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Families of children suffering a degenerative brain disease are suing the hospital and researchers who used their children's blood and tissue to identify and patent the gene responsible for the disorder.

HOUSTON "Mosquitoes are flying syringes," declared Frank Cortez-Flores of Loma Linda University (California), and two mosquito-borne diseases have broken past old geographic boundaries to invade the US. The first, West Nile encephalitis, is a newcomer to the western hemisphere and thus has garnered the most headlines. The other, dengue fever, is considered the world's most important vector-borne viral disease affecting people, in terms of both morbidity and mortality. The West Nile virus, native

The Italian Minister for Agricultural and Forestry Policy has made it clear he intends to ban GMOs of agricultural interest - but will he manage to sway the Italian public?

The UK's National Institute for Clinical Excellence has opted to remove confidentiality from its appraisal process as a means of pre-empting information leaks.

A special report just published in the UK reveals the extent and pace of the gene patent rush.

Nearly a million children die each year of malaria, but the parasite became resistant to the cheapest drug. Now we know why.

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