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December 10 marked another "major milestone" in molecular biology. An international consortium of scientists announced that they have obtained the first complete genetic blueprint of a complex animal. C. elegans Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, U.K., have sequenced the 97 million-base genome of Caenorhabditis elegans, biologists' favorite worm. The product of a nine-year effort, the C. elegans sequence joins those of E. coli and yeast in

In early December, Emory University in Atlanta agreed to pay $66,400 in fines and change its operating procedures in response to the December 1997 death of Elizabeth Griffin, a 22-year-old worker at its Yerkes Regional Primate Center. Griffin contracted herpes B virus, common in Old World macaques, when she was hit in the eye with fecal material, urine, or saliva while transferring a rhesus monkey to a cage.1 Though rare in humans, B virus is often lethal unless treated early with antiviral dru

Ferid Murad, M.D., Ph.D., just won the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for his work on nitric oxide. Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., heads the National Human Genome Research Institute. And 49 investigators who hold both M.D. and Ph.D. degrees are funded by the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute. What these disparate observations reflect is the rise of the M.D.-Ph.D., whose training and professional pedigree dovetail nicely with two hallmarks of the current biomedical arena: rapid

Peter Brazutis INTERNATIONAL EFFORT: Yunzhen Cao left the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York last summer to set up an AIDS research lab in China. Her researchers will be trained at Aaron Diamond, whose David Ho is pictured on the wall. Epidemiogical Deficiencies Epidemiological studies in Yunnan Province1 indicate that in some areas there is a high rate of HIV-seroprevalence among IV drug abusers--in some places as high as 85.7 percent. Furthermore, the infected drug users a

TIGHAR/P. Thrasher Tom King, senior project archaeologist for TIGHAR, excavates a site on Nikumaroro Island in 1997. In 1991, TIGHAR archaeologists found a shoe heel marked "Cat's Paw Rubber Co. USA" (right). They suspect that the heel and other matching shoe parts they found belonged to Amelia Earhart. STILL SEARCHING Lady Lindbergh may not have met her demise in the waters of the Pacific after all. On Dec. 4, 1998, at the annual American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting in P

Just prior to offering the floor to Harold Varmus for the first Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education subcommittee hearing in more than two months, and just after exchanging pleasantries with the National Institutes of Health director, subcommittee chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) asked Varmus jokingly, "Did you like the $2 billion we gave you?" A smiling Varmus answered in the affirmative; onlookers chuckled. "It's my belief that stem cells do not fall under the ban on embryo re

Per the request of President Bill Clinton, the members of the presidentially appointed National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) met on Nov. 17 to discuss the bioethical, medical, and legal ramifications of the apparent first-ever creation of bovine-human hybrid cells, embryonic cells consisting of a human cell's nucleus inside a cow egg. In a Nov. 14 letter to the NBAC, the president said that he was "deeply troubled by this news of experiments involving the mingling of human and nonhuman

PHOTO CREDIT: Lori Desantis, Children's Hospital of Boston ANGIOGENESIS HONORS: Children's Hospital of Boston researcher Judah Folkman (far right) received the 1998 John Scott Award from the Philadelphia Board of Directors of City Trusts for his work in studying angiogenesis and angiogenesis inhibitors. Folkman, who refuses to be photographed alone, is joined by Harvard Medical School colleagues (from right) Donald Ingber, Michael O'Reilly, and Robert D'Amato. After being built up by a New York

NEXT STEP: The virtual center "is the natural evolution of our shared research interests," says Ashley T. Haase, chair of the microbiology department at the University of Minnesota. When AIDS researchers physically located in four different states hold a meeting, it almost feels like they're sitting at a table across from each other--but they're really just facing their individual computer screens. They view slides of the human immunodeficiency virus in lymphoid tissue in real time and discuss

Cold Spring Harbor NEW PROGRAM AT COLD SPRING HARBOR Next fall, five students will begin a new Ph.D. program at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island that promises to be both faster and more flexible than the typical graduate school experience. The private, nonprofit research and educational institution has been home to such bioluminaries as Barbara McClintock and James Watson. Although it has welcomed grad students from the nearby University at Stony Brook for many years, until now it

PHOTO: Edward Derrick, AAAS PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE: J. Scott Hauger (left), director of the Research Competitiveness Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, speaks with Tom Collins, vice president for research at Oklahoma State University, during a break at the recent Next Generation Internet conference in San Diego. A distributed information-retrieval system enables desktop access to biological collections that can be used for biodiversity research, conservation, m

November marked one year since the war against HIV took another frightening twist. It was learned that, like guerrillas sneaking into a sleeping army command post, the virus could conceal itself from combination drug therapy by hiding in resting CD4+ T cells--the immune cells that order destruction of such foreign invaders, yet themselves are primary targets of HIV. But November also marked the emergence of a new weapon in the fight against these latent viral reserves, a fight still far from wo