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The views of South African President Thabo Mbeki - who has expressed doubts whether HIV causes AIDS, ascribing the disease to poverty - have stimulated 5000 scientists and doctors from over 80 countries to sign a declaration stating that the virus really does cause the disease. The issue is crucial for two reasons: first because South Africa faces one of the worst AIDS epidemics in the world, and if the country doubts the cause of the disease health interventions will go awry; and second because

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, best known for its very visible work in short-term humanitarian disasters, has made a dramatic shift to the longer view - where disease is the great killer.Releasing its latest annual report this week, the Societies say that the death toll from infectious diseases such as AIDS, malaria, respiratory diseases and diarrhoea is 160 times greater than the number killed in last year's natural disasters, including the massive earthqu

Small signs of hope amidst increasing gloom. That's the world AIDS situation according to UNAIDS.

Small signs of hope amidst increasing gloom. That's the world AIDS situation according to UNAIDS.

Small signs of hope amidst increasing gloom. That's the world AIDS situation according to UNAIDS.

Small signs of hope amidst increasing gloom. That's the world AIDS situation according to UNAIDS.

PPL Therapeutics Ltd of Roslin, Edinburgh, showed today how they succeeded a year ago (the delay was to secure a patent) in targeting a gene to a chosen location in embryonic sheep fibroblasts. Then they transferred the nucleus to stem cells and created whole transformed, gene-targeted sheep (Nature paper 1 and paper 2).We have succeeded in cloning sheep, goats, cows, pigs and mice, and now we have gene targeting in sheep. But it is proving difficult to clone whole animals efficiently, as the sc

Between 38 000 and 115 000, say yesterday's press conferences on the human genome.

Does the mouse, biology's model mammal, mean the human genome race is still on?

Coloured cotton, a giant carp, Bt-resistant poplars - is anything holding Chinese biotechnology back? Yes, says Zhao Zhizen - a government that won't take any risks.

What's behind today's announcement of the first draft of the genome.

Graphic: Cathleen Heard Twenty years ago, venture capitalists knew little about biotechnology. The scientific community knew only a fraction more. "With respect to immune system hormones, not a single interleukin gene had been cloned by 1981. No cytokine had actually been purified to molecular homogeneity," writes Steven Gillis, chairman and CEO of Corixa Corp., a Seattle-based immunotherapeutics company.1 Gillis recollects that preclinical efficacy data in animals did not exist for the earliest