Editorials

Last month, Juan Carlos López, who was Chief Editor of Nature Medicine for a decade, left the journal for a new position in the biopharmaceutical industry. His team looks back at his legacy and forward to what's next.

The important gains in supporting local biomedical science made by South Africa's Medical Research Council in recent years may be lost unless the country continues to fund and grow this important institution.

Reproducibility in science is a prominent topic in both lay and scientific press. But a new facet of this discussion has arisen in a recent comparison of two pharmacogenomic studies, and it calls for an evaluation of how we interpret science in the face of discrepant results.

Advocacy for the integrity of the scientific record is stronger than ever. Paradoxically, retracting a flawed paper is getting more and more difficult.

University technology transfer offices are tasked with helping bring the inventions made by academics to the attention of potential investors. But selling off intellectual property to patent aggregators in an effort to bring in money to their institutions could stifle the future development of new technologies.

Gains in human health come at the expense of animals in the lab. But denying those gains by hampering animal research could be far costlier.

The establishment of an NIH working group managing access to HeLa cell genomic data highlights the limitations of assuring the privacy of participants in genomics studies. If, as this case illustrates, anonymity cannot be guaranteed, informed consent rules may need to be revised.

The American Medical Association recently voted to recognize obesity as a disease. The potential implications of this resolution are manifold, but a better understanding of the underlying biology is necessary to help effect meaningful change.

Public health and research efforts directed at managing and targeting viral hepatitis have borne fruit in recent decades. However, more work is necessary to meet the goals of preventing transmission and treating infection to eliminate the enormous burden of hepatitis worldwide.

The ability to patent human genes has been costly to researchers and patients, and has restricted competition in the biotech marketplace. The recent US Supreme Court decision making isolated human genes unpatentable will bring freedom of choice to the patient, and level the playing field for research and development.

A recent plea by oncologists condemning inflated prices for some cancer drugs has ignited a debate on this topic between clinicians and pharmaceutical companies and highlights the need for a broader assessment of drug valuation.

The publication of a controversial study by a US National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded researcher suggesting a link between the Tea Party and the tobacco industry has brought the NIH under fire by Congress. But strict policing of NIH grantees would be a waste of resources and a setback to scientific inquiry.

Nature journals' updated editorial policies aim to improve transparency and reproducibility.

A recent study showing that mice do not reproduce the patterns of gene expression induced by human inflammatory disease has provoked renewed discussion of the validity of animal models in translational research.

A proposed HIV prevention trial in African infants using the antibody therapy VRC01 offers hope, but some researchers say other antibodies might be more effective. Given the thorny nature of testing therapies in newborns and the limited funds for the rollout of HIV trials, advisory bodies such as the US Institute of Medicine would do well to weigh in on the ethical framework for pediatric trials of antibody drugs in resource-poor settings.

Last January, scientists voluntarily imposed a pause on research that could lead to the generation of highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses with increased transmissibility to mammals. Now, new restrictions currently under debate further risk stalling progress in avian flu research.

A recent court ruling that favored freedom of speech over the authority of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate off-label drug promotion may have profound implications for the way drugs are marketed and, ultimately, for patients' interests.

In spite of years of effort, we still lack highly efficacious vaccines against HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and numerous other widespread pathogens. Two recent setbacks in vaccine trials suggest that it's time to rethink how new vaccines are developed and to investigate what can be learned from the existing armament of childhood vaccines.

Big pharma has historically made some substantial missteps regarding the full reporting of clinical trial results, but a new initiative by GlaxoSmithKline is a move in the right direction.