Pharma research jobs on the chopping block
Announcements of job loss in big pharma continue, with the UK press saying that GlaxoSmithKline will soon announce 4,000 layoffs, nearly half in R&D. (The Guardian) AstraZeneca said last week it would cut 8000 jobs, 3,500 of them in R&D, and noted plans to outsource more of its research and trim the number of disease areas on which the company focuses. (Wall Street Journal Health Blog)

Image: Wikipedia

FDA slaps doc for skin treatment statements
In a rare case of the agency censuring an individual rather than a company, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a warning letter to Miami Beach clinical researcher and dermatologist Leslie Baumann for "expressing premature enthusiasm" over a not-yet-approved injectible anti-wrinkle drug, the New York Times reports. The letter, issued last month, says Baumann improperly promoted the drug in statements to the media in 2007.

Stem cells: an approval and some grants
NIH director Francis Collins has ok'ed an advisory council's recommendation to include one of the most commonly used embryonic stem cell lines, developed by Wisconsin researchers, in the federal registry of embryonic stem cell lines. Meanwhile, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine announced a new round of grants for developing "tools and technologies for translational bottlenecks" -- including "disease in a dish" models. Researchers in both academia and industry are eligible to apply, the California Stem Cell Report notes.

A homeopathy protest
A society of skeptics in the UK this weekend staged a mass overdose of homeopathy therapies to show that such treatments don't work. They staged their treat-ins outside of branches of the major UK pharmacy chain Boots -- which sells homeopathic medicines -- in a handful of cities. The group said similar demonstrations were planned for Canada, Spain, the US, and Australia, The Independent reports.

PhD thesis, anyone?
Finally, PhD supervisors and PhD students -- check out this guide to how not to write a PhD thesis. This one isn't specific to the life sciences, but we'd say the key points apply. Our favorite no-no: "Assume something you are doing is new because you have not read enough to know that an academic wrote a book on it 20 years ago."


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