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It may still be winter, but the United States is already girding for a resurgence of human West Nile virus infections. This year, the sentinels for the advent of West Nile season will be not only dead crows on city streets or in suburban backyards, but animals at zoos nationwide, thanks to a program that is the brainchild of veterinary pathologist Tracey McNamara of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx, NY. McNamara, who, in 1999, first realized that the dead birds found on the grounds of th

The movie begins with three compartments, or vacuoles, docked like nanometer-sized flying saucers inside a yeast cell. The boundary membranes, which look like interior walls, are where the three vacuoles meet. Suddenly, they break loose, flapping inside the outer membrane in what has become a single organelle. This is membrane fusion—essential for transferring chemical information inside cells—and, until now, nobody knew how it happened. The previous model of a radially expanding por

Plans to elevate the status of France's biotechnology sector have won support from within the industry.

A session on xenotransplantation at the AAAS this week highlighted the need for urgent public consultation.

The fission yeast genome contains 50 genes with similarity to genes involved in human diseases.

Reprinted with Permission from Elsevier ScienceDividing by Genotype: Genotype frequencies for the C3435T MDR1 polymorphism among various groups. People with this variant may need higher doses of protease inhibitors. (Image from The Lancet 358:383-4, 2001.)

Humans have long embraced the idea of grouping and naming people who have distinct, genetically determined physical characteristics, like almond-shaped eyes or different skin color. It made sense, from a social standpoint (think safety, politics, and business) to align one's self with kin. However, studying race from a biological point of view, in the hopes of learning about specific diseases or developing new drugs, is a different matter altogether. "Race is generally not a useful consideration

Add this to the pot of stem cell sources creating a political stir: parthenogenesis, creating embryos from unfertilized eggs. Unlike the cloning issue, which has a defined division, the ethical question regarding parthenogenesis may have all the earmarks of being ambivalent. So far, the US government has already placed restrictions on federal funding for new stem cell lines derived from in vitro fertilized embryos, and the Senate is deliberating over a ban on cloning that may block stem cells de

Melvin Silverman, professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, recently got a call from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The CIHR surveyor asked the scientist who would benefit from his studies of diabetes and membrane function, and what the intermediate and final outcome of the work would be. To Silverman, the questioner had asked him to justify the funding of basic biomedical research according to its direct community health benefits, rather than its scientific significance.

At the first meeting of the newly assembled President's Council on Bioethics (PCB), Jan. 17-18, members began their consideration of sensitive bioethical issues not with an analysis of the writings of a scientist, nor a bioethicist, nor a legislator, but a novelist. The group discussed Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story The Birthmark, a literary exploration of mankind's apparent aspiration to root out his own imperfections. The story's protagonist, an alchemist named Aylmer, convinces his wife Ge

With a little help from a group of Weddell seals, a team of marine scientists has uncovered new information about the two ecologically most important fish species living far beneath the ice pack in the dark, frigid waters of Antarctica's McMurdo Sound.1 Behavioral ecologist Lee A. Fuiman of the University of Texas, Austin, biologists Randall W. Davis of Texas A&M University, Galveston, and Terrie M. Williams of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and their team at McMurdo equipped each

While the anthrax letters of October 2001 sent microbiologists and geneticists into an unwanted limelight, the chemical community also found itself suddenly grappling with how their field fits into the post-9/11 world. The news from a Jan. 14-16 meeting at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Science and Engineering in Irvine, California, "National Security and Homeland Defense," was upbeat. The goal of the meeting, the third in a series called Challenges for the Chem