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With the potential for catching serious metabolic disorders before symptoms appear, medical laboratories in the United States are increasingly screening newborns using tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) technology. A recent Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows about 500,000 newborns underwent such screening last year, up from 60,000 in 1996. This report, "Using Tandem Mass Spectrometry for Metabolic Disease Screening Among Newborns" (w

The $4.18 billion National Cancer Institute budget request submitted by the Bush administration to Congress in April for fiscal year 2002 amounts to an 11.7 percent boost of $439 million over the current year's appropriation. The package, however, falls $850 million short of the amount NCI sought in its own "bypass budget" proposal. NCI requested $5.03 billion, a whopping 34 percent boost of $1.27 billion. The bypass budget is so-called because, under the National Cancer Act of 1971, NCI's bud

can quickly become resistant to linezolid during extended treatment.

Now that the dust has settled after publication of the human genome sequence, Sydney Brenner assesses the first draft.

The commercial fishing and conservationist communities have clashed many times over how to protect fishery resources and conserve marine ecosystems while also supporting the economies dependent on the oceans. However, a new twist in the argument is the louder call from both sides for better scientific support for fishery management decisions. Fisheries management approaches often focus on single species protection by limiting the number of days fishermen can work, the types of fishing gear use

In southeastern Minnesota, the residents of little Winona are being besieged by messages from the future. On the radio and in newspapers, on billboards and handouts, the town's approximately 27,000 residents are being exhorted to join a pilot program that will put their individual health management information online. Going well beyond mere E-mail communication between physician and patient, the Winona Health Online1 project foreshadows a not-too-distant time when many Americans will have person

Scientists and publishers generally agree that the Internet is sparking a science publishing revolution.1 They have yet to agree, however, on how to cultivate that revolution without alienating one another. The latest effort to push the online publishing envelope has a sizable group of scientists threatening to boycott journals whose content is not freely available in a public database six months after publication. This call for a "public library of science" (PLOS) has already caused quite a sti

A single all-embracing effort to characterize the human proteome is an unlikely prospect (D. Steinberg, "Is a Human Proteome Project Next?" The Scientist, 15[7]:1, April 2, 2001). Nevertheless, smaller-scale--though still massive--proteomics projects keep springing up. On April 4, Myriad Genetics Inc. (MGI), Hitachi Ltd., and Oracle Corp. announced a $185 million, three-year collaboration to identify all protein-protein interactions and biochemical pathways in the human body. Myriad Proteomics I

The field of human genetics has never been "politically correct." The first gene screens created in the 1970s, for sickle cell disease and Tay-Sachs disease, targeted African American and Ashkenazi (eastern European) Jewish populations, respectively. This targeting made economic sense as these conditions are more prevalent within these populations. It isn't that genes discriminate, but that the human tendency to select mates like themselves tends to keep particular gene variants within certain g

Three dozen scientists, officials, and executives from academia, government, and business are speaking this week at a conference in McLean, Va., titled "Human Proteome Project: Genes Were Easy." This event, which is expected to draw at least 400 other participants, is the first sizable public meeting devoted to the possibility and advisability of a proteome project, according to organizer Chris Spivey, a conference director at Cambridge Healthtech Institute in Newton Upper Falls, Mass. The Vir

Graphic: Leza Berardone Researchers in Canada and Denmark are employing mass spectrometry, three-dimensional tissue biology, and supercomputing to blaze a trail in functional proteomics research. In the process, they're putting their company, MDS Proteomics Inc., on the fast track in the latest race to develop new drug targets and eventually better treatments for all kinds of diseases. By using this combination of technologies, MDS Proteomics is accelerating the process of identifying, analyzin

Graphic: Leza BerardoneOne recent morning at the Applied Biosystems proteomics research center in Framingham, Mass., scientist Jason Marchese patiently used a pipettor to place tiny samples onto a 2-inch-by-2-inch plate. He was surrounded by technology as simple as 2-D gel electrophoresis apparatus and as cutting-edge as a high-throughput system that uses automated robotics for multidimensional liquid chromatography separation of proteins and an automated workstation that uses the latest in mass