Richard Harris

The World Health Organization says two vaccine candidates now undergoing small-scale tests of dosage and safety in people might be ready for broader deployment in Africa by early 2015.

Forty percent of Americans say they feel at risk for getting Ebola but most say they are likely to survive if they get prompt treatment, according to a poll by the Harvard School of Public Health.

Three scientists will share the prize for developing microscopes that can study living cells in fine detail. Working independently, they took on a problem that many had assumed couldn't be solved.

Americans Eric Betzig and William Moerner and German scientist Stefan Hell have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for "the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy."

Brincidofovir has only been tested against Ebola in the lab and has not yet been tested in animals. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved its experimental use on an emergency basis.

Plans are afoot to test drugs to treat Ebola in West Africa – and those studies could have far-reaching benefits far beyond this rapidly expanding epidemic.

That's because some of the drugs are based on nascent technologies that can be used to treat other infectious diseases – and even inherited ...

A man who had come from Liberia is now in isolation at a hospital in Dallas. Health officials in the U.S. say they are confident that this case will not trigger a wider outbreak.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the man traveled from Liberia and fell ill in Dallas. He is now in strict isolation at a hospital in the city.

New drugs and vaccines can take years to develop. But health officials and researchers are accelerating tests of experimental drugs to fight the outbreak in West Africa.

When Richard Larson co-wrote a scientific paper about the perils of up-and-down funding for the National Institutes of Health, he noted that the research cycled between states of "euphoria," and a "hangover" far greater than you'd expect.

The editors of the journal Service Science at first argued that those ...

When Richard Larson co-wrote a scientific paper about the perils of up-and-down funding for the National Institutes of Health, he noted that the research cycled between states of "euphoria," and a "hangover" far greater than you'd expect.

The editors of the journal Service Science at first argued that those ...

The answer, this time, isn't simply more cash, says Dr. Harold Varmus, director of the National Cancer Institute. Instead, changing the way research money is distributed might fix systemic problems.

Tired of waiting for a cure for breast cancer, a coalition of activists now leans hard on Congress to steer money to particular research projects. Critics say that approach may miss promising leads.

If you have been following the various posts about beer on The Salt, you may have noticed a pattern: Many of the folks making beer have a scientific background. There's good reason for that. People don't make beer. Yeast does. Well, OK — it's a partnership.

And sometimes, it's ...

So, you want to be a science professor? Good luck. Highly educated, relatively low-paid postdoctoral fellows may drive U.S. biomedical research, but they're training for jobs that don't exist.

A shrinking pool of grant money for medical research has led competing applicants to oversell weak scientific findings, critics say. The result: Many experimental treatments are worthless.

When the National Institutes of Health budget doubled, some schools scrambled to build new laboratory buildings. But the funding has declined, leaving institutions struggling to pay for the buildings.

They were talented, idealistic risk-takers on the road to what they thought would be important medical discoveries. But when the funding for risk-takers dried up, these two academics called it quits.

The federal budget for bioscience has undergone big swings since 2000. Some scientists are now out of work and others are abandoning the ambitious, creative ideas that fuel discovery.

People are afraid to go to the doctor. Clinics have lost staff to the virus. Basic supplies aren't there. Ebola will have an impact on everything from malaria treatment to maternal health.