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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

Early this month, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) announced that it had received the largest single grant ever made for AIDS research. The William A. Gates Foundation, which gave IAVI $1.5 million last June, granted IAVI $25 million over a five-year period, which the organization will use in part for work on two to three new HIV-vaccine candidates. IAVI, a New York City-based international scientific organization created to aid in bringing HIV vaccines and technology to develo

Edited by: Steve Bunk Arnold S. RelmanAndrew Weil Integrative medicine, the combining of alternative and conventional medical methods, was the subject of a debate held recently at the University of Arizona (UA) College of Medicine. The opponents were Arnold S. Relman, editor-in-chief emeritus of the New England Journal of Medicine and professor emeritus of medicine and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Andrew Weil, director of the UA program in integrative medicine and best-selli

As an issue on the cusp of science and social policy, the value of marijuana in medicine refuses to go away. For several years, researchers wishing to undertake clinical trials of marijuana's medical effects on humans have claimed that the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are stonewalling by insisting that the protocols are unacceptable. Those organizations complain that several pr

Prions have been a tough sell. Against a backdrop of the "DNA to RNA to protein" credo, the idea that the same amino acid sequence could exist in multiple forms, both normal and deranged, seemed like heresy. But since Stanley Prusiner, a professor of neurology, virology, and biochemistry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), named the agent that causes the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) "proteinaceous infectious particles" in 1982,1 evidence has been steadily