In the Information Age, it might be tempting to think of job hunting as a kind of point and click trip down the information superhighway. Calling up a near endless number of Web sites, such as hotjobs.com, monster.com, BioMedNet, Genome Jobs, or Bio Online, E-mailing a resume and cover letter, and waiting for a response may seem an appropriate tactic. However, interviews with recent job seekers, employers hiring scientists, as well as those in the job-hunting profession offer a rather somewhat o

Michael Cowan Many consider postdoctoral fellows the sinew of American science; they enable forward motion and new discoveries as science flexes its muscle. "Since the 1960s, the performance of research in the United States has relied more and more on graduate scientists and engineers who have recently earned a Ph.D. and are pursuing further education and training," asserts a recently published report on postdocs by the Committee on Science Engineering and Public Policy (COSEPUP) of the National

The Jury is Still Out on Soy In the search for a breast cancer preventive, soy has been considered a promising candidate. But a review of research on soy's phytoestrogen genistein (K.B. Bouker, L. Hilakivi-Clarke, "Genistein: Does it prevent or promote breast cancer," Environmental Health Perspectives, 108:70-8, August 2000) is lukewarm on the compound's preventative capabilities. "There is no strong evidence that genistein would actually prevent breast cancer, but there is no strong evidence

Times are difficult for researchers using human subjects. Over the past few years the federal Office for the Prevention of Research Risk has temporarily lifted the authority of a number of prestigious institutions to do such research. They included, according to the Office of Human Research Protection, OPRR's successor agency, Duke University Medical Center, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, and the

Fewer than 40 years ago heat shock proteins (HSPs) seemed to many researchers little more than a curiosity in Drosophila. Elizabeth Craig, professor of biomolecular chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, remembers that some scientists used to regard HSPs as "something weird that a fruit fly does." She has been studying these proteins and the genes responsible for them in yeast for more than two decades. Today HSPs are the object of intense work by scientists in the United States and

Nicotine holds promise for treating diseases such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, and schizophrenia. "Nicotine is a very simple molecule, and it affects receptors of many subtypes; therefore, the consequences, behavioral and biologic, are very broad," says Neil Grunberg, director of the Psychoendocrinology and Biochemistry Laboratory at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Nicotinic receptors control the release of

Recent studies have shown that isolates of Campylobacter jejuni bacteria, major culprits in food poisoning, are gaining resistance to fluoroquinolone antibiotics, currently the drugs of choice in treating the disorder. Therefore, makers of agricultural antibiotics will soon need to take antibiotic resistance into account as part of the approval process, says Sharon Thompson, associate director for veterinary medical and international affairs at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A requireme

Photo: Jeff MillerBruce Christensen As public health officials on the East Coast keep an eye out for anything that hints of West Nile virus this year, researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, are hoping their ongoing basic research will help put a monkey wrench into the genetic machinery that lets mosquitoes transmit deadly and debilitating illnesses. Bruce Christensen, professor of animal health and biomedical sciences, and his team of 15 researchers, technicians, and undergraduates

Biologists are vigorously and enthusiastically exploring the structure and function of channels known as connexins, which link cells to one another. Connexin research is "hot," says one scientist heavily involved in the field, as investigators seek to answer a host of questions ranging from what passes through these channels to when and why they appear and disappear. Understanding how these channels work may also lead to improved drugs for diseases linked with connexin mutations. "From my perspe

The quest for a treatment for muscular dystrophy has led some scientists to focus on the half-dozen muscles surrounding the eyes. These extraocular muscles, which control eye movement, remain untouched by the disease. Some researchers think they understand why and hope to turn that understanding into a treatment. Normal distribution of dystrophin at the muscle cell surface and utrophin at sites of neuromuscular junctions (nmj). In animal models of Duchenne dystrophy, utrophin appears to expand b

Caitilyn Allen The dearth of women in science and engineering has spawned programs on college campuses to redress the balance and encourage women to stay in science. According to the National Science Foundation,1 a little more than 22 percent of the scientists and engineers in the United States in 1995 (the date of the most recent figures) were women. Though women make up about half of the social scientists, they are noticeably underrepresented among the "hard sciences." The NSF reports that 20

For about a decade, Susan Swedo, chief of the Pediatric and Developmental Neuropsychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), has been investigating how an ordinary strep infection can trigger an autoimmune response leading to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). She, her colleagues at NIMH, and other researchers have been exploring this link with a goal of better understanding the role of the brain in mental disorders and developing better OCD treatments. Though strep is