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It's going to be a preprint service. It's going to be a reprint repository. It's going to kill off society journals. It's going to save them. It's going to compete with commercial titles. It's going to complement them. There appears to be no consensus on the effect E-biomed, a potential government-backed electronic publishing service proposed by Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health, will have on other journals--both paper and electronic. Nor does there appear to be much a

"Drink milk," advertisements demand. Fight osteoporosis before bone loss occurs. They make a good point, considering that nothing on the market will restore a significant amount of lost bone mass. Current therapies can only stop or help slow down the process. However, scientists at Chiroscience Research and Development in Bothell, Wash., hope to actually treat osteoporosis. They have identified a novel gene coding for a protein that may be involved in bone-density control. This "bone mass gene

"Thermotoga was selected because it is near the base of the Woesean tree," says Craig Venter, TIGR chief scientific officer and president of nearby Celera Genomics Corp. The Woesean tree is the three-pronged depiction of the domains of life named for Carl Woese, the University of Illinois microbiologist who discovered the Archaea in 1977.2 The Archaea are microorganisms that lack nuclei as do traditional Eubacteria, yet have transcriptional and translational machinery and other characteristics

Image provided by Genzyme Transgenics Corporation CLONING GOATS In contrast to cloning's popular image as a brave new way to mass-produce monsters, biologists have described cloning as a tool to ease other biotechnologies. Researchers from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Genzyme Transgenic Corp. in Framingham, Mass., and Tufts University School of Medicine in North Grafton, Mass., have shown how cloning can dramatically increase the efficiency of creating goats that secrete valuable

Editor's Note: The National Academy of Sciences has elected 60 new members and 15 foreign associates from 10 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. In this article, The Scientist presents photographs of most of the new members and comments from some of them. A full directory of NAS members can be found online at www.nas.edu/nas. When in 1977 the genes of eukaryotes were found to be riddled with nonprotein-encoding stretches of bases,

Confidentiality agreements. Threats of lawsuits. Last-minute withdrawals of scientific papers. Sudden dismissals. Gag orders. Conflicts of interest, actual and potential. Lack of support for embattled faculty members by university administrators. It's a tough world for life scientists in the modern academic laboratory. Largely as a result of expanding commercial interest in academic research, today's faculty members and postdocs face threats and choices unknown to their predecessors. The poten

Ah, the privileged life of a salamander. Chop off a limb, and within days a new one grows in its place. In recent years, scientists have become increasingly interested in tracing the molecular origins of this seemingly magical ability. By harnessing the mechanisms involved in a number of animal models, researchers hope to one day grow a variety of new human tissues in place of the old or defective, thereby supplanting the need for less "natural" remedies such as bionic limbs or organ transplant

Winning the Nobel Prize automatically gives laureates a platform. This month the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) provided seven Nobelists with an additional floating one--a 40-foot yacht on the Delaware River. On May 4 the Lady Maureen sailed between Philadelphia, site of ISEF's first and 50th fairs, and Camden, N.J., home of the Coriell Institute, one of the fair's sponsors. It also served as a stage for seven laureates to encourage more scientists to get involved in informal

The 1999 International Conference on Science and Consciousness held recently in Albuquerque, N.M., might be described in many ways, but "a droning bore" is not one of them. Physicists and psychologists, physicians and philosophers, astronauts and astronomers, even the odd biophysicist and evolutionary biologist, were among the more than 50 speakers who tackled the formidable challenge of linking objective and subjective reality. Although some of the talks were long on vibes and rather short on

ANTSY ANTIBIOTICS Humans didn't invent self-medication. Ants got into the act 50 million years ago. The attine ants are expert gardeners, cultivating edible fungi in subterranean "mushroom farms" on food harvested above ground. The most famous attines are the leaf cutters, whose superorganismlike colonies of several million ants are organized into functional castes led by a queen (B. Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants, Harvard University Press, 1994). Their prodigious harvest

Steven Burrill Donations to scientists and scientific projects today often take on a personal flavor. Many relatively young and wealthy entrepreneurs direct their dollars to scientific causes that tap into personal concerns and strongly felt and articulated visions. "I ... [feel] passionately about ... science and technology and the need to build an economy and a society based around science and technology. I believe the education system by and large has not been keeping up in providing our yo

Could there be a repair mechanism in the human body more remarkable than that of chaperonins, which help misfolded proteins to refold themselves properly? Recent collaborative work by two leading chaperonin researchers has fitted what is known of the structure of a particular such enzyme to a model of its action.1 The result is a wonder to behold. If a protein's amino acid chain fails to fold into its proper or native three-dimensional shape, other proteins can attach to it, creating clumps th