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Steven Austad Life expectancy has increased remarkably in this century, but just how much farther can it go? One scientist bets that by 2150, someone--a woman, no doubt, (about 80 percent of centenarians now are women)--will live to the ripe old age of 150 with cognition intact. Another scientist bets that 130 will be the upper limit. To seal the bet, S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health and Steven Austad of the University of Idaho department o

Credit: OAR/National Undersea Research Program (NURP) With the year-end release of a final decision on how to proceed toward saving wild Northwest salmon from extinction, the Clinton Administration left implementation of its long-awaited plan to the incoming Republicans. For years, researchers have struggled under a glare of media exposure to resolve a central issue: should four hydroelectric dams in Washington be removed to help save the fish? The conclusion is no, not yet, but a scientific div

The drive to double spending by the National Institutes of Health between 1998 and 2003 reached its halfway point Dec. 15, when Congress approved a new NIH budget that represented a 50 percent increase from just three years ago. A 14 percent boost of $2.5 billion propels NIH spending to $20.3 billion for fiscal year 2001. The support expressed by President-elect George W. Bush during the presidential campaign to double NIH spending signals that the agency remains on track to double its budget in

Credit: Celgene CorporationThe drug thalidomide, sold as Thalomid (shown above) by the Celgene Corp. As the legendary phoenix rose from the ashes, so the drug thalidomide, responsible for severe birth defects across Europe in the early 1960s, is rising again and finding new uses. At the 42nd annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology held in San Francisco on December 4, 2000, researchers reported promising results with thalidomide in patients with multiple myeloma or myelodysplasias, a

The lead editorial in the December 23 British Medical Journal is appropriately entitled, "A pile of strangeness." The collection of articles, worthy of a stateside April Fool's issue, explores such compelling topics as physicians as serial killers, how to make an ophthalmoscope, whether animals bite more during a full moon, clues to alleviating back pain by studying the sleeping positions of apes, the history of constipation, and how not to give a presentation. Buried within the strangene

Plasmodium on the Move Watching movies starring microorganisms can be a pretty good way to go about parasitology research. New York University parasitologists were quite intrigued recently when they reviewed decade-old time-lapse microscopy observations on video that chronicled the pre-infection movement of Plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria. It seemed as though the parasite might actually be moving in and out of target cells within seconds rather than settling down to produce a pleth

Credit: Howard Hughes Medical InstituteThe above graphs show data from teenagers and adults who participated in an 11-day activity study. Each person's Horne-Ostberg score was plotted on the x-axis and his average waking time on the y-axis. The Horne-Ostberg survey identifies a person as an "evening" or "morning" type. As part of its annual educational outreach lecture series, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute recently had high school students participate in a large-scale circadian rhythm sci

Germany's Max Planck Society is setting up a Centre for Information Management that aims to give its researchers greater power over the way their work is published.

James Cassatt What if biologists gave grant awards to mathematicians and computer wizards to study complex human systems--and no one showed up? The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) is tackling this exact problem. For the last three years, the institute has created new grant initiatives to support a widening area of interest involving medical science and biocomplexity--specifically, the interactions, couplings, modeling, and computational analysis of multifaceted cell and or

Courtesy National Science Foundation Headlines on the morning of December 14, 2000, trumpeted the end of a presidential election that promised to go on forever. But if California Institute of Technology molecular biologist Elliot Meyerowitz had his way, the front page would have read differently: "Plant Genome Sequenced" at the top, then, lower down, "Election Decided - See Page 2." In a tour de force that capped a year of genome blockbusters, European, Japanese, and American scientists complet

Although the world has yet to witness a major bioterrorist attack, the field of bioterrorism continues to capture the attention of scientists, policy makers, and public health professionals. Symposia and reports are commonplace, and relevant legislation recently made it through Congress. Two upcoming government reports reaffirm a bioterrorism preparedness problem and recommend remedies. One comes from the Department of Defense (DOD) Threat Reduction Advisory Committee (TRAC), the other fr

In honor of last year's 40th anniversary of the American Society of Cell biology, the society supported the creation of a book called Landmark Papers in Cell Biology, a collection of 42 papers from the last 40 years. According to Joseph G. Gall, a member of the embryology department at Washington, D.C.'s Carnegie Institution and one of the book's editors, Landmark is not meant to be completely comprehensive nor definitive. Based on the recommendations from the editorial board of the ASCB journal