On June 14, a House Appropriations subcommittee gave some researchers cause for celebration when it surprisingly voted to remove a provision in a government spending bill that extended a ban on federal funding of human embryo research. However, their glee was short-lived. The full panel turned around on June 25 and adopted an amendment to continue the research ban. John Eppig, senior staff scientist at Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, doubts that the ban will be overturned anytime soon,

Courtesy of BD Biosciences Pharmingen  COLOR CODING: Multiplexed bead-based assays, like BD Biosciences' Cytometric Bead Array (shown), test for multiple analytes in a single vial. The key is in the colors: one hue indicates the bead ID, and the intensity of the second, how much protein has been captured. In today's fast-paced research environment, technologies for speedy, cost-efficient analyses reign supreme. As part of this general trend, techniques for multiplexing, that is, simultan