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For some children, science is as palatable as brussels sprouts. To elevate the topic in the minds of primary and secondary students, the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia and the Science Museum of London have collaborated to publish an online science gallery entitled "Pieces of Science," www.fi.edu/pieces. The 16 featured objects, from a beginner's guide to genetic engineering to the story of the mold Sir Alexander Fleming discovered and transformed into penicillin has its own its Web page, com

The US patent office has waded in to the dispute over who was first to develop cloning technology.

Researchers at Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital strengthen the case for gene therapy as a treatment for immunodeficiencies.

yet again bends the rules in publishing the rice genome, opinions are strongly divided on whether this should be the shape of things to come.

The raison d'être behind genetic screening is that genotype predicts phenotype (disease risks). But it isn't always so. The likelihood of a specific mutation in the BRCA1 gene causing breast cancer, for example, depends on one's ethnic group. Now a study raises questions about what looked like a perfect candidate for population genetic screening: hereditary hemochromatosis (HH), a form of "iron overload" disease.1 Standard biochemical testing appears to be a better predictor than gene tests.

The story of how the late lawyer and entrepreneur Franklin C. Salisbury joined forces with the late Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi is legendary within the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) that they cofounded in 1973. Two years before that, Salisbury read an article about Szent-Györgyi, who had won the 1937 prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of vitamin C. At the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., the famed Hungarian scientist was working

One cutting-edge neuroscience issue is whether a vaccine can cure Alzheimer disease (AD). A much-ballyhooed clinical trial recently sought an answer. But a mistrial was soon declared, and scientific sleuths now face a fresh mystery: Why did 15 trial subjects get sick? The vaccine, developed by Elan Corp., contained Ab, the peptide widely believed to trigger AD by forming brain-clogging amyloid plaques. When Elan researchers vaccinated transgenic mice that had developed AD-like pathology, plaque

Smoldering differences between the Celera Genomics Group and the Human Genome Project erupted last month as three leaders of the international public consortium published an online article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)1 criticizing the results published last year by Celera.2 For the first time in scientific literature, Robert Waterston of Washington University, Eric Lander of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research's Center for Genome Research, and John Su

When Science published Celera Genomics Group's human genome paper last year, many scientists, especially bioinformaticians, were less than pleased with the unusual restrictions put on data access.1 The most odious: The data was not submitted to GenBank, and academic researchers were entitled to only one megabase of data at a time without further permission. Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research's Center for Genome Research director Eric Lander, one of the most outspoken critics of the Scie

The fiscal year 2003 budget request for the National Cancer Institute is a record $4.72 billion, a $510 million, or 12%, increase over the present appropriation. But this "president's budget," submitted to Congress in February, falls $970 million short of NCI's own "bypass budget" request, which seeks $5.69 billion, a breath-taking increase of $1.48 billion, 35%, over the present appropriation, and a whopping $1.51 billion more than President George W. Bush requested for it last year. The bypas

Just one month after Andrew von Eschenbach was sworn in as National Cancer Institute director, he was called to a US Senate hearing as the government's lead witness that day. The topic was one that he had grappled with before during his tenure at the American Cancer Society—and one that his predecessor and other physicians had not endured well: the pitched debate over the effectiveness of mammography screening for women in their 40s. The hearing was triggered by a systematic review1 that c

Deemed the delicious taste, umami is found naturally in foods such as aged cheeses, steak, seafood, and mushrooms, and as an additive, the sodium salt monosodium glutamate. The substance that subtly makes food taste better is one of the 20 common amino acids that make up proteins. Now, researchers have shown that taste cells bearing a combination of T1R1 and T1R3 (T1R1+3) G protein-coupled receptors are broadly tuned to respond to many amino acids, including umami's monosodium glutamate. Althoug