The Scientist

Since my colleague Brendan Maher returned from a chromatin meeting in January, it seems there's been a burst of activity in the epigenetics field, much of it covered here in __The Scientist__. On March 17, for instance, I linkurl:reported;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23235/ on the publication of three papers in __Genes & Development__, which mapped the binding of the Dosage Compensation Complex (DCC) across the __Drosophila__ X chromosome during fly development. Today, __linkurl:Na

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The mood at linkurl:BIO yesterday;http://www.bio.org/ preceding Bill Clinton's speech felt more like a rock concert than a keynote address. In fact, I was very nearly carried away in a stampede when the conference organizers finally opened the barriers to the hall. When everyone finally got settled in, there was rapt attention during Clinton's 45-minute speech. True to form, he spoke with perfect organization, seamlessly citing statistics and facts without ever looking at notes. His theme for t

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This morning at the 2006 linkurl:BIO meeting;://www.bio.org/events/2006/ in Chicago, I listened to a panel of high profile executives at a range of companies within the biotech/pharma sector, all of whom seemed to agree that pharmaceutical companies are taking more risks in recent years by investing in earlier-stage products. This is a major shift for the industry, which has traditionally chosen to spend more money on later-stage products with more data to suggest they work, rather than throw th

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British scientists are expected to reveal today (Thursday) whether a dead swan found on the Scottish coast was infected with H5N1 avian influenza, Scottish authorities said last night. linkurl:Preliminary tests;http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2006/04/05231331 on the swan showed that it was infected with highly pathogenic H5 avian flu, but the exact strain is not yet known. With infected birds having turned up elsewhere in Europe, the UK has been anticipating the possible arrival of th

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Today was the first day of a 10 day trip to Africa on behalf of The Scientist to talk to researchers about the linkurl:state of science;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22793/ on the continent. On my inaugural stop, I visited John Mugabe, director of the science and technology council of the linkurl:New Economic Partnership for African Development;http://www.nepad.org/ (NEPAD), whose office is in a research campus on the edge of Pretoria, South Africa. Mugabe is not a vociferous man

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