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WASHINGTON, D.C. (BNO NEWS) – President Obama will visit the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Maryland on Wednesday morning to make a major announcement regarding the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the White House said on Monday. President Obama will be joined by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. Obama will also tour a laboratory at the Bethesda facility. Further details were not immediately released.

how dragon boating can help cancer survivors; how canoes can help cultural identity; how snorting cocaine creates anxiety. Click here for photos. In a letter to NIH director Francis Collins, Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, and Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) on Thursday demanded to know the screening procedures and review criteria used to approve $1.6 billion in stimulus grants and another $20 million in grants Click here to see video. FOX News identified more than a dozen suspect studies, many of which were funded by stimulus dollars, and compared them...

Sam Casey / Dr. David Stevens Washington D.C., Aug 21, 2009 / 06:20 am (CNA).- A federal lawsuit seeking to overturn the National Institutes of Health (NIH) guidelines for public funding of human embryonic stem cell research was filed on Wednesday. The suit claims the regulations violate a federal law which bars the institute from funding research in which human embryos are destroyed.Plaintiffs in the suit include the Christian Medical Association (CMA) and embryo adoption agency Nightlight Christian Adoptions.  Dr. James L. Sherley, a senior scientist at the Boston Biomedical Research Institute and Dr. Theresa Deisher, founder of AVM...

Bioethics: The former director of the National Institutes of Health, once an enthusiast for embryonic stem cells, now says their future has "dimmed." So why is the administration bailing out research into such therapies while troubled states like California have committed billions?Aside from creating or saving a few research jobs, the administration's decision to federally fund embryonic stem cell research is, as we've noted, a bailout of bad science. It throws money at an avenue of research that time and adult stem cell progress have passed by. Applauding the administration's move was Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., who echoed the claims...

President Obama's nomination of Dr. Francis S. Collins to head the National Institutes of Health is an excellent choice, but it troubles some secularists who believe science should proceed unrestrained by any higher principles than what can be achieved in a laboratory. The recent New York Times story announcing the president's selection of Dr. Collins ("who led the government's successful effort to sequence the human genome") reflects what would be considered bigotry or sexism if applied to someone because of his or her race or gender. Reporter Gardiner Harris writes that one of the objections to Dr. Collins (he names...

President Obama — in an inspired move — named Dr. Francis Collins head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Collins is one of the world’s leading scientists. He is a physician-geneticist known in part for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and for his leadership of the Human Genome Project. (Collins served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH from 1993-2008.) The New York Times reports, however, that a couple of objections have been raised to the choice of Dr. Collins. According to the Times: The first is his very public embrace of...

A rule that prevents many HIV-positive immigrants and travelers from entering the United States will likely be lifted before the year is up, after the Department of Health and Human Services earlier this month recommended changing the regulation. Immigration and HIV/AIDS advocacy groups have been working to repeal the 22-year-old rule, which they call discriminatory, dangerous, and debilitating to the strength of the U.S. scientific community. A large number of foreigners with the human immunodeficiency virus would benefit from the change, the groups say, when these individuals would finally be able to enter the country to see loved ones, attend...

NOTE: Article is a cut-and-paste "interview-type" presentation. Here are excerpts: BOB ABERNETHY: Several recent best-selling books have sharpened the old debate between some scientists and some religionists over creation, evolution and, among other issues, stem cell research. We want to re-run today a story we carried this past summer about a man who is both a research scientist and an evangelical Christian, and sees no conflict between the two fields. He is Dr. Francis Collins, who led the massive effort to discover the human genetic code. His book is called "The Language of God." ... Dr. COLLINS (at Press Conference):...

President Obama's appointment of Francis Collins to run the National Institutes of Health is significant as a culture war statement. A devout Christian, Collins is one of the foremost advocates for the notion that science and faith are compatible. The former head of the Human Genome Project, Collins is also the author of The Language of God. He's a strong believer but he doesn't let that weaken his scientific rigor (for instance, he's been critical of Creationism and Intelligent Design). Continued

Guidelines for federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research offer incentives for experiments that end human life and have not successfully treated disease. The Obama administration's final guidelines for federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research do more than remove a small protection for living human embryos. They actually encourage scientists to destroy preborn human life, courtesy of $10 billion in federal stimulus money designated for biomedical research, including embryonic stem-cell trials. "The regulations virtually guarantee that many more living human embryos will be destroyed for research," said Carrie Gordon Earll, senior bioethics analyst for Focus on the Family. "This policy also...

(CNSNews.com) -- The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAA), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will pay $2.6 million in U.S. tax dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly on the job. Dr. Xiaoming Li, the researcher conducting the program, is director of the Prevention Research Center at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit. The grant, made last November, refers to prostitutes as "female sex workers"--or FSW--and their handlers as "gatekeepers." "Previous studies in Asia and Africa and our own data from FSWs [female sex workers] in China suggest that the social...

div class="noticia_imagen_contenedor" style="width: 290px;"> Washington D.C., May 8, 2009 / 01:46 am (CNA).- The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) on Wednesday launched a campaign to oppose embryonic stem cell research and support ethical cures, encouraging citizens to contact Congress and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).After President Barack Obama’s March 9 executive order permitted federal funding for further embryonic stem cell research, the NIH proposed guidelines to fund research that will require stem cells harvested from the destruction of living human embryos.The draft guidelines are open for public comment through May 26.The USCCB campaign, titled "Oppose Destructive Stem Cell...

Besides being another great example of our Federal Government playing fast an loose with our tax dollars, this report even to ridiculous for fiction. The National Institute of Health (NIH) is in the process of spending $400,000 dollars to study if there is a link between drinking alcohol and having sex amongst homosexuals in Argentina. Yes, THAT NIH part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services--the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research. Obviously none of these jokers went to college--of course there is a link between alcohol and having sex---gay, strait, Argentina, New Jersey, it...

WASHINGTON — For years, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has been the National Institutes of Health’s most ardent champion on Capitol Hill. Having survived two bouts with cancer, open-heart surgery and even a faulty diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease, he has long insisted that research that results in medical cures is the best service that government can provide. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania arrived Friday at the Capitol to cast a crucial vote on the economic stimulus bill. But even lobbyists are stunned by the coup Mr. Specter pulled off this week. In return for providing one of only three...

Scientists across America are celebrating the passing of the Bush administration as the end of a dark age, a bleak stretch in which research budgets shrank and everything — stem cells, sex education, climate change, and the very origins of the Grand Canyon — became a point of conflict. President Barack Obama has ignited a new optimism among the white coats. In his inaugural speech, he promised to "restore science to its rightful place," hinting at nothing short of a renaissance in the fields of health, energy, the environment and America's schools. As a testament to that, the United States...

Scientists for years have intentionally removed potentially explosive words and phrases from research grant applications in an attempt to disguise their work and prevent opposition from critics, according to a Rutgers University study. This type of self-censorship may be having a "chilling" effect on research, the study found, even leading some scientists to abandon their work and pursue other careers. "One researcher told me, 'You will never see me publish another paper about sexual behavior,'" said Joanna Kempner, an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers, whose study was based on responses from 82 academic researchers nationwide. The study is published...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has suspended a $9 million grant for a depression study led by a psychiatrist at Emory University in Atlanta. The punishment, imposed in August but only made public today, is apparently the most severe reaction by NIH so far to a Senate investigation of NIH-funded researchers who may have failed to report all of their income from drug companies. Since last spring, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) has accused at least nine academic psychiatrists of failing to follow federal rules that require NIH grantees to report industry consulting income to their institutions. One investigator at...

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) handed out the first payments in a multi-million-dollar project to explore epigenomics last month. But some researchers are voicing concerns about the scientific and economic justification for this latest 'big biology' venture. Epigenetics, described as "inheritance, but not as we know it"1, is now a blisteringly hot field. It is concerned with changes in gene expression that are typically inherited, but not caused by changes in gene sequence. In theory, epigenetic studies can help explain how the millions of cells in the human body can carry identical DNA but form completely different cell...

They're the cold cases of medicine, patients with diseases so rare and mysterious that they've eluded diagnosis for years. The National Institutes of Health is seeking those patients - and ones who qualify could get some free care at the government's top research hospital as scientists study why they're sick. "These patients are to a certain extent abandoned by the medical profession because a brick wall has been hit," said Dr. William Gahl, who helped develop the NIH's new Undiagnosed Diseases Program. "We're trying to remove some of that." The pilot program, announced Monday, can only recruit about 100 patients...

President seeks competitive edge with final budget request. In his final year as president, George W. Bush has put forward a budget wish-list that looks to restore his priorities in science and research, with solid increases for some physical sciences and pretty much no new money for the biomedical sector. Whether Congress will go along with this remains to be seen. In terms of research and development, the budgetÂ’s most pronounced feature is a 15% (US$1.6 billion) increase in physical-sciences spending year on year (see Table 1). In December 2007, last-minute negotiations in Congress derailed the second year of BushÂ’s...