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Laboratory safety at the Chinese Institute of Virology under close scrutiny

Of the 262 readers who participated in our survey, 63% have plans to retire at age 65 or later, and a hardy 10% want to stop working after 75, or not at all. Even among the 45 and younger set, 56% plan to retire at 65 or later. At the spectrum's other end, 20% of this age group expects to call it quits before reaching 60.How our readers think they will spend their retirement covers the gamut, from doing volunteer work to opening a microbrewery. Some are obviously dreaming: "Maybe my kids will su

Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center, U of Texas at AustinThere are many milestones on the road to modern science, but few equal the summer afternoon in 1826 when French inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1765–1833) captured the first permanent image. Niepce, a tinkerer and amateur scientist, set out to automate the lithography process in 1812. Experiments with various acids and other substances failed. Still tinkering 15 years later, he set up a pewter plate layered with photosensitive bitumen

PictureQuestA plain tablet in a no-name blisterpack. It could save a life.Or maybe not.Since 1994, the Food and Drug Administration has approved year-to-year increases in the number of new candidate drugs for human testing in the United States, rising from 3,350 in 1996 to 3,900 in 2002.1 But the number of drugs that successfully negotiate the trial process and ultimately receive FDA approval is frustratingly low. Despite pharmaceutical companies' and the National Institutes of Health's research

On first consideration, it seems a straightforward question: How effective and safe is drug A in treating condition B? But the design and analysis of the clinical trials that set out to answer this question are far from straightforward, involving an overwhelming number of variables.First, the subjects: Any group of human beings will show boundless variation in terms of both genetic makeup and non-genetic variation, such as age and lifestyle.Then the disease: Behind the convenient categorization,

Courtesy of David S. GoodsellHistone deacetylases (HDACs), closely associated with gene silencing, may have a broader role in the cell than previously thought. Research suggests that HDACs have been misclassified simply because histones were the first substrates identified for these enzymes.Holly Goodson and colleagues, University of Notre Dame, dug through genome databases and characterized the prokaryotic distribution of HDAC homologs, providing evidence that these proteins predate eukaryote e

Courtesy of Almut MeckeRemoving the positive charge on nanoparticles can improve their chemotherapeutic efficiency, say investigators at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Research presented in March at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in Montreal showed that without the positive charge, the drug-carrying nanoparticles are less likely to be taken up by normal cells and more likely to be taken up by cancer cells.1 "That way we can direct them to tumor cells and decrease the

Courtesy of Jessica BonameLike the impossibly well-funded thieves from a good heist film, viruses pull immune-escape strategies from a deep bag of tricks. Murine γ-herpesvirus-68 (MHV-68) fine-tunes its attack on MHC class I molecules by degrading components of the complex that loads them with peptides.1"There's the primary targeting of the class I heavy chain," says Jessica Boname, in Philip Stevenson's lab at the University of Cambridge, who showed previously that MHV-68's MK3 protein dir

ELECTROPORATION ACTION:Courtesy of James Rae, The Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.At left, two α-Tn4 cells in the process of completing cell division. Each contains the protein products encoded by ECFP-vimentin and dsRed1-mito plasmids electroporated into one of the cells on consecutive days. At right, an example of successful serial single-cell electroporation on three consecutive days. The plasmids used: dsRed1-mito on day one, EYFP-Golgi on day two, and ECFP-vimentin on day three.To date, e

Courtesy of GenVaultEvery year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey preserves 3,000 DNA samples, each bathed in liquid nitrogen in ever-expanding banks of freezers."The samples are a national resource for research and a database of baseline information for studying new diseases or epidemics," explains Geraldine McQuillan, senior infectious disease epidemiologist at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, which runs the survey

Courtesy of Caliper Life SciencesMaking its latest foray into the microfluidics ring, Hopkinton, Mass.-based Caliper Life Sciences http://www.caliperls.com has introduced the new LabChip 3000 Drug Discovery System, a second-generation tool that builds on the foundation laid by its predecessor, the Caliper 250.Intended for high-throughput drug-detection studies, including a range of assay applications such as kinases, proteases, and phosphatases, the LabChip 3000 is both smaller and easier to use