newspapers or in scientific journals, but for Judah Folkman, this has become the norm. He talked to Nature Medicine about how his theories and findings have been challenged ever since he began research, and the reasons why he continues in the face of continual confrontation.

Thirty years after Stanley Prusiner identified a prion disease as the cause of death in a patient for the first time, scientists are still no closer to knowing the true biological nature of a prion or how it achieves its disease pathology at the molecular level. Yet, over this period, the stakes have been raised dramatically: prions are now known to pose a hitherto uncontemplated threat to public health. Nature Medicine spoke to prion expert Adriano Aguzzi about this area of biomedical investigation.

As Nature Medicine went to press, an international panel met in New York to decide how the first round of grants from the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria should be distributed. The Fund has been oversubscribed, and observers are keen to see whether the money is split fairly between the three diseases, which countries receive money, for what purposes and how quickly it is converted to on-the-ground benefit.

When it missed being signed off at the end of the 106th Congress, no one envisioned the lengthy delay that would befall the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations bill for FY01. But when chads and butterflies became the gremlins of the US presidential voting system, preventing the next Congress from reconvening to attend to unfinished business, senior biomedical scientists began to panic that stasis would adversely affect the budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is contained in the Labor bill (Nature Med. 7, 10; 2001).

Prizes in science don't come any bigger than the Nobels, and more often than not this award catapults its recipients from the general research milieu into the realms of scientific stardom. In this, its centenary year, the Nobel committee for Physiology or Medicine decided to honor investigators who have identified vital components of the cell cycle. Nature Medicine talked to one of the winners, Sir Paul Nurse.

NEWScrosses.Only the genotyping of the strain, which is done with markers spread along the chromosome, involves modern molecular techniques.Once each strain is generated, MCW researchers engage in what they call "high-throughput physiology," measuring and comparing over 200 quantifiable physiological traits-ranging from kidney function to ischemia response-in the consomic strain and its parental strain.The scale of the effort, which is being financed with a $13.3 million, four-year grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the NIH, is impressive."In the last 9 months ... we have studied 1,256 rats and we've generated over 29,000 data points of physiological characteristics," says Jacob, adding that "two technicians are generating the amount of data equal to a physiology paper a week."Rather than publishing all of the data in the form of papers, the program, named PhysGen, releases results quarterly in an online public database (http://pga.mcw.

Britain's two leading cancer charities are urging women not to pull out of a trial to test Tamoxifen's preventative effects on breast cancer following fresh reports that the drug can substantially increase endometrial cancer and some cardiovascular diseases. The fear coincides with news that breast cancer has overtaken lung cancer as the most common form of the disease in the United Kingdom.