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When Science voted stem cell research its 1999 Breakthrough of the Year, the congratulatory article traced the field's origin to the 1981 successful culture of mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells.1,2 But the roots of exploring these multipotential cells go back considerably farther, to a little-mentioned researcher who worked with mice at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. Photo: Jackson LaboratoryLeroy Stevens Leroy Stevens arrived at the lab in 1953, a newly minted developmental b

Science at State Conceding that "the State Department's science capabilities have not always been as substantial as they should be," U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright promised a number of improvements last month. Speaking at a plenary session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Albright said she will issue a policy statement this month "setting forth my commitment to enhance the department's ability to handle [science and technology] issu

Like medieval alchemists, modern biologists apply intricate, esoteric protocols to lowly matter, such as bacteria and rodents. Unlike alchemists, biologists successfully transmute these creatures into gold--disease-fighting pharmaceuticals and profits accruing from them. An indispensable ingredient in this dross-to-drug process is patent protection, which preserves monopoly and attracts investment. Unfortunately, the patent system isn't as ideal a catalyst as the chimerical philosopher's stone s

Graphic: Cathleen Heard The boy had the classic symptoms of acute leukemia--low blood counts and tumor cells circulating in his bloodstream. But the diagnosis was tentative because the tumor cells looked atypical for leukemia. So doctors extracted RNA from the cells, made cDNAs from the RNA, and incubated the cDNAs with a chip bearing thousands of single-stranded gene fragments on its glass surface. The hybridization pattern suggested, surprisingly, that the boy had a muscle tumor. After confirm

Known Cancer-Pathogen Associations Photo: Bill BransonJames J. Goedert In the 1960s and '70s, as part of a nationwide war on cancer, U.S. virologists took part in a massive effort to find virally caused human cancers. They didn't find much in the way of causative viral agents, but their research did lead to key, high-impact discoveries including the tumor suppressors p53, ras, and myc, not to mention HIV. A profusion of interest in the cancer-causing roles of tumor suppressors, signal transduct

Global Effort Against Cancer Paul F. Engstrom Cancer cannot be successfully fought in isolation. In recognition of this, more than 100 international leaders of government, patient advocacy, cancer research organizations, and corporations signed The Charter of Paris Against Cancer at the first World Summit Against Cancer this month. Paul F. Engstrom, senior vice president for population science at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, comments, "I saw more than the usual commitment to put more dollars int

Photo: James PlattFriends and colleagues: From left, K. Brooks Low, David Bermudes, John M. Pawelek When the public hears about Salmonella, it is usually in a warning about food poisoning, but a group of researchers in New Haven, Conn., is using the bacteria to target cancer. It turns out that Salmonella preferentially colonize and multiply within a tumor, thereby inhibiting growth. Vion Pharmaceuticals is taking advantage of this trait by genetically altering Salmonella typhimurium to reduce th

The masses of sequencing information that now confront genomic scientists raise a huge question: Exactly what do the products of these genes do? About 30 genomes have been completely sequenced, and up to 100 will be done by year's end, perhaps including a roughly finished sequence of humankind's 100,000 or more genes. Sequence data can identify gene products involved in disease, but the challenge facing researchers is far broader than that. Somehow, they must characterize the biochemical functio

The University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Human Gene Therapy (IHGT) and its director, James M. Wilson, faced increasing pressure from the federal government in late January. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration suspended all eight of the institute's gene therapy clinical trials on Jan. 21. A few days before, the Office for Protection from Research Risks at the National Institutes of Health launched an investigation into whether a clinical trial violated federal regulations governing patien

Figure: Gaetano Montelione and Yuanpeng Huang of Rutgers UniversityX-ray crystal structure of human basic fibroblast growth factor. With a bit of luck and sometimes decades of dedication, scientists have in recent years revealed fascinating vistas of biological structures at the atomic level using X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. In 1997, Timothy Richmond, a professor of X-ray crystallography at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, complete

Most soldiers in the biotech revolution think the public will eventually accept genetically modified (GM) foods, thereby ending hostilities. However, science must first offer something of value, such as improved nutrition. Just making life easier for farmers with pest-resistant crops won't outweigh real or imagined risks to people or butterflies. That's the message of a new consumer poll done by Roper Starch Worldwide for the American Farm Bureau Federation.1 Metabolic or nutritional genomics--

Bioinformatics Tools With efforts mounting to characterize protein functions following genome sequencing, bioinformatics has emerged as a key technology. Three such developments were showcased at a recent genomics conference in San Diego: WHALES (Web Homology Alert Service)--This keeps National Institutes of Health intramural scientists aware of new releases in the databases for DNA and protein sequences. It's based on stored, user-defined profiles that are processed weekly, with results return