Imagine a future where medical schools are answerable to shareholders, where patients decide how doctors should be trained, or where academics compete on TV game shows to win research grants …

This could be the future of academic medicine by 2025, according to members of the International Campaign to Revitalise Academic Medicine (ICRAM), launched by the BMJ and partners in November 2003.

Their vision for the future is published simultaneously today by the BMJ (www.bmj.com

The use of antidepressants in patients who have suffered a heart attack appears to reduce the risk of recurrent events and cardiac death, according to a large, multi-center study conducted by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. The findings suggest that post-heart attack patients who suffer from depression should talk with their physicians about taking the medication.

“Our study provides much stronger evidence than we’ve ever had before that antidepressants are safe

Classification tool may better describe autism-related disorders, help evaluate treatments

A new classification tool may allow healthcare professionals treating children with autism and autism-related disorders to more systematically sort out the combination of traits in the condition, and to better predict how children may improve over time. If the model holds up to further study, it may also allow researchers to gauge the effectiveness of different autism treatments.

Need cues, memory aids

When encouraged to use memorization strategies commonly employed by healthy individuals, people with schizophrenia can be helped to remember information just as well as their healthy counterparts, a process that in itself seems to spur a normalization of memory-related activities in the brains of people with schizophrenia, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Memory study shows brain function in schizophrenia can improve

A gene enabling an insect virus to enter new cells was likely stolen from a host cell and adapted for the virus’s use, researchers at Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) at Cornell University report.

Virologists have long thought of baculoviruses, a group of viruses that can liquefy their insect hosts in a matter of days but don’t induce so much as a sneeze in mammals, as potential pesticides. But the viruses would require tweaking to be effective since they kill insects

Rockefeller scientists show that microRNAs play an essential role in the development of the fruit fly

In a story reminiscent of David and Goliath, new research from Rockefeller University shows that sometimes the smallest molecules can be the most powerful. In the July 1 issue of Cell, Ulrike Gaul, Ph.D., and colleagues report that microRNAs serve very important, and very specific, functions during the early development of the fruit fly.

First discovered a few years ago

Research led by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that damage to a cell’s DNA sets off a chain reaction that leads to the increased expression of a marker recognized by the body’s immune system.

The new findings, to be published July 3 in an advanced online issue of Nature, shed light on a long-standing question of how the natural killer (NK) cells – which are able to attack tumors – can differentiate cells that are cancerous from those th

The winner of the 2005 EMBO Science Writing Prize is Edwin Harold Rydberg of the Istituto di Ricerche di Biologia Molecolare (IRBM) P. Angeletti in Rome, Italy. The theme of the competition was ‘genes and behaviour’ and the winning entry deals with an area widely studied in behavioural genetics – the commonly misunderstood condition of schizophrenia. Rydberg’s elegant narrative reveals the personal impact of this distressing condition and the difference understanding the biology behind a conditi

New forms of drugs for dysbacteriosis and other gastrointestinal disturbances are being developed by the Novosibirsk researchers with support of the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC).

A lot of Russians suffer from malfunction of gastrointestinal tract. The frequent reason for that is dysbacteriosis – disturbances of normal intestinal flora. To fight dysbacteriosis, physicians prescribe eubiotic drugs to patients, which contain bacteria necessary for digestion, f

Cornell University researchers have learned how a common fish found along the West Coast can hum and hear outside sounds at the same time.

The study marks the first time that scientists have found a direct line of communication between the part of a vertebrate’s brain that controls the vocal muscle system and the part of the ear that hears sound. The researchers believe that understanding the auditory system of the plainfin midshipman fish (Porichthys notatus ) — a 6- to 10

Study finds that poor T cell responsiveness limits current approaches

In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in developing therapeutic vaccines. Most Americans are familiar with prophylactic, or preventive vaccines, which protect an individual from infections; examples include the common pediatric vaccines as well as the flu shot. But therapeutic vaccines are designed instead to be administered to patients who have already acquired chronic infections, su

Analysis of the brain of a patient suffering from Parkinson’s disease has shown for the first time that an experimental treatment can reverse the loss of nerve fibres.

Analysis of the brain of a patient suffering from Parkinson’s Disease has shown that the experimental treatment he received caused regrowth of the nerve fibres that are lost in this disease. The findings are reported in the July issue of Nature Medicine.
This is the first time that any treatment has be

One in fifty children and adolescents live with severely debilitating and recurrent pain but there is an “embarrassing” lack of data on the best ways to treat them, according to researchers.

As many as 15 per cent of children suffer from headaches, abdominal and musculoskeletal pain but two per cent of children have pain symptoms that can be severe enough to interrupt sleep, restrict physical activity and prevent them from attending school.

Studies have shown that childr

Thanks to imaging and analysis techniques used by researchers at TU Delft, an international group of scientists has been able to gain more insight into the behaviour of cancerous cells. Delft researchers were the first to establish the changing positions of the ends of chromosomes (telomeres) in cells. It has been discovered that these telomeres behave differently in cancerous cells. An online article on this phenomenon has been published in the important American scientific journal PNAS.

Research published in this month’s edition of the journal Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, describes a method that can detect a pattern of contamination on banknotes from drug related crime that is different from the pattern seen in general circulation. The process is significantly faster than other previous methods.

“People involved in drug-trafficking are not always involved in handling illicit drugs, but they may possess cash that has been held by others who come into contac

A protein that was thought to simply turn genes on and off now looks to be more like a cellular “dimmer switch,” researchers from Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah, report in the July 1, 2005, issue of the journal Science.

The scientists showed for the first time that when certain parts of a protein molecule are modified – flexible, randomly structured regions believed to be only minor players in the protein world – they become important in turning genes on an