Articles by Douglas Steinberg

Potential perils from bioterrorism to bird flu are increasingly pushing proteomics researchers to identify molecules involved in the infection process.

Political, ethical, and family conflicts catapulted Terri Schiavo's case to international prominence earlier this year.

About a month before a New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) meeting last February, six of the scheduled speakers received an unusual homework assignment.

nouement: suicide or cancer.

RNA interference (RNAi) is fast becoming an essential tool for academic and industrial labs searching for genes that promote or inhibit cancer.

Psychiatrists can draw upon long clinical experience with adult patients to surmise why antidepressant medications foster suicidal thoughts and behavior in some children, as the US Food and Drug Administration warned this fall.

Recall a memory under certain circumstances, and the brain might erase it, recent rodent research suggests. If that possibility seems like science fiction, consider other weird tricks played by the mind's memory machinery. False recollections, for example, can occur during a déjà vu experience or after hypnosis. And true recollections which can reconstruct experiences from decades earlier, often seem almost supernatural, even to those fully aware of the brain's complexity.Because of it

A TALE OF TWO MODELS:Courtesy of Douglas K. Bishop and Denise Zickler, © Elsevier ScienceThe double-strand-break repair model (A) posits that during meiotic prophase I, crossovers (COs) and noncrossovers (NCOs) begin with a double-strand break (DSB) of a DNA helix. Cleavage of a structure known as the Holliday junction (HJ) ultimately generates both COs and NCOs. A newer model (B) proposes that COs still arise from HJs (right) but that NCOs come from a pathway called synthesis-dependent str

UPSIDE-DOWN MITO-MAPLE:Courtesy of Douglas C. WallaceResearchers constructed a phylogenetic tree based upon human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation. A branch bifurcates whenever they found an additional polymorphism. At the top of the inverted tree is mitochondrial "Eve"; the illustration shows two mtDNA sub-branches, or lineages, found in Europe and the Middle East. The J1- and J2-branch polymorphisms in the cytochrome b gene might have spread because they were climatically advantageous. (Rep

THE TRIPLETS OF CELLVILLE:(Reprinted with permission from G.A. Pihan et al., Cancer Res, 63: 1398–404, 2003)When stained with a biotinylated probe specific for the chromosome 8 centromere, diploid cells from normal human uterine cervix (A), breast (C), and prostate (E) tissue show two signals. Aneuploid cells from carcinoma tissues in situ (B, D, and F) each have three or more signals.About 70 scientists recently attended an invitation-only California premiere tinged with controversy. But

Courtesy of Philipp Kaldis, © 2003 Elsevier  THE UNEXPECTED SURVIVOR: Mice that lack the CDK2 protein (-/-) survive to adulthood but are slightly smaller than their wild-type littermates (+/+). The knockouts are also sterile. After several groups reported discovering cyclin E and cyclin-dependent kinase 2 (CDK2) in 1991, a consensus emerged. It held that these protein partners are crucial in promoting the cell cycle's G1- to S-phase transition and driving cancer-cell proliferation.

© Mehau Kulyk/Photo Researchers, Inc. A typical neuron's axons and dendrites, when loaded with dye and magnified, resemble long, untended tresses on an extremely bad hair day. They extend wildly, usually to one side, and then bend at weird angles as their ends split into branches and sub-branches. This neuronal coiffure must appear even more chaotic before the nervous system has undergone the developmental equivalent of a crew cut crossed with a topiary trimming. From the late embryonic

Ned Shaw Several dozen biologists and computer scientists are gathering this week in Bar Harbor, Maine, to discuss ontology--not the hoary philosophical concept, but the bioinformatics buzzword referring to a computer-based representation of the facts established by a scientific field. One group of conferees, the five-year-old Gene Ontology Consortium, will likely focus on programming issues and new viewing, browsing, and editing tools, says Monte Westerfield, the University of Oregon biology

Last May, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first weapon in what could become a brand new arsenal against cancer. That weapon is Velcade (bortezomib), a drug that inhibits an intracellular protein-disposal system known as ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis (UMP). Made by Cambridge, Mass.-based Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Velcade improves and prolongs the lives of some patients with relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma. As a succession of companies tested Velcade (also called P

Courtesy of Bonnie Bartel and David P. Bartel Reprinted from Plant Physiol, 132:1-9, June 2003.  CURRENT MODEL: (A) A microRNA (MIR) gene encodes a primary transcript with a stem-loop structure. A hairpin precursor (in brackets) has been found in animals but not in plants. The enzyme Dicer cleaves the transcript to form a microRNA (miRNA) which nestles in a ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complex that is similar, if not identical, to the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC). (B) When an mRNA has n