Vaccination has beaten back infections for more than a century. Now, it may be the next big step in battling cancer.

Clinicians and researchers teamed up to investigate how inappropriate proinflammatory mechanisms contribute to the pathogenesis of drug-refractory epilepsy.

A type of antibody long thought to have a minor role in immune system memory may actually be a key player, new findings suggest. Researchers tracked the antibody's function by imaging the immune system's B cells in the act of responding to a pathogen and developing into memory B cells, which can recognize an infectious agent years after first encountering it, they report in a study published online yesterday (October 25) in Nature Immunology. B cell and memory B cell reacting to a virus Image:

Ned Shaw US scientists have reason to feel both heady and scared. The federal government recently released unprecedented billions of dollars to fund bioterrorism research. Yet, the merits of this sudden shift in focus are being debated, and some worry that the money will be squandered or wasted. "I have been really very upset by the focus on bioterrorism," says Stanley Falkow, professor of microbiology and immunology and of medicine at Stanford University. "Everybody's talking about it, but th

Editor's Note: On May 2, the National Academy of Sciences announced the election of 60 new members and 15 foreign associates from nine countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Nearly half of the new members are life scientists. In this article, The Scientist presents photographs of some of the new members and comments from a few of them on their careers and on past and current research. A full directory of NAS members can be found online a

Biology happens on many levels, from ecosystems to electron transport chains. These tools may help spur discoveries at all of life's scales.

Human proteome cataloged; island-separated crickets evolved silence; molecule shows promise for combatting coronaviruses; study replication etiquette; another call for STAP retraction

Commercial kits use fluorescent beads to probe dozens of cytokines in one reaction.

Researchers interested in gene expression studies adopt one of two approaches. They can either examine the expression of a given gene in a population of cells in aggregate, or they can study the gene on a cell-by-cell basis in situ. The advantage of the former approach is its simplicity: It is generally easy to prepare RNA or protein from a given tissue sample and to probe it for the gene or protein of interest. But there are several disadvantages associated with the population approach. First o

A low-profile child of the '60s, flow cytometry didn't capture the imagination of most researchers until the early 1980s. The decade saw the birth of the AIDS epidemic, and as attention focused on HIV, researchers needed a method to accurately and reproducibly characterize immune cells. Flow cytometry was suddenly thrust into the spotlight. COMPLETE KITS: Bio-Rad’s KINESIS reagent kits for flow cytometry assays A flow cytometer shines one or more lasers on a sample of cells in suspension