In our May issue, James Aiken, the CEO of the Keystone Symposia, linkurl:wrote that;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23399/ ?the long reach of Bill Gates? had ?finally touched the Keystone Symposia, and all of conference planning, really.? Aiken was writing a grant proposal to the Foundation, and they required him to show measured value for the conferences. Aiken went on to describe a method for quantifying the conferences? impact. When he tallied the results of the instrument Keys

Doug Bergman drove 240 miles to have his heart stabbed by a needle from the inside out. Now he hopes the stem cells that may be in that needle will change his life. By Ivan Oransky WEB EXTRA View Slideshow of Bergman's day Related Article: Making a Play at Regrowing Hearts Results from the first round of controlled human stem cell trials for heart disease are in. What have we learned? Web Extras: Clinical Trials Database A sortabl

In May, James Shapiro linkurl:wrote in our pages;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23394/ about progress using the Edmonton Protocol to transplant islet cells into patients with type 1 diabetes. In this week?s New England Journal of Medicine, he and a number of colleagues around the world linkurl:report the results;http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/13/1318 of a phase 1-2 trial of the protocol in 36 patients. The findings were consistent which previous studies that Shapiro d

On Monday, the Karolinska Institute will announce the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, kicking off a week of science Nobel announcements. And millions of Jews around the world will be in synagogue, observing the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. Orthodox Jews, and even some Conservative Jews, like my family, don?t answer the phone on the holiday, even if they?re home. So that begs a question: What if an observant Jew is among the winners of the Physiology or Medicine pri

Research!America today launched the linkurl:2006 Your Candidates ? Your Health Voter Guide;http://www.yourcandidatesyourhealth.org/ -- a site designed to help voters figure out how the candidates seeking their support feel about scientific research. The group sent 10 questions on subjects such as the CDC budget and basic science funding to all House and Senate candidates. To find out how they responded, plug in your zip code. This is an important and timely effort, with the US midterm elections

Announced today: The linkurl:2006 Lasker Award;http://www.laskerfoundation.org/ for Basic Medical Research is shared by Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, Carol Greider at Johns Hopkins University, and Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School for their research on telomerase, the enzyme responsible for maintaining the length of linear chromosomes. In addition, Joseph Gall of the Carnegie Institution is being honored for his lifetime of discovery and innovation as

Earlier this week, I and several other editorial staffers here at __The Scientist__ started receiving Emails titled ?User Quarantine Release Notification? from an ?inel.gov? address, presumably from the Idaho National Laboratory. Nothing terribly unusual about such spam, which requested that we click on a link to view a list of all of our quarantined messages. Someone had been attacked by a virus. What happened after that, however, was more unusual: __The New York Times?__ George Johnson respo

A linkurl:piece;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23878/ we ran on July 7 has given birth to a great forum linkurl:thread;http://forums.lablit.com/viewtopic.php?t=177; on LabLit -- created by Jennifer Rohn, one of our contributing editors -- on Stephen Gallagher's work and science on television. Gallagher himself has even taken part. Join it, and add your comments to our story (see linkurl:comment link;http://www.the-scientist.com/forum/addcomment/23878/ at the end of the story, where se

From an Endocrine Society linkurl:press release;http://sev.prnewswire.com/health-care-hospitals/20060627/NYTU00827062006-1.html describing a study presented at their national conference this week: 'Our preliminary results indicate that body weight is compromised and weight goes up when people are exposed to an environment with unlimited availability of palatable food and low levels of daily activity,' said University of Chicago researcher Plamen Penev. Stop the presses! Read further, and you

Last November, we linkurl:reported;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/15837/ that the owners of an upscale spa in New York State had 'offered $10 million to the University of Chicago for the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis. ? one of the nation's most historically important, if no longer scientifically advanced, observatories.' Well, they got it. According to a press release this week from the resort firm, Mirbeau will build a 100-room retreat and 73 small homes on the 30 acres

Credit: © ANDREI TCHERNOV" /> Credit: © ANDREI TCHERNOVIn June 2004, Erica Heath, who formerly ran the University of California, San Francisco's institutional review board (IRB), got an unusual call. Douglas Fischer, a reporter at the Oakland Tribune, told her he wanted to test the blood of four family members for levels of polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) fire retardants, and publish the results in the paper. "She laughed when I told her what I wanted to do," says Fischer.

I didn't know Laura van Dam particularly well, but I did have the chance to work with her. In 1993, while I was in college, I was an intern at Technology Review, where she was a senior editor. It was a good experience for me, thanks in no small part to Laura, who always had time for this unpolished kid who seemed to always be running off to the lab to finish my thesis. She was infinitely patient, particularly with the pieces that didn't make it into the magazine. I probably learned more when she