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Editor's Note: Contributing Editor Ricki Lewis was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 1993 and had standard treatment. She will be taking a recently approved test this summer and hopes to participate in the clinical trial of another, both discussed below. Michael Levine When a lump in the neck turns out to be thyroid cancer, many doctors announce, "If you had to get cancer, this is the one to get." Fortunately, treatment is straightforward and effective, but follow-up testing can be uncomfort

DISEASE RESEARCH SUPPORT In response to a perceived need for increased clinical research funding, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation recently established the Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award Program. The Foundation will give $600,000 a year for five years to four research teams studying either cancer, AIDS, heart disease, or sickle cell anemia and related blood disorders. According to Alan Altschuler, the Foundation's acting program director for medical research, the clinic

p53 has emerged as one of the top targets in the war against cancer.

In the last two months of 1998, the National Cancer Institute announced seven new initiatives set to cost a total of $343 million over the next five years: As part of a new report entitled The National Cancer Institute Tobacco Research Implementation Plan, Priorities for Tobacco Research Beyond the Year 2000, two initiatives, the "Transdisciplinary Tobacco Research Centers" and "Research in State and Community Tobacco Control Interventions" programs, will be funded at $142 million over five y

Even the most commonly mutated tumor suppressor genes, such as p53 and Rb, malfunction in only about half of all tumor types. However, excess telomerase appears in all major cancers. So why don't more pharmaceutical strategies exist to block the enzyme that, in excess, dictates cells to divide ad infinitum? The answer may be twofold, Serge Lichtsteiner, a researcher at Menlo Park, Calif.-based Geron Corp., reported during an interview following his presentation at a recent New York Academy of

Protein structure information from X-ray crystallography and bioinformatics has given biochemists a potentially potent anticancer target: specific segments of DNA's double helix. But, as a group of biochemists at a fall conference sponsored by the National Foundation for Cancer Research agreed, knowing the structure of proteins and protein complexes that bind to DNA segments and turn genes off and on may be only half the battle. Proteins or large synthetic molecules should, in theory, be able t

December 10 marked another "major milestone" in molecular biology. An international consortium of scientists announced that they have obtained the first complete genetic blueprint of a complex animal. C. elegans Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, U.K., have sequenced the 97 million-base genome of Caenorhabditis elegans, biologists' favorite worm. The product of a nine-year effort, the C. elegans sequence joins those of E. coli and yeast in

In early December, Emory University in Atlanta agreed to pay $66,400 in fines and change its operating procedures in response to the December 1997 death of Elizabeth Griffin, a 22-year-old worker at its Yerkes Regional Primate Center. Griffin contracted herpes B virus, common in Old World macaques, when she was hit in the eye with fecal material, urine, or saliva while transferring a rhesus monkey to a cage.1 Though rare in humans, B virus is often lethal unless treated early with antiviral dru

Ferid Murad, M.D., Ph.D., just won the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for his work on nitric oxide. Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., heads the National Human Genome Research Institute. And 49 investigators who hold both M.D. and Ph.D. degrees are funded by the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute. What these disparate observations reflect is the rise of the M.D.-Ph.D., whose training and professional pedigree dovetail nicely with two hallmarks of the current biomedical arena: rapid

Peter Brazutis INTERNATIONAL EFFORT: Yunzhen Cao left the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York last summer to set up an AIDS research lab in China. Her researchers will be trained at Aaron Diamond, whose David Ho is pictured on the wall. Epidemiogical Deficiencies Epidemiological studies in Yunnan Province1 indicate that in some areas there is a high rate of HIV-seroprevalence among IV drug abusers--in some places as high as 85.7 percent. Furthermore, the infected drug users a

TIGHAR/P. Thrasher Tom King, senior project archaeologist for TIGHAR, excavates a site on Nikumaroro Island in 1997. In 1991, TIGHAR archaeologists found a shoe heel marked "Cat's Paw Rubber Co. USA" (right). They suspect that the heel and other matching shoe parts they found belonged to Amelia Earhart. STILL SEARCHING Lady Lindbergh may not have met her demise in the waters of the Pacific after all. On Dec. 4, 1998, at the annual American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting in P

Just prior to offering the floor to Harold Varmus for the first Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education subcommittee hearing in more than two months, and just after exchanging pleasantries with the National Institutes of Health director, subcommittee chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) asked Varmus jokingly, "Did you like the $2 billion we gave you?" A smiling Varmus answered in the affirmative; onlookers chuckled. "It's my belief that stem cells do not fall under the ban on embryo re