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Since news that researchers had restored sight in dogs with Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA) broke two weeks ago, Jean Bennett's phones at the F.M. Kirby Center for Molecular Ophthalmology at University of Pennsylvania's Scheie Eye Institute haven't stopped ringing. Anxious parents, whose infants suffer from this and other retinal degenerative diseases, want help. But they have to wait a few years; much more needs to be done. Researchers at Penn, Cornell University, and the University of Florida

Time after time, Steven A. Rosenberg, chief of the surgery branch in the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Clinical Oncology Program, has seen cancer immunotherapy destroy melanomas that conventional therapies leave unmolested. When immunotherapy works, even bulky metastatic tumors are destroyed. The frustration and tragedy, he says, speaking recently to a Grand Rounds audience at the National Institutes of Health, "is that it happens in only a small percentage of patients." For nearly 20 year

Marshalling a healthy dose of pomp and circumstance, the Franklin Institute Science Museum (FI) in Philadelphia honored seven distinguished scientists and engineers on April 27 as part of its annually awarded Benjamin Franklin Medals and Bower Awards. A red carpet lined with uniformed swordsmen led awardees and distinguished guests and FI contributors into the institute's grand domed entrance hall for the medals presentation and a black tie dinner. ABC News anchor Cokie Roberts hosted the ceremo

The US National Academy of Sciences today announced the election of 72 new members.

A biochemist's unintended wander into gene therapy may have achieved one of gene therapy's long-sought goals: a way to deliver cytocidal genes to metastatic cancer cells dispersed throughout the body while leaving normal cells unharmed. Fred Hall of the department of surgery at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has developed an ingenious seek-and-destroy cancer vector. What makes Hall's attempt at tumor-targeted gene delivery out of the ordinary is that his vector doesn't hom

Just a few short decades ago, cell biologists--essentially relegated to the tissue culture equivalent of Flatland--couldn't imagine working in three dimensions without sacrificing their subjects, much less having the ability to view the impact of their work in real time, over time. Now, state-of-the-art imaging technologies and new biological reagents and probes are sending biologists and other scientists on fantastic voyages into the molecular world of living animals to watch how cancer develop

The Mormons' religious beliefs have proven to be quite a boon for cancer epidemiologists. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, following religious tenets, have meticulously recorded their family trees for centuries. Recognizing the research value of such data, Mark Skolnick, chief scientific officer at Myriad Genetics Inc. in Salt Lake City, computerized those records at the church's family history library 25 years ago. Recently, researchers had high hopes that the data wo

With true success stories in cancer treatment so rare, the flood of recent papers validating the 1998 Food and Drug Administration approval of Herceptin (trastuzumab) stands out.1-3 In a broader sense, the drug's rocky road from conception to clinic also validates the concept of rational drug design, an approach that will become more common as pharmaceutical companies mine human genome information. "It is extremely gratifying to have gone though the first laboratory determinations, to clinical

Although the research has only just begun at the newly established In vivo Cellular and Molecular Imaging Centers, or ICMICs, the researchers have jumped in and are covering many cancer research bases. Here are basic descriptions of activities under way at each of the centers. Massachusetts General Hospital/ Harvard Medical School At Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, virtually all imaging modalities are being put to the test, including optical near infrared fluorescence im

Although most of the studies now occurring in the In Vivo Cellular and Molecular Imaging Centers (ICMICs) are focused on basic animal research, investigators aren't wasting any time in moving the power of in vivo molecular imaging to human patients.

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