Articles by Brendan Borrell

By Brendan Borrell ELEMENTAL SHORTAGE The world is running out of cheap phosphorus, the element that lies at the heart of great agricultural advances and thorny environmental problems. Biologists are only now beginning to understand what it means for evolution and human health. James Elser at a study site in southern Norway Although a limnologist in Phoenix and a molecular biologist in Atlanta have never met before, a single element ties them together.

By Brendan Borrell Bio Island Dream For 40 years, Puerto Rico has been a pharmaceutical manufacturing powerhouse, but is it ready to finally edge its way into research and development? Conceptual rendering of Science City Courtesy of Puerto Rico Science, Technology and Research Trust Ignacio “Nacho” Pino opens up another bottle of red wine as the sun sets over the city of Mayagüez on

Researchers complain as University of Puerto Rico strike exceeds 50 days

A Cuban pharmacologist and genetics expert was a speaker at a Puerto Rico biotech conference co-organized with the FDA

What would be the perfect revenge for a scientist whose paper is turned away from Nature? A Nobel Prize, of course.

By Brendan Borrell The Counterfeiter The story of how one of pharma’s biggest enemies was nabbed in Houston, Texas Stone / Getty Images On May 25, 2007, Kevin Xu logged into his Gmail account and found a startling message from a man who could have been his biggest client. rom an office suite on the 28th floor of the Plaza Royale in Beijing, the baby-faced businessman had gone from selling shark cartilage and penicillin to Chinese

By Brendan Borrell A pioneer's perils Homme Hellinga © Les Todd / Duke University On a rainy morning at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Md., last fall, Duke University biochemist Homme Hellinga took the stage to sum up what he had been doing over the last 5 years with the $2.5 million Pioneer award he received in 2004. Unlike other NIH grants that require a strict game plan with concrete goals, the Pioneer award is a kind o

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By Brendan Borrell In the muck Randall Kerstetter shows off the duckweed collection at the Waksman Institute at Rutgers. Courtesy of Wesley M Jackson Duckweed first appeared in satellite images of Venezuela in 2004 as a mysterious swirl of green on the surface of Lake Maracaibo, doubling in size with each passing day. Maracaibo is one of South America’s largest bodies of water, but with brackish water and few nutrients, it had ne

New study calls into question further research from Duke biochemist Homme Hellinga

Dust and other disturbers of air quality are traveling vast distances to affect the health of people worldwide, says a new report

By Brendan Borrell Death, delimited Black-backed jackals eating a zebra carcass. Courtesy of Steve Bellan At about noon on March 26th, Steve Bellan was working in his office at Etosha Ecological Institute in northern Namibia when he got word of a fresh zebra carcass near the Gemsbokvlakte water hole, about 20 kilometers east on a dusty park road. Over the next hour, the bushy-haired Ber

From left: Jay Keasling with Francesco Pingitore and Chris Petzold. Credit: Courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley Nat'l Lab - Roy Kaltschmidt, photographer" />From left: Jay Keasling with Francesco Pingitore and Chris Petzold. Credit: Courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley Nat'l Lab - Roy Kaltschmidt, photographer Jay Keasling watches as 700 billion Escherichia coli swish around inside a benchtop bioreactor in the brand-spanking new

Scanning electron micrograph of the head of a female Anopheles gambiae mosquito, indicating the olfactory appendages (antennae, maxillary palps and proboscis) Credit: Courtesy of LJ Zwiebel, colorization by Dominic Doyle / Vanderbilt University" />Scanning electron micrograph of the head of a female Anopheles gambiae mosquito, indicating the olfactory appendages (antennae, maxillary p

Drew Purves Credit: Courtesy of Microsoft Research" />Drew Purves Credit: Courtesy of Microsoft Research Drew Purves had been a postdoc at Princeton University for almost five years when he saw a weird job advertisement in August 2006. He and his companions in Stephen Pacala's lab were the techies of the ecology world, building mathematical models of forest ecosystems. Weaned on a Commodore-64 computer and the BASIC