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As the pace of scientific discovery continues at breakneck speed, the gap widens between the public's and scientists' understanding of science. And, with research revealing that barely half of U.S. high school seniors meet even basic science requirements,1 the prospects for the situation improving in the near future appear bleak. The myriad scientific findings in the last decade have stimulated and increased media coverage, but the lament among scientists about the media, says Nobel laureate Sir

The National Science Foundation recently provided California State University, Los Angeles, a three-year, $300,000 grant to boost adolescents' interest in science. "Science Technology Engineering Program (STEP) Up for Youth" uses fees earned from companies that import foreign specialists to engage students in year-round science, math, and technological activities. "We hope this will motivate students to pursue careers in these fields," says Sylvia James, director of the NSF elementary, secondary

Your ancestors didn't travel to the New World on the Mayflower? Not listed in Burke's Peerage and Baronetage? No worries, mate. For a couple of hundred bucks, Oxford Ancestors, a new British biotech company, will add cachet to your lineage by extending it back at least 10,000 years.

Traditionally, high school and university curricula neatly fragment science into physics and chemistry, geology and biology. But that's not the way that the natural world works. In recognition of this disconnect, the National Science Foundation's "Biocomplexity in the Environment" program is funding explorations of the links that connect the living and nonliving components of the planet. Research sites involved in the effort span the globe, from coral reefs to estuaries, from urban/rural bound

In June, word leaked out that something terrible went wrong with a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University. A healthy, 24-year-old employee of one of the clinics died while participating in a research study on asthma. Such negative events are not unheard of: in 1993, half the participants in a 10-person trial of the anti-hepatitis B drug, fialuridine (FIAU), carried out at the National Institutes of Health, died. Two others became severely ill.1 In the ensuing investigations of the Johns Ho

In biomedical research, is the "gold standard" of controlled studies that analyze individual therapies the only way to get trustworthy results? That question is central to what has arguably become America's most profound public health development: the boom in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). That question also was pondered frequently at the fourth annual Comprehensive Cancer Care Conference recently in Arlington, Va. Cosponsored by the nonprofit Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Wa

To say that K. Barry Sharpless has had an eventful year might be as understated as saying that he likes chemistry. In addition to receiving the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Dec. 10, Sharpless, W.M. Keck Professor of chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., returned to his hometown of Philadelphia earlier in April to receive the Benjamin Franklin Medal, and then again this autumn to receive the John Scott Award. The latter award was bestowed by the Philadelphia Board of Ci

Surgeons may have rethink the way they operate on children with crossed eyes, or strabismus. This is thanks to the discovery by Joseph Demer, Jules Stein Eye Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles of the orbital pulley system. Using MRI and cadaver dissection, Demer found that each extraocular muscle consists of a global layer contiguous with the tendon and that inserts into the eyeball, along with a similar-sized orbital layer forming the extraocular muscle's pulley, which con

Next to 'why is the sky blue' and 'where do babies come from,' 'why do leaves turn color in the fall' might be the most frequently asked question about nature. 

Nine months have passed since draft sequences of the human genome were first published.1,2 One human gestation period later, the genome, as deciphered by the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, still screams toward its projected Spring 2003 finish date. "The trajectory we're on for meeting that goal is precisely on target," assures Francis Collins, director, National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and spokesperson for the largest public biological science project in histor

It wasn't easy getting to the 4th International Meeting on Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms and Complex Genome Analysis held Oct. 10-15 at the Wenner-Gren Foundation in Stockholm. A week earlier, as flight cancellations continued in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, SwissAir had declared bankruptcy and an SAS jet had crashed in Milan, further disrupting schedules. So it was little surprise that several speakers had to phone in their talks. But not J. Craig Venter, president and chief sc

From TV dinners to computers, improving speed and efficiency are deemed the true hallmarks of progress. The same tenet holds true in science: Why wait thousands of years for nature to do its work when it can be done in a few months? This is the concept behind the new biotech firm Morphotek. Using a patented technology platform called morphogenics, the company has given evolution's normal crawling pace a rocket-powered backpack. Philadelphia-based Morphotek creates genetically altered host orga