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Repair of aging skin could become more than merely a cosmetic concern if current research fulfills its promise. Recent efforts to eliminate wrinkles and regenerate skin damaged by the years--or by injury, acne, or infection--may have applications for improved wound repair in the elderly, and potentially for protection against serious aging-related skin conditions. Geron Corp of Menlo Park, Calif., perhaps best known for its research into inhibition of telomerase to treat cancer, is also inves

President John F. Kennedy's famous White House secretary Evelyn Lincoln described her key to maintaining intellectual vitality 21 years ago: "It's not who you are, but who you associate with that's important in life," she told a Detroit Free Press reporter.1 Although Lincoln was describing a philosophy of deep involvement with family, learning, and career--a career that kept her life enriched through a series of fascinating relationships with power figures--her philosophy now is gaining new cre

Graphic: Cathleen Heard No one can escape one of the few risk factors common to neurodegenerative diseases, heart disease, and many cancers: age. Within the last decade or so, research on aging, once seen as unfeasible and impractical, has become the legitimate purview of many scientists who hope to prolong life, improve quality of later life, and delay humans' decay at the cellular and genetic level. By viewing aging as a fundamental root of other diseases, researchers studying the mechanisms

Government Organizes Against Pathogen Resistance Collaboration between government agencies, academia, and the private sector is the key to combating pathogen resistance and finding new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat bacterial infections, according to a recently released action plan from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/). The plan, developed by an intergovernmental task force headed by the National Institutes of Health, CDC, and Food and Drug Admi

Reprinted with permission from the American Society of Plant Physiologists Plant Physiology, flagship journal of the American Society of Plant Physiologists, inaugurated its 75th year of publication with a special January 2001 anniversary issue. According to Editor in Chief Natasha Raikhel of Michigan State University, "The January special issue focuses on conceptual breakthroughs of the past 25 years as perceived by over 40 authors who have been at the leading edge of this unprecedented surge

When John Ruffin, former head of the National Institutes of Health's Office of Research on Minority Health (ORMH) was sworn in as the director of the new NIH National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD) on January 9, the ceremony took place against a background of support from unlikely political corners. The problem of health disparities between ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups in the United States has been discussed by NIH for several years.1 But the issue ca

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