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The National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a clearinghouse for information about evolution and the anti-evolutionist initiatives, reported more than one state or local difficulty per week in 1999 and 2000 related to the teaching of evolution. One of the prominent figures in the ongoing evolutionist vs. creationist debate is NCSE executive director Eugenie C. Scott, a physical anthropologist by training. Scott didn't intend to become embroiled in this issue; one of her graduate school prof

Despite some success, reproductive cloning in mammals is still a tricky feat. University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine researchers, by tracking the gene Oct4 in mice, have shown how its routine failure to reprogram after nuclear transplant commonly prevents the successful development of mammalian embryos (M. Boiani et al., "Oct4 distribution and level in mouse clones: consequences for pluripotency," Genes & Development, 6[10]:1209-19, May 15, 2002). Producing a clone requires tha

Tony Blair discussed the importance of science to society at The Royal Society yesterday.

The chicken genome will be among the next to be sequenced, and so will that of humanity's closest relative.

From Friday, researchers in over 100 developing nations will have low-cost Internet access to more than 2,000 biomedical journals under a major WHO initiative.

Controversial evolutionary biologist succumbs to cancer he had battled for 20 years.

The public release of the draft mouse genome sequence reopens the debate on the commercial viability of genome sequencing.

The UK's Royal Society has announced the election of 42 new Fellows and six Foreign Members.

Consider a human baby, so young she cannot distinguish herself from the world. Her parents, beset by the fears and longings of adulthood, gaze anxiously upon their daughter's knitted brow. Her serious expression, at once reminiscent of her mother and comical on an infant's face, causes the parents to fret: When will the crease become a wrinkle? When will the physical assault of being alive begin? Their concern might seem absurdly premature, but the fleeting nature of life has long prompted peopl

Every human being has asked at least once, "Why do we have to age and die?" Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Tuchnina (now Gavrilova), decide to really pursue the answer. They first met at a conference in 1975 when they were both fourth-year chemistry students at Moscow State University. Then, seven days after their first date, a smitten Gavrilov proposed, promising he would discover how to stop aging if she would marry him. The couple went on a quest to find a general theory that could explain what

While wealthy nations pursue drugs to treat baldness and obesity, depression in dogs, and erectile dysfunction, elsewhere millions are sick or dying from preventable or treatable infectious and parasitic diseases.1 It's called the 10/90 gap. "Less than 10% of the worldwide expenditure on health research and development is devoted to the major health problems of 90% of the population," explains Els Torreele, co-chair of a working group that provided background recently for an initiative announced

African trypanosomiasis is making an unwelcome comeback. But unlike other returning diseases, this one has a drug treatment—eflornithine—that disappeared from the market when it failed to cure cancer. Yet like Viagra's origin from a curious side effect in a clinical trial, so too was eflornithine reborn. "When it was discovered that it removes mustaches in women, it suddenly had a market: western women with mustaches," says Morten Rostrup, president of the international council for M