The Scientist

An ongoing regimen of HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) keeps HIV from exploding into AIDS. In the clinic, where patients precisely follow the HAART program, it wipes out detectable virus in more than 90% of patients. In the real world, where patients forget a pill here and there, the success rate falls to 50% or 60%, says Dean Hamer of the National Cancer Institute. In addition, HAART itself creates problems.Few, if any, patients could stay with HAART forever. "There are lots of prob

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Figure 1Hope was once high that, over time, antiretroviral therapy would rid patients of HIV-infected cells. Such hopes hinged on the presumption that these drugs could reach any and all HIV reservoirs.That's clearly not the case, as the title of a recent conference in the French West Indies attests: the 1st International Workshop on HIV Persistence during Therapy. "HIV persistently replicates, even in infected patients whose levels of plasma viremia have fallen below detectable levels while on

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"Give us the tools, and we will finish the job."--Winston Churchill Centrifuges, imaging systems, pipettes, PCR instruments, microscopes, and more--all indispensable components of the scientist's toolbox. They make science happen. Moreover, they make science compelling. Why else would television programs such as CSI and The X-Files devote so much screen time to such high-tech gadgetry? Most labs have these things, and naturally, researchers have their preferences. So, like last year, we

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Christine Bahls His hair is pure white; his speech, still tinged with his native German, is a tad slow. The body bows a bit to its achieved 99 years--even living legends shuffle in slippers and need sweaters. Ernst Mayr, who began studying birds and ended up studying the world, who introduced biodiversity into the synthesis of evolutionary biology, thereby evolving a new strain of study, cannot let science go. Each morning, he critiques someone's work, pours over his own pending publication,

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© Mehau Kulyk/Photo Researchers, Inc. A typical neuron's axons and dendrites, when loaded with dye and magnified, resemble long, untended tresses on an extremely bad hair day. They extend wildly, usually to one side, and then bend at weird angles as their ends split into branches and sub-branches. This neuronal coiffure must appear even more chaotic before the nervous system has undergone the developmental equivalent of a crew cut crossed with a topiary trimming. From the late embryonic

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