A 30-year-old Colombian woman with damaged airways is healthy months after receiving what European doctors are reporting is a first-ever, stem-cell-based windpipe transplant. They say the technique has allowed the woman to thrive without the use of the drugs that other transplant patients must take to prevent their immune systems from rejecting the new organs.

The unique transplant was performed in June on Claudia Castillo, who was severely short of breath after part of her trachea had collapsed from tuberculosis, hampering the flow of oxygen to her left lung. Doctors in Barcelona took a trachea from a 51-year-old female donor who’d died of a stroke and, over a six-week “washing,” stripped it of its cells. British doctors then grew stem cells from Castillo’s own bone marrow in the lab and had them grow on the donor trachea with them before implanting it, creating a kind of hybrid windpipe with the donor organ as a scaffold, the doctors write in this week’s edition of The Lancet.

Quick: How many top science writers were spotted standing behind a Republican Senate candidate during a concession speech last night?

Only one, as far as we know: Carl Zimmer.

If you were watching News 12 in New Jersey last night, you would have seen Carl holding his daughter as his father, former U.S. Rep. Dick Zimmer, conceded to incumbent Sen. Frank Lautenberg after a 55 percent to 43 percent vote.

Dick Zimmer, 64, campaigned against 84-year-old Lautenberg on a platform of energy conservation and greater efficiency standards for cars and SUVs. He also supported increased nuclear power and energy exploration on public lands.

It’s hard to imagine an industry that isn’t affected by the global financial crisis, and science is no exception. The credit crunch will slow the development of new medicines, too, say economists and scientists meeting in London today and tomorrow.

The concern for novel treatments follows a boom time in the development of so-called “lifestyle drugs” to treat conditions such as impotence and baldness, which critics say has eclipsed innovation in treatments for serious diseases and those in developing countries where people cannot afford high-priced medicine. Investment in biotechs, companies that focus on developing new technologies from biology, last year hit a record-high $50 billion, but “the signs are that this has flattened,” says David Wield, director of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Innogen Center in Edinburgh.

A clinical trial that would test the use of embryonic stem cells to treat spinal cord injury could begin within three months.

The Scientist is reporting that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) may lift its hold on a trial sponsored by California biotech Geron Corp. by early next year. In May, the agency ordered Geron to delay the trial while it studied how best to regulate stem-cell-based therapies.

The phase 1 trial would test whether it is safe to inject nerve cells into the site of a spinal cord injury. A study published in 2005 in the Journal of Neuroscience found that giving rats the injections seven days after a spinal cord injury improved their motor function.

The head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is leaving the agency, he announced today, marking at least the second departure of a scientist from the Bush Administration in the last 24 hours.

Elias Zerhouni says he'll depart the NIH at the end of next month to write. His announcement on the NIH Web site, follows yesterday's resignation of Conrad Lautenbacher, chief of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Both were long-time Bush appointees, Zerhouni having served for six years and Lautenbach for seven.

"It's with mixed emotions that I move on," Zerhouni, 57, said in a press conference today, according to The Scientist, adding that he doesn't "have a job lined up."

His running mate may be raising the ire of scientists with her positions on creationism and wildlife conservation, but Republican presidential nominee John McCain is touting his tech cred. In a page out of the Al Gore playbook, McCain boasts that "under my guiding hand, Congress developed a wireless spectrum policy that spurred the rapid rise of mobile phones and Wi-Fi technology."

McCain's remark today was in response to 14 science-policy questions posed to him and Democratic opponent Barack Obama. The Arizona senator's replies are published online by Science Debate 2008, a group of science and business leaders. (Obama answered the group's queries about three weeks ago.)