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Mount Sinai School of Medicine
New York NY 10029 USA
University of Maryland
Baltimore MD 21201 USA
UT Health Science Center
San Antonio TX 78229 USA
House Ear Institute
Los Angeles CA 90057 USA
Phillip Morris Intl.
Neuchatel CHE
Phillip Morris Intl.
Neuchatel CHE
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis MN 55455 USA
The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge MA 02142 USA
Careers Articles
- Michael Hall has the dubious honor of having worked in the only lab that was ever shut down for recombinant DNA guideline violations. “It was very exciting,” he recalls with a smile. The local TV stations sent crews and the National Institutes of Health conducted a thorough investigation. “I had to write statements about what happened and tell the investigating committee what I...
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- When Judith Swan was a PhD student in molecular and cell biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), her research on specialized microtubules in chicken cells went pretty smoothly. But despite expert guidance and advice from her advisor, “when it came time to write, nobody had very much to say,” Swan recalls. Swan was essentially told to write up her research, then was...
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- Tim Hubbard claims he knows nothing about genetics. But he was drawn into the
high-stakes world of genomics by a job offer he couldn’t refuse. Hubbard had
been working on algorithms for predicting protein structures at the MRC Centre for
Protein Engineering in the United Kingdom when he noticed that the Sanger Institute in
Hinxton was looking to hire some new bioinformaticists....
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- Audrey Dussutour never had a special fondness for ants, but over the last decade,
she’s gotten to know them very well—especially their propensity to
act as a single organism though hundreds or thousands of individuals may comprise a
single colony. “It’s fascinating, because it works exactly opposite
to humans—there’s no leader,” she says. Her...
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- After working for DuPont (which became DuPont Merck) for 17 years, Bill Schmidt
decided to take his act on the road. The company elected to stop developing drug
candidates for pain that Schmidt had been working on, based on the belief that no new
drug could compete with cheap generic drugs such as morphine and aspirin. (This was four
years before Pfizer’s Celebrex and...
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- Talk about a rite of passage: In his first job out of Amherst College in 1980, Douglas Bishop worked as a tech for a scientist
who had neither an alarm clock nor a circadian rhythm. David Kurtz at Cold Spring Harbor had a habit of staying awake for
24 hours, sleeping awhile, and then repeating the process. “The approach allowed him to work about 100 hours a week,” says
...
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- Anthony Brown has always been good at pharmaceutical medicine, but recently
he's become a pro at being interviewed as well. Just 1 month and two interviews
after graduating from St. John's University in Queens, New York with a bachelor's
degree in toxicology and chemistry in May 2005, Brown landed a job in the
pharmaceutical industry as a quality...
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- Growing up, J. Christopher Love never imagined that he’d be exploring the intricacies of the immune system as a career. In
high school, he developed theoretical designs for molecules that could act as electrical devices at the MITRE Corporation,
a government-sponsored defense technology company in Fairfax County, Va. Love says the project helped him “realize that...
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- Sean Carroll’s most flamboyant finding was prompted by an innocent
query before a seminar. Carroll had gone down to Duke University to give a talk
about his research on the genes and molecules that direct the regular spacing of
bristles on a fruit fly leg. There he met up with Fred Nijhout, who had been
studying the spots on...
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- It’s not every day that a biologist’s work makes it on to Comedy
Central. But after giving a talk at the American Museum of Natural History in New York
City about herpes-like viruses in corals, that’s what happened to Rebecca Vega
Thurber, then a marine biology postdoc.1 Her findings were
mentioned on Stephen...
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- Seven years after landing his first faculty job, and a year after securing
tenure, Andrew Hendry earned his first year-long sabbatical, a precious respite from
teaching and administrative duties that only comes around a few times in one’s
career. Last summer, Hendry, a McGill University evolutionary ecologist who studies
speciation dynamics, packed up the...
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- As an undergraduate at Radcliffe College—Harvard's allgirl
sister institution—in the 1960s, Susan Gottesman
earned pocket money working as a technician in Jim
Watson's Harvard lab. "I would hear stories of people going to
mixers at Radcliffe and meeting this strange guy who said he
was a professor," she laughs. "But in the lab he was perfectly well
behaved." And he...
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- Ah summer! It's a time for easy living, a relaxed teaching schedule, perhaps
a leisurely sabbatical, some tall cold drinks, and... undergraduate interns. The
National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program places
about 140 undergrads in biology labs every summer, while the National Institutes of
Health invites about 800 undergraduate researchers to work...
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- In 1999, Konrad Hochedlinger squeezed into a packed lecture at the Institute
of Molecular Pathology in Vienna to hear stem cell researcher Rudolf Jaenisch talk
about nuclear transfer cloning techniques. Hochedlinger, a biology masters student,
knew little about cloning, but he'd been intrigued by the technique ever since
scientists cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996. "I was too shy" to...
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- As pharma's pipeline dries out, companies are increasingly reaching out to
university researchers—and not just for out-of-the-box licensing deals.
Over the past three years, Washington University in St. Louis has seen the numbers
of collaborations rise from 46 to 72, while GlaxoSmithKline and Merck have reported
plans to acquire as much as 50% and 25%, respectively, of their...
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- In February 1999, evolutionary biologist Ashleigh Griffin defended her PhD
thesis at the University of Edinburgh. Then, one month later, she gave birth. For
the next three years, she stayed home caring for her daughter while writing up her
research "when I could manage that," she says. She was so poor that she was relying
on milk tokens from the government just to get by. ...
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- In 1997, Domenico Pratico, a third year University of Pennsylvania postdoc,
was seeking funding for his molecular research on brain aging and neurodegeneration.
For nearly three years, his lab had worked on developing a specific, sensitive new
assay to measure oxidative stress in a patient's brain. The results were promising,
but...
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- In early February, the House voted to approve the $787 billion economic
recovery package and this was signed into law by President Obama. The bill contains
something for everyone including scientists—$10 billion for National Institutes of
Health (NIH), $1.3 billion for the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR),
...
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- In 2007, Steve Erikson, a plant researcher at a large public university in
the south, had been working with a PhD student on a project using RNAi to silence
endogenous genes and improve the nutritional quality of a particular food crop.
Erikson stressed to his student, Adrianne Long (the names have been changed to
maintain...
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- Financial planners hate having to tell their clients that they need to delay
retirement. Yet as the global economic meltdown drags on, many researchers in both
academia and industry are facing that reality. ...
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