The stagnation of biomedical research funding in the US is placing great pressure on the research enterprise. It is time to consider some radical solutions.

Political and industrial factors-beyond the economic headwinds-may be causing public investment in biomedical research to slow down around the world.

Although for the last 50 years, ethicists dealing with human experimentation have focused primarily on the need to protect individual research subjects and vulnerable groups, biomedical research, especially in genetics, now requires the establishment of standards for the protection of communities. We have developed such a strategy, based on five steps. (i) Identification of community characteri...

Today's biomedical research of excellence is mainly seen as a global phenomenon around the study of large series of samples organized with well-defined and detailed criteria regarding the identification of patients, with the specific information required in each case. This justifies the growing interest in developing cooperative networks of biobanks to minimize biases arising from heterogeneity...

Race as a variable in research ethics is investigated: to what extent is it morally appropriate to regard the race of research subjects as pivotal for research outcomes? The challenges it poses to deliberation in research ethics committees are considered, and it is concluded that race sometimes must be considered, subject to clearly stated qualifications.

The US biomedical research workforce does not currently mirror the nation's population demographically, despite numerous attempts to increase diversity. This imbalance is limiting the promise of our biomedical enterprise for building knowledge and improving the nation's health. Beyond ensuring fairness in scientific workforce representation, recruiting and retaining a diverse set of minds and a...

The aim of the present study is to find out empirically whether the remarkable increase in collaboration in recent decades has made researchers more productive or not. As an example I will analyse (with bibliometrical methods) West German biomedical research in the eighties and the nineties of the twentieth century. The comparison of the two five-year periods 1980 – 84 and 1994 – 98 showed that...