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The Israeli biotech industry is still in its infancy but heavy investment, an aggressive technology sector and a supportive academic community should ensure some big growth spurts.

In the context of a heated debate on human embryo research, some Italian researchers are looking for a scientific way through the moral and ethical minefield.

report published today, the United Nations Population Fund has delivered a devastating attack on the world's unequal treatment of women.

The 2000 Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards, announced in New York on September 17, will put further pressure on the Nobel Foundation to grant a Nobel Prize for work related to the cell cycle.

Image courtesy of Eyewire ©2000, Graphic: Cathleen Heard How do you make a neuron? Nowadays, that depends on how you like your neurons. Perhaps you're having problems expanding your neural stem cells (NSCs) to large numbers because after repeated passaging, they lose the phenotype or go into crisis. Read the June Nature Biotechnology, where National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke neurobiologist Ron McKay offers a recipe for making dopaminergic and GABAnergic neurons from rat

Vaccinomics--the application of genomics and bioinformatics to vaccine development--is bringing a fresh approach to the Herculean problem of making vaccines against the various HIV-1 subtypes, or clades, spread around the world. With vaccinomics, says Annie De Groot, CEO of EpiVax, a young vaccine development company in Providence, R.I., a single vaccine against all HIV clades may be feasible. Her opinion is an about-face pivot from the current pursuit of HIV vaccines one clade at a time.

Eyewire ©2000Researchers have created transgenic mice capable of detecting potential toxins in the human body. Researchers under the direction of Ronald M. Evans at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., have created a "humanized" mouse capable of detecting potentially toxic substances in the body. In the process, they have uncovered what they believe to be the primary source of the xenobiotic response within a specific gene they call SXR, steroid and xenobiotic rece

Recently published positive results should help the troubled fields of stimulating angiogenesis and gene therapy move ahead. Jeffrey Isner, professor of medicine and pathology at Tufts University School of Medicine and colleagues have shown that vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF165) delivered via a naked DNA vector directly into the heart improved blood flow to ischemic areas of the heart (P.R. Vale et al., "Left ventricular electromechanical mapping to assess efficacy of phVEGF165 gene t

Ever since the isolation and culturing of human pluripotent stem cells in 1998, the debate has intensified regarding legal, ethical, and social ramifications associated with research use of these cells that are capable of developing into many different specialized tissues.1, 2 In order for the National Institutes of Health to clarify its position on research with these cells, in January 1999, it placed a moratorium on use of human pluripotent stem cells derived from embryos and fetal tissue in f

On Aug. 29, the political action committee (PAC) 80-20 announced its endorsement of democratic presidential candidate Al Gore. Making that announcement at the Universal City Hilton in California was not a usual political activist, but rather former University of California (UC) at Berkeley chancellor and current UC-wide University Professor and UC-Berkeley NEC Professor of Engineering Chang-Lin Tien. Tien was chairman of the PAC's endorsement committee. His committee vice chair was molecular bio

A new research programme is encouraging researchers to forgo publishing their results in academic journals and instead post them straight on the web.

Claims that AIDS originated from trials of a polio vaccine in the 1950s are repudiated, but just won't go away.