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The latest budget for the UK continued the Chancellor's role as puppetmaster for science and technology.

Who should benefit from the transfer of technology from the academic world into the business arena? The university that cooked up the ideas, or the company that turned them into money? How about society as a whole? An American Prof warns against micro managing the process.

Microsoft has stepped up its courtship of the international research community with the publication of an investigation of how computer science will underpin scientific discovery in the next 15 years.

If your business isn't in a technology cluster, you have every reason to feel an outsider.

Everyone sees MIT as a role model, especially the British government. But there are other successful exploiters of academic R&D.

Tectonic shifts in the patent landscape could follow on from high-profile lawsuits challenging what can be protected by a patent and how patents are enforced that are due to be heard by the US Supreme Court this month.

The competition to lure biotech investors and know-how is heating up in US states - and so are the legal battles between over fair and unfair incentives.

Battle lines are drawn in an expensive, distracting and unedifying legal fight between two vaccine manufacturers. Nuala Moran investigates.

Six volunteers are in intensive care after a U.K. trial of an antibody treatment for leukaemia went horribly wrong, raising a raft of questions about drug testing.

At the Science Business roundtable in Paris on 7 March, labour was the big talking point - both inside and outside the conference room.

Business angels in German-speaking countries have traditionally been shy about what they do. Mary Lisbeth D'Amico watches them come out of hiding.

Retina Implant AG has developed an electronic chip that is implanted in the eye under the retina and could restore partial vision for the blind – and is now looking for funding from investors to take the product to the market next year.

Friedrich Bornikoel, managing partner for TVM Capital's Information & Communications Technology group, sees a recovery in German venture capital - but still no boom.

Chameleon BioSurfaces, a spin-out from the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, is looking for £500,000 in funding to develop a new form of polymer coating for drug eluting stents.

Europe's aversion to GM crops has killed investors' appetites for agricultural research. Even in the UK, historically a world leader in this field, it is almost impossible to commercialise agricultural biotechnology of any kind.

Look out for more competition from Asia as Singapore turns on the pressure with its own increase in R&D spending.

BioXell, an Italian spin-out from Roche, said it has raised €10.5 million in funding from an extension of its Series C round which was first closed in October, 2004. TVM Capital, one of Germany’s biggest venture capital funds, led the financing.

The notion of grid computing is seeping out of the academic world into business applications.

Save energy, cool your seat.