What's the biochemical basis for our learning and storing the names, events, sights, and sounds that stay with us for a lifetime? Can we, in fact, reduce and explain these bits of nostalgia in terms of the inner workings of cellular and molecular mechanisms, phenomena in the brain at the synapses between neurons? Seth Grant and Richard Morris More than 30 years ago, investigators believed that they'd taken a huge step toward doing precisely that. Terje Lomo, then a Ph.D. student at the Univer

 In March 1996, a laboratory from the University of Rochester announced the discovery of an enzyme integral to unlocking the still-mysterious intricacies of DNA transcription and gene activation, the most basic of cellular processes.

Mildred Dresselhaus coauthored a report to be released Feb. 17. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) President Bruce M. Alberts was so concerned by the accountability provision buried in last year's "omnibus" budget legislation that on Jan. 26 he sent a letter to Office of Management and Budget Director Jacob Lew in which he writes that he's "convinced that the new legislation will have serious, unintended consequences for the nation's research enterprise." Speaking at the recent American Associ

Courtesy of ARIAD Pharmaceuticals In the gene therapy system devised by Penn and ARIAD researchers, the adeno-associated virus is injected into the body to deliver the desired gene (top left), and a drug in pill form is given orally to activate gene expression (top right). Researchers demonstrated a strong correlation between the amount of drug administered and the resulting increase in the amount of protein produced (center). Scientists attempting to devise successful, efficient gene therapy

In the last two months of 1998, the National Cancer Institute announced seven new initiatives set to cost a total of $343 million over the next five years: As part of a new report entitled The National Cancer Institute Tobacco Research Implementation Plan, Priorities for Tobacco Research Beyond the Year 2000, two initiatives, the "Transdisciplinary Tobacco Research Centers" and "Research in State and Community Tobacco Control Interventions" programs, will be funded at $142 million over five y

Just prior to offering the floor to Harold Varmus for the first Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education subcommittee hearing in more than two months, and just after exchanging pleasantries with the National Institutes of Health director, subcommittee chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) asked Varmus jokingly, "Did you like the $2 billion we gave you?" A smiling Varmus answered in the affirmative; onlookers chuckled. "It's my belief that stem cells do not fall under the ban on embryo re

Per the request of President Bill Clinton, the members of the presidentially appointed National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) met on Nov. 17 to discuss the bioethical, medical, and legal ramifications of the apparent first-ever creation of bovine-human hybrid cells, embryonic cells consisting of a human cell's nucleus inside a cow egg. In a Nov. 14 letter to the NBAC, the president said that he was "deeply troubled by this news of experiments involving the mingling of human and nonhuman

Plant and animal circadian rhythms, 24-hour cycles that regulate many physiological and metabolic functions, are ultimately influenced by the same thing: light. Scientists are now beginning to realize that plants and animals may also share some of the mechanisms for receiving and processing that light so that the day/night cycles in both organisms are optimized. Two reports in the Nov. 20 issue of Science --one by researchers from The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. (D.E. Somers

This year's winners of the Nobel Prize for physics collectively discovered and described a phenomenon that appears to defy common sense. Fewer notions could be so intuitively valid as the following: smaller things are generated by breaking bigger things apart. The world of physics usually bears this out: An atom, for example, divides into electrons, protons, and neutrons; a proton splits into quarks. But in 1982, Daniel Tsui, a professor of physics at Princeton University, and Horst Stormer, a

Mice everywhere are breathing a collective sigh of relief. Soon, far fewer small laboratory animals will be routinely sacrificed to allow researchers to observe the after-effects of gene mutations or other experimental manipulations. Instead, investigators will be able to track the implications of those changes in living specimens in exquisite detail and for extended periods of time, thus painting a fuller, more accurate picture of what's going on and why. At least, that's the likely scenario i

On September 25 at the Hotel Pierre in New York City, seven prominent scientists, representing a generation of landmark discoveries in biology and medicine, stepped to the podium to receive this year's Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards, a coveted honor bestowed annually since 1946 by The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation. The research of six of this year's recipients made possible groundbreaking discoveries in the field of cancer research. The research of the seventh, who received his award

Like explorers searching for the source of a long, expansive river, Alzheimer's disease (AD) researchers are seeking the origins of an exceedingly complex biochemical pathway, one that culminates in the onset of a debilitating condition that afflicts more than 4 million people in the United States alone. Along the way, investigators run into numerous tributaries, factors that, although proven to somehow contribute to disease pathogenesis, may or may not be connected or causally related to one a