Notebook (old)

After a long famine, and buoyed by the stock market's overall health over the past 18 months, investors are once again feasting on initial public offerings (IPOs). Prominent among them are biotech firms. The news is good for the cash-starved biotech companies, since they finally have a place to raise money. But the news is not as good for IPO investors, who are getting uncertain returns in the post-IPO aftermarket."Although the general markets have been choppy all year and are likely to remain s

Five years after the UK Biobank first won financial backing in principle from the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council, it has just about reached the point where bricks and mortar are being added to grand ideas and cautious plans. (When was originally approved in 1999, the Biobank resembled the UK Population Biomedical Collection, which sounded more like something you could order from a curio shop at the Census Bureau than a repository for tissue samples.)So even as Biobank fever arou

Andrzej KrauzeThe number of European researchers who leave Europe for greener pastures abroad has continued to make headlines on a regular basis in recent months. Time magazine, for example, reported in January that some 400,000 European science and technology graduates now live in the United States, and the European Commission says that only 13% of European science professionals working abroad intend to return home. More recent studies from Germany question whether the picture is as gloomy as t

Chances are you've never seen a laboratory like the one supervised by Chip Maxwell. Pulsating Day-Glo fluorescent lights flash off brushed aluminium walls as Maxwell places his hands on an opaque plastic hemisphere sprouting from the countertop. Maxwell, an environmental engineer at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, rubs it with his eyes closed. "What does that instrument do?" asks a woman from Kentucky, raising her camera to capture the scientist at

Some European imports have never been welcomed with open arms in the United States, particularly in these days of EU trade wars and Freedom Fries. The rabid tactics increasingly used by a hard core of animal-rights extremists must rank among the least welcome trends to cross the Atlantic in recent times.A clear sign that something new was afoot came in early June during the Biotechnology Industry Organization meeting in San Francisco. Animal and ecological rights groups, said FBI special agent P

Andrzej KrauzeIf you're one of the hundreds of thousands of regular BioMedNet users, you'll know that the Web site went dark on June 30, after nine years of creating a large and vibrant community of life scientists, based on content such as a bookstore, mouse knockout database, PubMed, and a biomedical database. (If you're a regular reader of The Scientist Daily News online, you'll know that we reported the coming demise in December.) The abridged story of the once wildly successful site is wort

Contents Pivotal pump Leptin limbo Clue to obesity Biotech Web site Helping hand Mapping malaria Notebook Pictured above are pigmented bacterial colonies of Deinococcus radiodurans, the most radiation-resistant organism currently known. DEINO-MITE CLEANUP In 1956, investigators discovered a potentially invaluable cleanup tool in an unlikely place. A hardy bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans unexpectedly thrived in samples of canned meat thought to be sterilized by gamma radiation. The b

Contents Pivotal pump Leptin limbo Clue to obesity Biotech Web site Helping hand Mapping malaria UCSD - Salk Program in Molecular Medicine HEART FAILURE RESCUE: A cross section of a mouse genetically engineered to develop heart failure (left) shows enlarged heart chambers and thin walls that are typical of the condition. A cross section from the same strain of mouse, but with the phospholamban gene (PLB) also missing, appears normal. PIVOTAL PUMP A biochemical calcium pump and the gene that con

Content Jumping DNA Semen pharming Screening for heart risk Real-time signaling PubSCIENCE starts, PubMedCentral grows When time stands still Shutting down the pump Brain gain JUMPING DNA Mutations aren't transmitted only by inheritance--they can cross species, too, according to recent findings by John F. McDonald, head of the genetics department at the University of Georgia (I.K. Jordan et al., "Evidence for the recent horizontal transfer of long terminal repeat retrotransposon," Proceedings of

Contents Id and angio Testosterone boost to favored offspring More dopamine To B or not to B Mice that know when to say when Viral conquest Unraveling helicase Done in by a sucker ID AND ANGIO When Robert Benezra of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, and colleagues knocked out two proteins that inhibit transcription factors in mice, they expected to see premature neural differentiation. In addition, however, they noticed that the absence of those two proteins, Id1 and Id3, di

Reprinted with permission from Nature CKI produces complete secondary dorsal axes. Synthetic mRNA encoding CKI, mutant CKI (K > R), or Xwnt-8 was injected at the eight-cell stage into one ventral vegetal blastomere. Embryos injected with CKI or Xwnt-8, but not inactive CKI (K > R), developed complete secondary dorsal axes. CANCER CLUE The rush of discoveries over the past two years concerning the Wnt signaling pathway--known to be crucial to normal development and altered in human melano

The banded Gila monster's saliva may help provide a new treatment for type II diabetes mellitus. NEW TREATMENT FOR DIABETES II? A chemical in the saliva of the Gila monster Heloderma suspectum that helps digest gigantic meals may provide a new treatment for type II diabetes mellitus. The Gila monster is one of only two venomous lizards and hails from the Phoenix, Ariz., area, coincidentally the home of the Pima Indians, who have the world's highest incidence of type II diabetes." John Eng, a

HARDWIRED HUNGER Two distinct but adjacent sets of cells in the same part of the brain respond in opposite ways to the same hormone: leptin, which, when lacking in the bloodstream, results in a voracious appetite. A group led by Joel K. Elmquist, neuroendocrinology researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and assistant professor of neurology and medicine at Harvard Medical School, set out to understand the leptin pathway by injecting the hormone into rats and following its progress to

ALZHEIMER'S VACCINE It's the classic vaccine approach: Get protection against a disease by training the body's immune system, using a bit of the disease itself, to respond to infection in force. Typically applied to infectious diseases such as smallpox or polio, immune system-boosting treatments have more recently been aimed at cancerous tumors. Now a recent paper suggests that Alzheimer's disease (AD) might be effectively treated by priming the immune system with a form of the damaging, neuro

Contents Trial veteran Resistance in rivers I contain multitudes Chlamydia in heart disease Tomatoes vs. armyworms Look, Ma, no paws Peroxide damage Philip Brunell receives the first injection at NIH of the experimental shingles vaccine from nurse Patricia Hohman. TRIAL VETERAN When Philip Brunell received the first shingles vaccination in a Phase III trial June 17, it was not exactly a shot in the dark. The senior attending physician at the National Institutes of Health clinical center estim

WHY X Y? Cloning is not just for females anymore. The same University of Hawaii researchers that cloned 50 healthy female mice a year ago (T. Wakayama et al., "Full-term development of mice from enucleated oocytes injected with cumulus cell nuclei," Nature, 394:369-74, July 23, 1998) recently reported the first-ever cloning of an adult male mouse (T.W. Wakayama, R. Yanagimachi, "Cloning of male mice from adult tail-tip cells," Nature Genetics, 22:127-8, June 1999). Named "Fibro" after the fibro

Image provided by Genzyme Transgenics Corporation CLONING GOATS In contrast to cloning's popular image as a brave new way to mass-produce monsters, biologists have described cloning as a tool to ease other biotechnologies. Researchers from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Genzyme Transgenic Corp. in Framingham, Mass., and Tufts University School of Medicine in North Grafton, Mass., have shown how cloning can dramatically increase the efficiency of creating goats that secrete valuable

ANTSY ANTIBIOTICS Humans didn't invent self-medication. Ants got into the act 50 million years ago. The attine ants are expert gardeners, cultivating edible fungi in subterranean "mushroom farms" on food harvested above ground. The most famous attines are the leaf cutters, whose superorganismlike colonies of several million ants are organized into functional castes led by a queen (B. Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants, Harvard University Press, 1994). Their prodigious harvest

INTRAFLAGELLAR TRANSPORT Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have for the first time seen a motor protein moving cargo during intracellular transport in a living organism. "This provides a potentially very exciting assay for studying motor proteins generally in vivo," says Jonathan M. Scholey, senior author of the study published recently in Nature (J.T. Orozco et al., "Movement of motor and cargo along cilia," Nature, 398:674, April 22, 1999). Using fluorescence microscopy, Sch

MAD LEMURS A study of lemurs infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), clarifies the pathogenesis of the abnormal proteinase-resistant protein (PrP) or "prion" protein now thought to cause encephalopathic diseases. Also, more zoo animals could have the disease than previously thought (N. Bons et al., "Natural and experimental oral infection of nonhuman primates by bovine spongiform encephalopathy agents," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96:4046-51, March 30, 1999)