CONTENTS

March 2006

FEATURES
What should we be doing to prepare for the unprecedented aging of humanity?
By S. Jay Olshansky, Daniel Perry, Richard A. Miller
and Robert N. Butler

Your Money for Your Life
How one company carved itself a piece of the anti-aging industry pie
By Alison McCook
Plugging the Mitochondrial Leak
By Nick Lane
The Trouble with Markers
Michael O'Neill
The Midwestern city of Kalamazoo lost its pharmaceutical anchor but scrambled to keep its scientists. Is there a lesson for other regions -- and researchers?
By Keith O'Brien
Eight Ingredients to Build a Life Sciences Hub
Can You Host the Next Biotech Hub?
An investment of $100 million should be enough to correlate the genome with function, and identify new basic research and drug targets
By Marc Vidal
Interactome Yields Data,
But Is It Significant?

By Jeffrey M. Perkel
Making Money from the Interactome
By Kate Fodor
Where should you postdoc? Find out where institutions around the world ranked in The Scientist's annual Best Places to Work for Postdocs survey.
By Ted Agres, Ishani Ganguli, Stephen Pincock and Johan Nyman
ALSO THIS MONTH

A BETTER LIFE FOR POSTDOCS?

The lot of postdocs may be improving a bit, but a new threat has materialized
By Richard Gallagher

MAIL

The trouble with peer review; Defending animal research; How to improve the h-index

THE AGENDA

Aging Never Gets Old; Millions of Patents; Interact with the Interactome; Kandel's Memories

A LAB GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

By Ishani Ganguli

BRAIN SWAPPING COMES OF AGE

By Jack Lucentini

THE SCIENTISTS AND THE WHALES

By Stephen Pincock

BEATING UP INTELLIGENT DESIGN

By Ishani Ganguli

NIH'S HISTORY KEEPER RETIRES

By Karen Pallarito

HOW TO GUARD AGAINST IMAGE FRAUD

The Journal of Cell Biology's image-screening process could have caught part of Woo-Suk Hwang's fraud. The editors encourage other journals to use it.
By Mike Rossner

THE STATE OF SCIENCE FUNDING

Should Sacramento, Albany, and Providence be taking over for Uncle Sam?
By Glenn McGee

OUR FOOD IS DYING

Infectious agents are threatening the world's crops
By Jack Woodall

DRUNKEN DROSOPHILA

Ulrike Heberlein started out studying fruit fly eyes. So how did she end up inventing the inebriometer?
By Karen Hopkin

THE ROOT OF BRCA1'S EVIL

Uncovering the mechanism of cancer-causing defects in a notorious oncogene
By Nicole Johnston

THOSE MYSTERIOUS NONCODERS

By Aileen Constans

PARENTAGE HAS EFFECTS
OUTSIDE THE GENOME

By Aileen Constans

EXTINCTION LINKED
TO GLOBAL WARMING

By Ishani Ganguli

PAPERS TO WATCH

 

ANTHRAX ACTS IN SURPRISING WAYS

 

snoRNAS LINKED
PRADER-WILLI SYNDROME

 

SCIENTIST TO WATCH

Karl Deisseroth: Frustrated and doing something about it
By Monya Baker

THE TROUBLE WITH KITS

Prefab kits blunt technical creativity. Have your students devise their own solutions.
By Jeffrey M. Perkel

DO YOU NEED AN
ELECTRONIC LAB NOTEBOOK?

If you answer 'yes' to these four questions, you probably do.
By Melissa Lee Phillips

HOW IT WORKS

The Multimode Microplate Reader
By Jeffrey M. Perkel

LEVERAGING MEDICAL TOURISM

Opportunities and challenges for biotechs follow people on health holiday
By Linda F. Powers

USPTO PROPOSES CONTROVERSIAL PATENT FILING CHANGES

Will a bid to improve efficiency end up costing industry and academia?
By Ted Agres

A QUESTION OF QUALITY

ClinicalTrials.gov registrations are up, but how useful are the data?
By Ishani Ganguli

IP, GOING ONCE, GOING TWICE, SOLD!

By Ishani Ganguli

INTERNATIONAL PATENT SEARCHING GETS OVERHAUL

By Ishani Ganguli

LOOKING FOR ANSWERS

How to uncover a person's potential value when conducting a job interview
By Ruedi Sandmeier

INCREASE JOB SKILLS, INCREASE VALUE

New programs can expand and broaden your skill set and improve your career prospects
By Virginia Gewin

HARVARD OPENS HEALTHCARE/BIOTECH POLICY CENTER

By Kendall S. Powell

SUSAN LINQUIST ON HOW TO COMMUNICATE SCIENCE

By Kendall S. Powell

FOUNDATIONS

The First Commercial UV-Vis Spectrophotometer
By Ishani Ganguli