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New questions after second X-SCID patient develops leukemia.

US universities competing for plum designations as bioterror research centers.

Wolfgang Baumeister, Riitta Hari and Nikos K. Logothetis share the 2003 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine.

Fee hikes and outsourcing considered to shrink application backlog in US and UK.

New Majority Leader's influence on US science policy and funding hard to predict.

Vivian Siegel leaves premier biology journal to lead open-access publishing effort.

50 UK schools are to explore new terrain for science education.

Meeting explores balance between openness and defense of sensitive data.

Foundations | Charles Darwin, 1809-1882 Letter and Photo: the American Philosophical Society Will you be so very kind as to look at the enclosed title and give me your opinion," wrote Charles to friend and fellow scientist Sir Charles Lyell in March 1859 about his now famous book. Arguing that external conditions could hardly be responsible for variation, Darwin wrote in his preface: "In the case of the misseltoe [sic], which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that mu

Courtesy of the James D. Watson CollectionCold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives Getty Images "An unknown Elvis Presley is preparing to graduate from Humes High School in Memphis, Tenn. Princess Elizabeth is preparing for her June 8 coronation. And at the Cavendish Laboratory at University of Cambridge, England, Jim Dewey Watson, 24, and Francis Compton Crick, 36, are trying to persuade Watson's younger sister, Elizabeth, to give up her Saturday afternoon to type a 900-word article that begin

Getty Images In the half century since James D. Watson and Francis Crick pieced out the structure of DNA, research into the double helix has transformed knowledge of development, function, and disease. It has also become a commonplace truth that DNA (or RNA) is the unique sine qua non of any living organism. As such, it comprises a material identifier, a collection of base-pair sequences that provide an individual's signature, independent of the information that any one sequence may encode. Wh

The DNA revolution may be just too big to take in: beyond words, even 50 years on. Think of four chemical bases coupled exclusively to each other, adenine with thymine, guanine with cytosine, in a double helix. Then think of this double helix having the power to unwind and duplicate, to make new helixes. So far, so simple. The structure spells out a gene that makes a protein, and makes more DNA. But like the double helix itself, the challenges divide into questions of scale and complexity. In