Faculty members gnash their teeth and wring their hands when students plagiarize. They cry for offenders to be punished. But now an online text-search program directed at their own work suggests that professors in biomedicine may be just as guilty of paper-writing sins. More than 70,000 article abstracts appeared disturbingly similar to other…

In the past few months, animal-rights groups have stepped up their demonstrations against academic researchers who use animals, spawning a new wave of concern among scientists. In February, extremists caused a fire at the home of a researcher from the University of California at Los Angeles, and protesters struck the husband of a scientist from…

A professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh tracks the fiscal fortunes of the National Institutes of Health. Any tightening of the NIH budget might starve out talented young researchers at Pittsburgh. Support from the agency amounts to about half of all government support. (MLW)

The Department of Health and Human Services has proposed new regulations on scientific misconduct and requested ideas on what the government should do about the problem. Guidelines proposed by eight university groups and two science organizations are intended to help institutions draw up their own research-fraud procedures. (MLW)

Two federal agencies proposed conflict-of-interest guidelines that would require scientists supported by government money to file financial-disclosure forms and universities to review those forms and eliminate conflicts of interest. The National Institutes of Health and the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration proposed the…

Participants in the January 1999 Internet World Conference on Biomedical Sciences will meet and communicate solely in cyberspace. In many respects, the conference will be traditional, with 56 symposia on 15 biomedical subjects, but participants avoid registration fees and travel costs. Japanese universities conducted four previous conferences,…