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White House will review how agencies interact with researchers

Snapshot | The Eclectic Reading Habits of Scientists When it comes to reading nonscientific books, the interests of our readers would fill a library. The 322 readers who completed our survey have books on fly fishing, science fiction, politics, and philosophy, sitting on their coffee and bedside tables. One reader has a self-described "voracious" appetite: "I usually have at least three books going at all times." They also read newspapers: 62% do so on a regular basis, with the New York T

Foundations | The First Array Courtesy of Mark Schema Ron Davis and I were studying plant transcription factors in 1990, but progress was slow and arduous because the gene expression tools were so primitive. We conceived of the DNA microarray in 1993 to speed up gene expression analysis by combining biology and high technology. We adapted Affymetrix VLSIPS technology to synthesize yeast microarrays, and measured gene expression in yeast cells by hybridizing fluorescent probes derived from

In 1992, American writer Andrew Solomon, then in his late-20s, was about to publish his first novel when he unexpectedly slid into a major depression. In a subsequent book, he wrote that the experience is "almost unimaginable" to the uninitiated. Describing it, he likened himself to an oak being strangled by a vine, "a sucking thing that had wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I." He called up the image of falling into an abyss: "You hit invisible things over and over again, un

Advances in technology always make us uneasy. Telephones, vaccinations, E-mail, mobile phones--despite the value we now place on them, these innovations provoked dire forecasts, and damnation, on their arrival. A vocal minority continue to see these innovations as dangerous. Some of the unease that comes with the new and different is well founded. We don't have to search far to find examples of new technologies that turned out to have unanticipated, troublesome consequences. Nonetheless, muc

Criticizing recent negative studies of replacement therapy, some scientists are holding out for more data

Supporters of new publishing model still face skepticism about journals' viability

New York City policy of charging genetic material in lieu of a person raises technical and ethical concerns

With Alfred D. Hershey, she established DNA as the genetic material

Responses ranged from playfully innovative to panic over frozen samples and lab animals' health

Research universities lack creativity when it comes to training the next generation of biologists

Genomic utility spawns demand by researchers