Erythropoietin is an effective drug to increase your number of red blood cells. It is primarily used in anemic patients with cancer and on dialysis, but it is also popular with athletes that want to (illegally) increase their endurance performance, most notably cyclists and cross country skiers.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is currently recommending public access of all papers from NIH-funded research. <strong> Fewer than 5% of research papers </strong> have gone this route since the policy went into effect in 2005.

I’ve written a similar post <strong> before </strong> , put I would like to talk about some of the features that I would like to see in an ideal paper writing application. <strong> Intelligent Formatting </strong> Content and formatting should be separated from each other.

Today I decided to rename my blog from <strong> Publish or Perish 2.0 </strong> to <strong> Goobledygook </strong> . The old name explained the topics of this blog pretty well, so why the change after only 4 months of blogging on Nature Network? And there are already many blogs with the same name. I simply like the new name.

Cancer is caused by genetic changes ¹ . Oncogenes harbor activating mutations that cause or promote cancer, whereas tumor suppressor genes ² protect from cancer. In this model, genetic changes in one copy of an oncogene, but both copies of a tumor suppressor gene are required to initiate cancer.

Posters are an important tool to communicate your research findings to a larger audience. The format is different from oral presentations or full papers, and special rules for a good poster apply. Posters can be an important step before a full publication, although many posters will never be peer-reviewed and published. The problem with posters is that they are second class citizens to oral presentations in most meetings.

I did a little experiment to figure out whether the full-text versions of my last 15 papers (published between 1997-2008) are available online. The result: 3 papers available for everybody 10 papers only available from within my institution (Journal subscription required) 2 papers only available for purchase Interestingly, the papers in the two journals with the highest impact factor are both available as full-text.

In one of my first blog posts (before I joined Nature Network) about a year ago I wrote about the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2007 Meeting. I was surprised that only a handful of blogs reported about the event, one of the largest and most important meetings for clinical cancer research. One would think that blogging and scientific meetings would be a natural combination.

One of the opening lectures this Saturday of the International Congress of Genetics was held by Mario Capecchi. His talked was entitled <strong> Modeling human disease in the mouse: from cancer to neuropsychiatric disorders </strong> . In the first half he described his mouse model of synovial sarcoma. Synovial sarcoma is an aggressive and often fatal soft tissue tumor.