From Alzheimer's and diabetes to cancer, schizophrenia and even baldness,
Funder requires grantees to share data every two months Sharon Begley, In Switch, Scientists Share Data to Develop Useful Drug Therapies, Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2006. (Thanks to John Wilbanks.) Excerpt: the list of ailments that elude cure marches on. The crisis in "translational science," or turning basic discoveries into therapies, has been brewing for years, but it hit a depressing nadir in 2005, when just 20 new drugs won approval from the Food and Drug Administration....[T]he three-year-old Myelin Repair Foundation...requires that the five biologists it supports share results in real time. Because they don't keep discoveries under wraps until publication, they can build on each other's work sooner....The foundation's insistence that its scientists exchange results every two months is a sea change from the standard every-two-to-five-years progress report. "This has been one of the most difficult transitions, getting scientists to understand accountability in the short term," says Robert Miller of Case Western Reserve University.