Frontlines | Hired Guns, Science-Style When you cannot solve a problem, why not pay someone to do it for you? That's the idea behind the worldwide, online R&D collaboration, Innocentive (www.innocentive.com). Questioners post their biology, chemistry, or biochemistry 'challenges' on the Web site and interested scientists who figure out a solution earn a reward. Normally, the answer-seekers, who pay a fee, remain anonymous, but some are known. Ali Hussein, Innocentive's vice president of

5-Prime | ICSU: International Council for Science What is it? Created in 1931 as the International Council of Scientific Unions (but recently rebranded as the International Council for Science), ICSU is a nongovernmental organization whose mission is to give scientists worldwide the opportunity to collaborate on projects and exchange information. ICSU has established several policy and advisory committees, including the International Biological Programme (1964-1974), which studied the biol

Anne MacNamara In structural biology, one head may be actually better than two, because the self-sufficient scientist holds an advantage over a group, according to David Speicher, a professor at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. "When you obtain crystal structures of a protein, this often leads to new hypotheses," he says. "By knowing crystallography, you're not dependent on waiting on someone else to produce the new structures that you want to study." Recent technological developments th

Frontlines | The Lab Is Alive, With the Sound of Music Erica P. Johnson The music may be base-ic, but a team from Ramon y Cajal Hospital (RCH) in Madrid have found the song inside us all. They took each nucleotide from the genome of Candida albicans, plus a few other organisms, and arbitrarily designated a tone from the do-re-mi scale (Thyamine is re, guanine is so, adenine is la; and cytosine is do). The end result: a full musical interpretation of the genome. Inspiration for the project

Frontlines | See-through Mummies Thanks to a new take on an old technology, scientists now can unravel secrets of Egypt's mummies without undoing any bandages. Using multidetector computerized tomography (MDCT), a group of Italian researchers took a noninvasive, yet highly accurate virtual tour of the mummies' bodies (F. Cesarani et al., "Whole-body three-dimensional multidetector CT of 13 Egyptian human mummies," Am J Roentgenol, 180:597-606, March 2003). The instrument scanned along the

Frontlines | Fleeing Monkey Fuels Simmering Fire A monkey that split from the California National Primate Research Center at University of California, Davis, caused one group of protestors to go bananas last month. On Feb. 13, a rhesus macaque escaped from its cage during a cage change; researchers believed that the female animal had slipped down a drain. After a scan of the center's entire drainage system and a search of the local area, her whereabouts were still unknown in late February,

Systems biology, a siren in a sea of dark prospects, has lured investors frustrated with low returns in biotechnology and anxious to set a new course of drug discovery. Institutions have also geared up training programs, but the excitement in the new field has failed to arrest downsizing in the biotech industry. Major research institutions and pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, Novartis, and Eli Lilly and Company, are implementing systems biology in the hopes of slashing drug di

Frontlines | Look Out Broadway (or Maybe Not) New York City has historically been fertile ground for innovative dramatic and musical performances. So, after Helen Davies brings her adaptations of classic songs to Greenwich Village, can a Broadway musical be far behind? Or are there enough angels out there to fund the "Yesterdays" of leprosy, or other tunes of herpes? What started off as mnemonic aids for Davies, professor of microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania, to get her studen

Global Goals; Prepare for a Radiant Job Interview; NIH Budget Boost Draws Questions TRAINING @ | Global Goals WHAT: Workshop on Ethical Issues in International Health Research WHERE: Harvard School of Public Health, Boston WHY: To address current issues, anticipate potential future problems, and facilitate productive communication in issues of public health ADVANTAGES: Participants from both developing and industrialized countries can compare experiences, receive expert advice, an

Private Research Funding Falters; Tomorrow's Technologies; Adopt an Ethical Attitude in the Lab Erica P. Johnson FUNDING FORUM | Private Research Funding Falters Awards by charitable foundations are expected to decline for the first time in twenty years, and the life science community has already experienced the pain. Funding will at best remain flat, and most likely decrease in 2003, says Steven Lawrence, director of research for the Foundation Center in New York City. Declining endowment

Even before Francis Crick used his physics training to help calculate the structure of DNA, physics has informed biology. And while many biophysicists focus on basic research, they increasingly use their discipline to predict the effects of drugs before they are used in animal or human trials. Scientists also use quantitative and computational biophysics tools to answer questions about the cell: to predict protein folding or observe interactions between biological macromolecules in vivo. But

When asked to explain the need to study cellular evolution, W. Ford Doolittle, professor of biochemistry at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, offered the following scenario: "If martians were to visit us and ask where we came from and how we got here, and we were to say we didn't think it was worth pursuing, I'd be embarrassed." The origins and evolution of life are still a mystery, and opportunities abound for those with the temerity to broach this primordial problem. For example,