When you fill out a customs declaration form for entering New Zealand, you are asked if you are carrying any of a long list of animal and plant products. Are you carrying camping gear and boots, riding equipment, and clothing that may have been in contact with farm animals? Have you been on a farm or in a forest in the last 30 days? In a world increasingly worried about alien species and imported livestock diseases, perhaps no other country has been as traditionally concerned about introducing

The commercial fishing and conservationist communities have clashed many times over how to protect fishery resources and conserve marine ecosystems while also supporting the economies dependent on the oceans. However, a new twist in the argument is the louder call from both sides for better scientific support for fishery management decisions. Fisheries management approaches often focus on single species protection by limiting the number of days fishermen can work, the types of fishing gear use

Courtesy of William Ghiorse (2 Termononaspora images) and Margie Romine (Sphingomonas image)The two images at left are of Termononaspora fusca.Right: Sphingomonas aromaticivorans Be forewarned. Visitors to Walnut Creek, Calif., may want to leave their pets at home to keep them from becoming fodder for gene sequencers. The Joint Genome Institute (JGI) at Walnut Creek, genome central for the U.S. Department of Energy, is one of the largest sequencing operations in the world, where "it turns out it

A consensus grass comparative map shows how grass genomes line up. When the well's dry, we know the worth of water," wrote Benjamin Franklin under his Poor Richard alias. Not much has changed in 250 years as the United States, suffering one of the most devastating droughts in 90 years, painfully learns water's worth. The situation is gravest in the Southwest, which is enduring its fourth year of drought in five years. The U.S. Department of Agriculture continues to add more counties to its list

Graphic: Cathleen Heard This week, as the United Nations convenes its Millennium Summit in New York, delegates will consider how to help developing countries obtain better access to medical information on the Internet. The discussion is prompted by Secretary General Kofi Annan, who in his April Millennium Report proposed a Health InterNetwork and a volunteer U.N. Information Technology Service. The first proposal would establish thousands of online sites in hospitals and clinics to provide acce

They're here. Gene chips, carbon nanotubes, and other products, that is, that show that the science of the very small is getting very big. And in biological and biomedical research, nanotechnology--the manipulation and construction of materials and structures at sizes of billionths of a meter--is becoming increasingly important, shrinking the borders between biophysics, biochemistry, structural biology, and other life science fields while seeding new industries. Central to this are exploi

In June, as the public and private genome projects prepared to announce the rough mapping of the human genome, a special Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) genetics ethics committee was wrapping up its own report on how the government should oversee genetic testing. In the report, sent to assistant secretary and surgeon general David Satcher, the Health and Human Services Secretary's Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing, or SACGT, recommends that the government provide additional ove

When the federal Office for Protection from Research Risks (OPRR) ordered Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) to halt all human subject research in January, it was another punitive measure in that agency's 14-month-long series of actions that sent a clear message to the research community: Researchers spending federal tax dollars should diligently consider ethics in their work. This particular case, however, especially troubled genetics researchers. It involved the father of a research

Life science researchers planning future projects that involve contact with people via the Internet can benefit from a new report based on experiences of sociologists, psychologists, and others. The World Wide Web can be a virtual candy store for research into numerous topics. However, online researchers are discovering that the brave new world of research on the Web challenges them to define more specific frameworks for answering ethical questions of consent and privacy in cyberspace stud