One cutting-edge neuroscience issue is whether a vaccine can cure Alzheimer disease (AD). A much-ballyhooed clinical trial recently sought an answer. But a mistrial was soon declared, and scientific sleuths now face a fresh mystery: Why did 15 trial subjects get sick? The vaccine, developed by Elan Corp., contained Ab, the peptide widely believed to trigger AD by forming brain-clogging amyloid plaques. When Elan researchers vaccinated transgenic mice that had developed AD-like pathology, plaque

The mood could have been grim Feb. 15 when 155 physicians attended the inaugural meeting of the New York Lung Cancer Alliance in Manhattan's glitzy Le Parker Meridien hotel. A month earlier, The New England Journal of Medicine had reported that when 1,155 patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) received combination chemotherapy, half died within eight months.1 The New York meeting, however, was upbeat. Alliance cofounder Abraham Chachoua attributes the optimism to emerging trea

In 1999, scientists at Elan Corp.'s South San Francisco, Calif. facility stunned the Alzheimer Disease (AD) research community: vaccination, they announced, reduces AD-like pathology in transgenic mice.1 Since then, dozens of labs have been working on vaccines to prevent, retard, or reverse AD's devastating symptoms. One clinical trial is finished, a second is under way, and others appear imminent. In animal studies, researchers are testing different types of vaccines and examining how the immun

The Faculty of 1000 is a Web-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. It provides a continuously updated insider's guide to the most important papers within a range of research fields, based on the recommendations of a faculty of over 1,400 leading researchers. Each issue, The Scientist will publish a list of the 10 top-rated papers from a specific subject area, as well as a short review of one or more of the listed papers. We will also publish a selection of comments on inte

After spending the early 1970s studying regeneration in the Xenopus frog tadpole's optic nerve, Paul J. Reier began to ponder how mammalian spinal cord injuries (SCIs) might heal. Eventually, the junior professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine chose to enter an emerging field: fetal cell transplantation into the spinal cord. A colleague called the career move crazy--a judgment that Reier now admits wasn't totally unwarranted. "The spinal cord injury field was clouded by pessimi

Thousands of cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) will likely emerge from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Many cases will last a few months, but severely traumatized witnesses could suffer for the rest of their lives. How can a single horrific experience with nasty aftershocks sear the psyche for decades? Answers to this question appear increasingly urgent in an atmosphere of war, anthrax scares, and continual television replays of the World Trade Center collapse. Researchers have lin

At first blush, gene therapy seems ill-suited to treating Parkinson's disease (PD). Scientists have linked few cases to missing or mutated genes and are generally clueless about the disease's cause. But the need for some relief from its debilitating symptoms is so great that gene therapy researchers have labored over the past decade to develop counter-strategies. These studies have had promising results. When the brains of rat and monkey PD models express certain transgenes, the animals show les

The Canavan trial signals a new phase in a 10-year offensive that gene therapy researchers have waged against neurodegenerative disorders.

As California's energy crisis deepens, biotech companies have worries in addition to the ruined experiments and damaged equipment that concern life scientists in academia.1 Soaring energy prices could slowly sap the industry's economic health, and blackouts could spoil large batches of drugs by interrupting FDA-mandated protocols. "Biotechnology companies in California sort of naively thought that they were located in a First World business environment," says Joseph Dougherty, an analyst at Lehm

As a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco, Christopher Trepel studied the cellular mechanisms of memory in cats and rats until he ran into a serious obstacle: His allergies to the animals had become intolerable. He was also allergic to mice, guinea pigs, and rabbits. "I was fast running out of animals," Trepel recalls. "I kept moving up the food chain. I was going to have to use humans, and that's prohibited." He also had a qualm about academic science: A professor trains 40 pe

A power shutdown last month at the University of California, San Francisco, sent physiology professor Mary F. Dallman into a panic. Her lab studies the effects of stress on the pituitary-adrenal axis in rats' brains, and one of her postdocs had recently begun the sort of 20-day, $10,000 experiment typically conducted by her lab. The pituitary-adrenal axis "is highly circadianly driven," Dallman explains, "and when the lights go out in the middle of the day, you're giving the circadian clock a

While celebrities and U.S. entanglement in the Colombian drug war keep cocaine in the headlines, a larger tragedy hides in the unseen lives of both addicts and former addicts. In 1999, 1.5 million Americans took cocaine at least once a month, according to the federal government's National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. The problem's vast size is aggravated by two stubborn realities: many addicts just can't quit, and those who do might relapse when stressed or tempted. Both groups suffer because