DuPont's newest polymer innovation, the first DuPont polymer derived from a biological source, has been recognized by the China State Intellectual Property Office and China Central Television (CCTV) as "Most Visionary Innovation" at a recent award ceremony.

Also, on Feb. 25, DuPontTM Sorona® will receive the 2005 "New Technologies in Renewable Materials and Processes" award at the Global Plastics and Environmental Conference, sponsored by the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE). Founded in 1942, SPE has membership of more than 20,000 plastics professionals in the United States and more than 70 countries around the world. Conference Chairman Tim Kettering said, "The story of Sorona® is unique because it demonstrates that the use of renewable materials and processes can create new performance technologies and products."

Scientists have demonstrated a new way to assess the potentially damaging effects of prenatal drug exposure--a technique that could also be used to monitor a fetus's response to therapeutic drugs--using sophisticated, noninvasive medical imaging tools. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, whose findings are reported in the February issue of the Society of Nuclear Medicine's Journal of Nuclear Medicine, used positron emission tomography (PET) combined with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to track the uptake and distribution of trace amounts of cocaine in pregnant monkeys and found significant differences in where and how fast the drug accumulates in maternal and fetal organs.

Yet another follow up of the NIH public access policy announced earlier this week, this time from free-access publisher BioMed Central :

BioMed Central welcomes the announcement of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) new public access policy. The NIH calls on all of its grantees to deposit articles resulting from their NIH-funded research in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central and make them freely available within 12 months.

BioMed Central anticipates that many other funding bodies worldwide will now follow the example set by NIH.

A little follow-up on open access publishing and the NIH new policy from yesterday :

The final National Institutes of Health (NIH) rule on Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information is wasteful of federal research dollars and a missed opportunity to take advantage of available technology and existing efforts, according to a group of the nation's leading not-for-profit medical and scientific publishers. The final rule ignores significant free access policies already existing in the not-for-profit publishing community that offer more cost-effective public access to the science in their journals.

NIH's new rule requests but does not require authors to deposit into PubMedCentral (PMC) manuscripts of articles reporting NIH-funded research that have been peer reviewed and accepted by journals for publication. NIH would release these manuscripts to the public within 12 months or less after publication in the journal. The timing of the release would be determined by the authors, who "should ensure that their PMC submissions are consistent with any other agreements, including copyright assignments," according to the NIH statement.

Researchers have identified a promising new target in their fight against a dangerous bacterium that sickens people in hospitals, especially people who receive medical implants such as catheters, artificial joints and heart valves.

A substance found on the surface of Staphylococcus epidermidis has, for the first time, been shown to protect the harmful pathogen from natural human defense mechanisms that would otherwise kill the bacteria, according to scientists at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML), part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health.

The results of the world's first phase 3 HIV vaccine efficacy trial are reported in the March 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online. Although the vaccine was ineffective in preventing HIV infection, the trial represents a landmark in the fight against HIV and offers the scientific community a foundation on which to build future trials.

The multi-centered trial, conducted in the United States and the Netherlands and completed in 2003, is described in two papers by the rgp120 HIV Vaccine Study Group, and Peter B. Gilbert and colleagues, which address the vaccine efficacy results and the immunologic responses of the study participants.

Genomics, the study of all the genetic sequences in living organisms, has leaned heavily on the blueprint metaphor. A large part of the blueprint, unfortunately, has been unintelligible, with no good way to distinguish a bathroom from a boardroom, to link genomic features to cell function.

A national consortium of scientists led by BIATECH, a Seattle based non-profit research center, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a Department of Energy research institution in Richland, Wash., now suggests a way to put this house in order. They offer a powerful new method that integrates experimental and computational analyses to ascribe function to genes that had been termed "hypothetical" -- sequences that appear in the genome but whose biological purposes were previously unknown.