Articles by Ilene Schneider

Kim Ha uses the Internet to order buffers, enzymes, and other equipment. It's the electronic age. You communicate via E-mail. You surf the World Wide Web for everything from the local weather forecast to cheap airline tickets. Why not buy lab supplies over the Internet? With about 2,500 companies selling products to life scientists and more than 15,000 new products introduced each year, ordering lab supplies the traditional way can be a time-consuming task--maybe three to six hours a week sear

Using genomcs to develop new antibiotics and vaccines could help prepare for potential bioterrorist actions Although the Human Genome Project now draws more attention, the genomes of smaller organisms collectively contain more information. The American Association for the Advancement of Science's second annual Genome Seminar, held at this year's annual meeting in January in Anaheim, Calif., focused on analyzing that information for a myriad of purposes ranging from developing malaria vaccine s

Kits and chips will routinely screen for the genetic implications of new drugs within the next 10 years, and therapeutics is becoming a science as opposed to an art. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will expect pharmaceutical companies to have molecular insights into how drugs work and how they are metabolized. Such data will reduce idiosyncratic reactions to drugs. These were the opinions of panelists at a presentation called "Developing Prescriptions with a Personal Touch: The Human G

Discoveries in genomics will bring about enormous changes in the scientific community, but these changes have "caught many sectors of the biomedical academic community off guard," cautions Allen W. Cowley Jr., professor of medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Cowley calls "scientific manpower preparedness" a hurdle science must overcome to fully benefit from the Human Genome Project. A shortage of scientists appropriately trained to define the physiological function of genes and expre

PHOTO: Edward Derrick, AAAS PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE: J. Scott Hauger (left), director of the Research Competitiveness Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, speaks with Tom Collins, vice president for research at Oklahoma State University, during a break at the recent Next Generation Internet conference in San Diego. A distributed information-retrieval system enables desktop access to biological collections that can be used for biodiversity research, conservation, m

John A. Pople Sharing the 1998 Nobel Prize in chemistry are a physicist and a developer of computational codes that made the physicist's concepts more easily applicable to the study of large molecular systems. Walter Kohn, 75, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and John A. Pople, 72, of Northwestern University, have made pioneering contributions in developing quantum chemistry methods that can be used for theoretical studies of the properties of molecules and the chemical proces

Chandra Louise, Ph.D.

In 1976, biochemist Fred Rothstein, of Long Beach, Calif., decided that he had "too much of an entrepreneurial personality to deal with the structure of corporate or academic life." Rothstein, whose experience included 20 years teaching physiology at Tufts University Medical School and five years as an industrial scientist with Miles Laboratories and Abbott Laboratories, struck out on his own and became a consultant to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Since then, he says, he has earn