A well-known obesity researcher will plead guilty to making material false statements in a 1999 grant application worth $542,000 from the US National Institutes of Health. The researcher, who held various research positions at the University of Vermont (UVM) College of Medicine in Burlington could go to jail for up to 5 years.

Since the 1990s, corruption has seriously threatened mainland China's universities in their teaching, research, service to society, and international links and exchanges. Yet, discussions of corruption have been largely confined to exchanges on the Internet. The Chinese masses know little of these discussions. The government has just begun to address this issue by instituting countermeasures.

The National Council for Higher Education and Research (Cneser), which is an administrative jurisdiction, treats every year cases of fraud in the French education system.

Nearly half of the medical-school faculty members who serve on boards charged with protecting volunteers in clinical research also serve as industry consultants, duals roles that raise concerns about potential conflicts of interest, according to a study published today in the journal Academic Medicine. The study found that 47% of the faculty members serving on university panels, also had consulted for industry within the past three years.

The Bush administration proposed guidelines last month that would let research institutions decide whether to restrict researchers' financial interests in studies involving human subjects, and whether such interests should be reported to the research volunteers.