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If the size of a society provides a reading of the health of a field, gene therapy may be heading for a fruitful stretch. The American Society of Gene Therapy (ASGT) attracted 600 abstracts and 1,700 participants to its inaugural meeting in Seattle last year, compared to 1,000 abstracts and 2,100 participants to its second annual meeting in Washington, D.C., last month. In a conversation with News Editor Paul Smaglik, James Wilson, ASGT president and director of the University of Pennsylvania's

ALZHEIMER'S VACCINE It's the classic vaccine approach: Get protection against a disease by training the body's immune system, using a bit of the disease itself, to respond to infection in force. Typically applied to infectious diseases such as smallpox or polio, immune system-boosting treatments have more recently been aimed at cancerous tumors. Now a recent paper suggests that Alzheimer's disease (AD) might be effectively treated by priming the immune system with a form of the damaging, neuro

Steps in positional cloning. Positioning of disease loci to chromosomal regions requires multidisciplinary collaborations. "You have a clinician out in Israel gathering patients, a medical geneticist doing genetic mapping, my lab doing physical mapping, and Washington University sequencing. All these things come together and, boom, in record time you have this gene," says Green. Green goes on to point out that this is a classic example of finding a gene from sequences the Human Genome P

Technological developments helped make single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) databases possible. But further innovations will be necessary to make those records of thousands of genetic variations useful. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, remembers a swell of developments that crested in 1996. "The technology for finding SNPs seemed to be moving along pretty well," he recalls. "You could imagine getting a pretty good set." Enabling technologies included

The SNP Consortium collaboration of 10 pharmaceutical companies and the Wellcome Trust will spend $45 million over two years to identify and map about 300,000 randomly generated SNPs. The industry partners are AstraZeneca (London); Bayer (Pittsburgh, Pa.); Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (New York); F. Hoffmann-LaRoche (Nutley, N.J.); Glaxo Wellcome (Research Triangle Park, N.C.); Hoechst Marion Roussel (Kansas City, Mo.); Novartis (Basel, Switzerland); Pfizer (New York); Searle (Skokie, Ill.); and S

1982 The Human Polymorphism Study Center, the first academic institution to propose the systematic study of polymorphisms, is founded in Paris. Its primary objective: to make an inventory of all possible polymorphisms in the human population and associate them with diseases. However, the technology to take on such a project would not be advanced enough for more than a decade. 1995 An initiative led by the Wellcome Trust, of Cambridge, England, to form a consortium of pharmaceutical companies,

Sometimes it seems as if genome projects are cropping up everywhere.1 But until costs come down, limited resources are being largely concentrated into what Joseph Nadeau, professor of genetics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, calls "the genome seven," an apples-and-oranges list of viruses, bacteria, fungi, Arabidopsis thaliana, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, and mouse, with Homo sapiens in its own category.2 Researchers widely acknowledge that in the rod

Global warming has a strong effect on butterfly populations. Camille Parmesan , assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas in Austin, cares about butterflies, so she's concerned: Global warming is bugging her beloved insects. Three years ago, Parmesan reported that Edith's checkerspot butterfly had moved northward along the west coast of North America over the past century.1 Specifically, local populations were four times more likely to go extinct in Mexico, at the

Hemophilia is an ideal model for gene therapy, speaker after speaker repeated during the American Society for Gene Therapy's (ASGT) June meeting in Washington, D.C. Successfully providing a single protein a few times should, in theory, cure the disease, they stated. And once introduced via vector, a therapeutic clotting protein need not be continuously produced or regulated, they added. What they did not mention--at least not as openly--was the double-edged nature of that "ideal" status. In oth

if (n == null) The Scientist - From Basic Research to Cancer Drug: The Story of Cisplatin The Scientist 13[14]:11, Jul. 05, 1999 News From Basic Research to Cancer Drug: The Story of Cisplatin By Ricki Lewis Clinical Trial Results for Treating Cervical Cancer The April 15, 1999 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) brought great satisfaction to Barnett Rosenberg, a retired Michigan State University biophysicist who founded the Barros Resear

Contents Trial veteran Resistance in rivers I contain multitudes Chlamydia in heart disease Tomatoes vs. armyworms Look, Ma, no paws Peroxide damage Philip Brunell receives the first injection at NIH of the experimental shingles vaccine from nurse Patricia Hohman. TRIAL VETERAN When Philip Brunell received the first shingles vaccination in a Phase III trial June 17, it was not exactly a shot in the dark. The senior attending physician at the National Institutes of Health clinical center estim

Foodborne infections and bacterial antibiotic resistance garner tremendous attention in the public health arena. So it should come as no surprise that a decades-long debate is heating up over whether antibiotic-resistant bacteria from food animals pose a threat to humans. Concerned that you just can't keep antibiotic resistance genes down on the farm, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Veterinary Medicine has moved to impose regulations to help curb the development of antibi