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From Friday, researchers in over 100 developing nations will have low-cost Internet access to more than 2,000 biomedical journals under a major WHO initiative.

Controversial evolutionary biologist succumbs to cancer he had battled for 20 years.

The public release of the draft mouse genome sequence reopens the debate on the commercial viability of genome sequencing.

The UK's Royal Society has announced the election of 42 new Fellows and six Foreign Members.

Consider a human baby, so young she cannot distinguish herself from the world. Her parents, beset by the fears and longings of adulthood, gaze anxiously upon their daughter's knitted brow. Her serious expression, at once reminiscent of her mother and comical on an infant's face, causes the parents to fret: When will the crease become a wrinkle? When will the physical assault of being alive begin? Their concern might seem absurdly premature, but the fleeting nature of life has long prompted peopl

Every human being has asked at least once, "Why do we have to age and die?" Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Tuchnina (now Gavrilova), decide to really pursue the answer. They first met at a conference in 1975 when they were both fourth-year chemistry students at Moscow State University. Then, seven days after their first date, a smitten Gavrilov proposed, promising he would discover how to stop aging if she would marry him. The couple went on a quest to find a general theory that could explain what

While wealthy nations pursue drugs to treat baldness and obesity, depression in dogs, and erectile dysfunction, elsewhere millions are sick or dying from preventable or treatable infectious and parasitic diseases.1 It's called the 10/90 gap. "Less than 10% of the worldwide expenditure on health research and development is devoted to the major health problems of 90% of the population," explains Els Torreele, co-chair of a working group that provided background recently for an initiative announced

African trypanosomiasis is making an unwelcome comeback. But unlike other returning diseases, this one has a drug treatment—eflornithine—that disappeared from the market when it failed to cure cancer. Yet like Viagra's origin from a curious side effect in a clinical trial, so too was eflornithine reborn. "When it was discovered that it removes mustaches in women, it suddenly had a market: western women with mustaches," says Morten Rostrup, president of the international council for M

Continuing public concern over gene patenting and its impact on medical research and discovery has prompted several US and European initiatives challenging the power of patents. None pose an immediate threat to the biotechnology industry, but lawyers and industry advocates say a groundswell of political support for limits on patent protections, as has occurred in Europe, could eventually undermine biotech companies. "The mere discussion of this type of legislation—whether it goes anywher

The US Senate will likely vote on human cloning before Congress breaks for recess in late May. Supporters have rallied around the bill by Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) that would ban human cloning for reproductive purposes and therapeutic cloning from embryonic stem cell lines. Legislators hold the power to make a day in the lab a felony, and most people hope that these senators at least know what they are talking about. "I don't expect Congress to understand everything,

If a visitor to Earth were to try to assess life's diversity by touring terrestrial biology laboratories, he, she, or it might conclude that the planet is overrun with fruit flies, mice, small plants, tiny transparent worms, and a few types of single-celled inhabitants. That skewed view might be why it's taken more than a century for the field called evo-devo today to have taken off. It's also why Indiana University distinguished professor Rudolf (Rudy) Raff collects sea urchins from the Austral

CuresNow, a coalition of scientists, patient groups, and entertainment executives recently launched an ad campaign to rally opposition to the Brownback-Landrieu bill that would criminalize all forms of research cloning ("Popular ad couple Harry and Louise are back, opposing Bush cloning ban," Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2002). The characters were featured in commercials that helped sink Bill Clinton's health care reform plan. In the current effort, the fictitious Louise refers to a bill that