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GM food has provoked much protest but GM medicine has more public approval: the difference lies in approaches to research.

Many drugs effective against tropical diseases are no longer available or in danger of being pulled from the market because they are unprofitable.

Editor's Note: This is the first of two articles on questions raised by recent stem cell discoveries. The second article, focusing on various organs and the nervous system, will appear in the Nov. 27 issue of The Scientist. Researchers first isolated embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from mouse blastocysts almost 20 years ago, and a paper announcing the discovery of human ESCs emerged in 1998. Adult-derived stem cells (ASCs) have since become the rage in certain quarters of biology, with unexpected--

Courtesy of Ed Rowton, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research An anopheline mosquito taking a blood meal. Researchers and physicians, open your guides to rare diseases, for that may be the only place you'll encounter Jumping Frenchmen of Maine. There you also will find Kabuki Make-up Syndrome, Split-Hand Deformity, Stiff Person Syndrome, Tangier Disease, and Twin-Twin Transfusion Syndrome. These are among thousands of "orphan diseases," originally so called because they weren't "adopted" by spon

At a featured symposium of last month's American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) meeting in Philadelphia, Bob Waterston, director of the genome sequencing center at Washington University in St. Louis, reviewed how and why the Human Genome Project (HGP) accelerated in 1998. Having at that point generated a disappointing 10 percent of the total human sequence, sequencing centers had to greatly scale up efforts in order to reach this past summer's milestone "draft" ahead of schedule. First, said W

SIDS Cause Discovered? While child care experts have suspected for some time that the prone sleeping position of infants can be related to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), the reason for this major cause of postneonatal death in the developed world has long been a mystery. Based on previous work that implicated Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that colonizes the gastric lining (C.P. Pattison, B.J. Marshall, "Proposed link between Helicobacter pylori and sudden infant death syndrome," Medic

Joseph Paul Jernigan, 38, executed Texas murderer, flourishes in his resurrection in cyberspace and shows every sign of fulfilling his promise as a peerless instructor of anatomy and unique teacher of surgeons. He is also a champion sportsman whose versatility no single mortal can match. Jernigan, a.k.a. the National Library of Medicine's Visible Male, came under the spotlight of research medicine in 1994, in the form of a 15-gigabyte dataset of digitized photographs of 1,878 coronal slic

A new UK directive supports use of the controversial drug Ritalin in severe Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), but only under specialist supervision.

The UK's Royal Society yesterday released a report backing continued research into the use of cloned embryonic stem cells.

Reed Elsevier's proposed takeover of Harcourt has provoked an outcry from librarians and academics alike - but do they have the muscle to influence it?

HOUSTON. Amgen, the largest biotechnology company in the world, is funding research focusing on disorders that destroy parts of the nervous system. These include Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis and stroke. Medicines for disorders resulting from dysfunction of the neuroendocrine system such as obesity and Type 2 diabetes are also under development. In both areas, Amgen licenses product candidates and technologies that complement its internal drug discovery and develop

Neurogenomics has significant commercial potential by way of gene targets for enhancement of brain function and treatment of brain-based disease.