When Robert Lanza?s group at Advanced Cell Technology reported linkurl:this week;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/24363/ creating so-called ethically clean ES cell lines (establishing colonies from an early human embryo without destroying it) they didn?t make clear whether they had actually accomplished this feat. This work might have potential, but the numbers speak to a logical smoke and mirror show. Using 16 blastomeres (embryos in the 8-to-10-cell stage), Lanza?s group extracted 9

A few weeks ago linkurl:I chided Nick Wade;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/24083/ (lovingly! I?m a huge fan, after all) for invoking the ?code? word when describing a study on nucleosome positioning. It surprised me when my post spurred some comments on the nature of the __Nature__ press office, and their proclivity for hyping, but ?not overhyping,? the research papers within. Wade can be forgiven. I didn?t realize how pervasive the word code had been in __Nature__ until I saw the di

It?s been a summer of depressing anniversaries, but not until now have I had the occasion to remember, vividly, the actual events. I was too young to remember the first reports of linkurl:AIDS, 25 years ago.;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23586/ Legionnaire?s disease, happened (just a few blocks from where I now work) linkurl:five years earlier;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/88/ than that. But I still remember quite vividly watching President Bush give his linkurl:firs

I was glad to see that someone?s taking direct-to-consumer genetic testing to trial. Nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics is a burgeoning experimental science as we?ll be writing about in September, but the common refrain among many experts -- ?It?s not ready for prime-time? -- hasn?t stopped several companies from marketing store bought genetic tests which are used with a lifestyle inventory to provide customized nutritional guidance. I?ve been linkurl:skeptical, to say the least,;http://www.the-s

Nicholas Wade extols the virtues of chromatin organization and regulation in today?s linkurl:__Science Times__;http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/science/25dna.html hitting on a topic that I always love reading and writing about. Here he talks about DNA directed nucleosome positioning. Certain DNA sequences, perhaps because of their relative bendability, might be more or less amenable to histone wrapping making some regulatory sequences more or less accessible. A linkurl:recent paper;http://www

Jane Tomlinson, who is living with advanced breast cancer, starts her grueling 4200 mile, US-spanning bike ride to raise money for cancer research this Friday in San Francisco. According to her linkurl:Website,;http://www.janesappeal.com/ she?s run three London marathons, the NYC marathon, and completed the Ironman triathalon among other extreme exercise fundraisers since she was told nearly six years ago that she had six months to live. She?s been quoted as saying that she expects this to be t

Credit: © DIEGO CERVO" /> Credit: © DIEGO CERVO Picture this: Among the cirque du swag of the BIO 2006 exhibit hall in Chicago, a cheerful young scientist pads up to the booth of a certain magazine of the life sciences. On scanning her nametag, one of my colleagues notices an interesting affiliation: Philip Morris. Intrigued, my colleague asks the senior research scientist about her work, which she says involves "harm reduction."With 16,000 people in attendance, BIO

The linkurl:__New Yorker__;http://www.newyorker.com delves into a scientific fraud this week (see below). This one, upward of five decades old, was uncovered largely by ornithologist Pamela Rasmussen, an assistant prof at Michigan State who is co-author of ?Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide,? linkurl:reviewed here.;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438916a.html In preparing the guide, she took to task one Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, member of the Royal Fusiliers, inte

Four papers released online today detail some of the work from David Allis's group and others on chromatin remodeling. 

Just the other day I was talking to a researcher on the phone whose work had unexpectedly intersected with nucleosome remodeling. I get the feeling it?s not an uncommon occurrence. I?ve enjoyed following the linkurl:explosion of research;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23392/ on this topic in the past decade, in part because the analogies are irresistible. As the now pat intro to numerous papers on the subject says, with the sequence of the human genome at hand, scientists are lo

FEATUREEpigenetics All art: Rick Contreras All photography: Jason Varney/varneyphoto.com Histones serve as slates to a dizzying array of modifications, but researchers are confident they can decipher the epigenetic puzzle.BY BRENDAN MAHER ARTICLE EXTRASRelated Articles: Is It a Code: The DebateSteven Henikoff and Bryan M. Turner debate if there really is a histone code.Roughly two meters of DNA gets pack

The __New York Times__ linkurl:has an interesting business story;http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/business/13diagnose.html on the growth of high-priced clinical diagnostic tests involving genomic and proteomic technologies. One chief scientific officer praised the makers of Oncotype DX (which rates the risk of breast cancer recurrence based on a panel of 12 genes) for validating their product in the clinic and then placing it ?in a Starbucks package at a high price.? At $3500 a pop, the test