Professor Alan Cowman of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute will deliver the Rubbo Oration at this year's Australian Society of Microbiology (ASM) annual meeting, being held in Melbourne next week.

Biofuels - North America and India are into it in a big way, Brazil wants everyone to play, and China is spending a packet to join in. Now a group of Queensland biotechnologists have teamed up with the Swiss to sweeten the game.

Malaria specialist Brendan Crabbe appointed new director of Burnet Institute.

Adelaide-based biotech GroPep (ASX:GRO) has completed the manufacture of two vaccine antigens for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI).

Australia's best-known and most venerable medical research institute, The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Parkville, Melbourne, celebrates its 90th anniversary this year. Graeme O'Neill interviewed the Hall's former director, Prof Sir Gustav Nossal, and his successor, Prof Suzanne Cory, about the institute's history and their view of science in Australia today.

The latest list of international research grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has confirmed Australia's status as a leading nation in malaria research.

Prof Alan Cowman and his team at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) are part of an international consortium that has won a US$13 million Grand Challenge in Global Health grant to develop a treatment for malaria.

University of Queensland parasitologist Prof Scott O'Neill has won a prestigious grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the US to work on a remarkable symbiotic bacteria that induces sterility in insects.

The 'H' in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) could stand just as well for Hydra, the multi-headed monster of Greek myth. By the time the human immune system has decapitated one strain of the virus, it has spawned a host of novel mutants. Mutants proliferate because natural selection endowed the virus with a dodgy reverse transcriptase enzyme that introduces random errors into the genetic blueprints of newly replicated virus particle.

Following a call by the European Commission for increased technology research, Microsoft has launched an initiative to invest in scientific research centres in Europe.

The outlook for 2005 is one of 'cautious optimism', with an increased emphasis on issues of compliance, pharmacovigilance, outsourcing, and the pharma CIO. Those were some of the key takeaways of the first annual Life Science Insights (LSI) Predictions for the life sciences industry, delivered today by Jim Golden, the firm's vice-president for research.