The Nutshell

When you come across a worst case scenario -- say someone who had a well-paying job but fell on hard times and lost everything ? do you think of that person as an outlier, or an example of what can happen to anyone? The other day, I heard about Jo A. Del Rio, a former Merck employee. She brought home an annual salary of $80,000 until January, 2004, when she was laid off during downsizing. Soon after, a series of medical problems depleted her financial reserves, and she ended up living in a shel

As if things weren't bleak enough for disgraced South Korean cloner Hwang Woo-suk, it emerged last night that he has been linkurl:offered public support;http://www.clonaid.com/news.php by Clonaid, the UFO cult founded by a former French sports journalist. In a posting on its website, Clonaid, which claims it has cloned several human embryos but is keeping the results secret, tries to draw a parallel between Hwang's recent difficulties and its own activities.The website asks: 'It is interesti

Yesterday (Jan. 17) the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute linkurl:announced;http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Info/Press/2006/060117.shtml that its linkurl:World Trace Archive database;http://trace.ensembl.org had just crossed the 1 billion sequence mark. The Trace Archive is a collection of sequence reads, traces, and metrics from the world's sequencing facilities. It measures some 22 Terabytes in size and is doubling every 10 months, according to the press release. "To grasp how much data is in the

Now that 21 people have been infected with avian flu in Turkey, there has been a proliferation of news about the bird which Ben Franklin, who linkurl:celebrated his 300th birthday yesterday;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/22973/ , suggested as the US?s linkurl:national bird;http://www.greatseal.com/symbols/turkey.html . It turns out that turkeys are remarkably intelligent and technologically sophisticated. Today?s winner: linkurl:?Turkey able to develop bird flu vaccine: professor.?;h

Rice University physicist Neal Lane penned linkurl:an interesting op-ed;http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/3590974.html in the __Houston Chronicle__ today. On the occasion of Benjamin Franklin?s 300th birthday, Lane asks (and takes a stab at answering) the question, what would Ben make of this whole intelligent design hubbub While unquestionably a man of God, Franklin reveled in science. Lane writes that Franklin would most certainly have cut any purported ID theorist a fai

This month?s __Nature Biotechnology__ linkurl:includes an article;http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v24/n1/abs/nbt1175.html from Sergey Lukyanov that elevates fluorescent proteins from cool to killer. Lukyanov, of the Shemyakin-Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, and colleagues report the isolation of a GFP variant called KillerRed that acts as a photosensitizer. Photosensitizers produce reactive oxygen species upon stimulation with light; Killer

linkurl:Today?s science fraud revelation;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/22952/ is that a study published in __The Lancet__, purportedly demonstrating that common painkillers could protect against oral cancer, was pure fiction. The response of __The Lancet__ Editor Richard Horton, linkurl:as quoted by the BBC;http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4617372.stm "The peer-review process is good at picking up poorly designed studies, but it is not designed to pick up fabricated research

So, just how untrustworthy is the stem-cell literature? Very, according to one of the field's leading lights, David Shaywitz of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He's the author of linkurl:an op-ed piece;http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/11/AR2006011102040.html that was meant to defend the beleaguered field of stem-cell research, despite linkurl:fraudulent papers;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/browse/blogger/13/date/2006-01/ from the lab of Korean researcher Hwang

With the conference winding down, you can clearly feel the change in emotion throughout the halls, lobby and conference rooms of the St. Frances. What was once a vibrant and high energy crowd is now a dwindling group of tired and emotionally drained individuals. To navigate through the H&Q conference successfully, one needs stamina, good shoes and a strong posture. Call it coincidence, but the majority of companies I met with on Thursday were in the CNS field. My conclusion: The majority of

I received an Email advertising the new journal __Autophagy__ today. In a list of features about the journal, the Email adds: ?We also point out that we have an expedited review process if your paper was rejected from a ?flashy? journal; we all know that even solid papers do not always get accepted into the top general audience journals.? The policy is expanded on a bit in their linkurl:submission guidelines here;http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/autophagy/guidelines.php?PHPSESSID=85d

My time has been spent in ?Europe.? In the last two days, I have been to Italy four times, London and France each twice and made brief stops in Germany and Switzerland. The series of meetings that I have had with European companies has caused me to come to the conclusion that companies in that region are undervalued, undermanaged, underappreciated and unhappy with the lack of availabe capital. The companies are therefore looking to gain additional investor support from US venture capitalists. At

Some acts of scientific creativity deserve recognition. After finding her dead cat, a Virginia woman named Marylin Christian had a number one suspect: her neighbor?s dog, a German Shepard mix named Lucky. According to the linkurl:Washington Post;http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/08/AR2006010801330_pf.html, the woman, armed with memories of TV crime shows, asked Lucky?s owners for samples of saliva and fur. They obliged. Her county vet concluded that Lucky?s fur matc

I found out today that I got lucky. Human cloning has always received the lion's share of headlines, but I've always been more fascinated by the cloning of the lions ? animal cloning, in particular the quirky but earnest gang that would like to clone your pet for royal sums. So I might have felt vindicated by today's news ? which I reported on linkurl:here;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/22933/ ? that while Woo-Suk Hwang's claims on human cloning were based on fraud, his cloning of lin

Researchers have, since 1988, been searching for a so-called "universal nucleant," that is, a material that will nucleate crystal formation, much as a grain of sand nucleates the formation of a pearl. Buried in the biophysics section of PNAS's January 6 Early Edition is linkurl:a somewhat esoteric paper;http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0504860102v1 that may just end this search -- and open one of structural biology's most persistent bottlenecks, generating high-quality crysta

A beautiful day in San Francisco and although many of the meetings at this year's H&Q conference seemed to spill into the streets surrounding the St. Francis Hotel, with men in suits or casual attire mingling in groups of two and three on the sidewalks, the lobby and hallways of the Hotel are still packed full of industry executives looking to make things happen. That's right, my first impression of this year's conference, and perhaps indicative of what's to come in 2006: people want to do deal

I was grateful for the linkurl:invitation;http://www.amnh.org/rose/specials/?src=p_h to witness the return to Earth of NASA?s Stardust mission broadcast live from the American Museum of Natural History this Sunday. While the notion of roaming the halls of a favorite childhood retreat at 5am is appealing, I?m even more enthralled by the possibilities of Stardust, an unmanned spacecraft which captured particles from the comet Wild 2 offering the possibility of a glimpse into the very birth of the

Every January, the movers and shakers of biotech come to the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco to see and be seen, exchange information and move money by funding companies and forming partnerships and other alliances. Thousands of bankers, analysts and company executives mix and mingle at JP Morgan's Annual Healthcare Conference (often still called the H&Q), setting the tone for the year in biotech. Those attending the invitation-only conference go to the company presentations and meet in hall

An entirely appropriate stew of scientific vexation and mortification has accompanied revelations that the incredible Korean achievements in human embryonic cloning and stem cell research are exactly that: incredible. But midst the hand-wringing over failures of peer review--and justified alarm over the future of human embryo clones and stem cell research--an intriguing fact has been obscured. Woo Suk Hwang would still be a rock-star equivalent, and frustrated researchers would still be trying

I can no longer shop happily. Representing the first genomics craze to hit supermarket shelves, Sciona, a Colorado based biotech just started marketing a nutrigenomics product called Cellf in supermarkets for about $100. These kits include a lifestyle-assessment and family-profile questionnaire and a cheek swab. Mail in the lot and you?ll get back a genetically personalized recommendation for living healthy. A collaboration with the supermarket chain includes specific advice from supermar

Judge John E. Jones III ruled that the mention of Intelligent Design in Dover area high schools as an alternative to evolution was not only unconstitutional but unscientific. In the final days of the case it appeared more and more apparent that the judge was less than impressed by the arguments of the defendants as they bumblingly tried to cover their motivation for injecting ID into the schools. But Jones? ruling really takes the whole ID hypothesis to task as a blatant and undeniable extensio