Mike SnyderCourtesy of Michael Marsland"We couldn't get that project funded for the life of us," says Yale University's Mike Snyder of the experiment that, in his opinion, launched the functional genomics era. It was the late 1980s, years before the dawn of DNA microarrays, and Snyder and his colleagues were proposing to use epitope-bearing transposons to tag every protein in yeast. With this collection, the scientists planned to track the positions of all 6,000 yeast proteins, information that

Drew EndyCourtesy of Sriram KowitzFor Drew Endy, heading up the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Synthetic Biology Working Group is like being "the lifeguard at the gene pool." Working with prefabricated snippets of DNA pulled off a freezer shelf, Endy and his MIT colleagues are attempting to design and construct new living systems.Their agenda, explains Endy, is twofold: "First, let's see if we can learn more about existing systems by rebuilding them." Next, he'd like to "take natural livi

Japanese researchers hope to create live woolly mammoths, destined for a theme park.

Collapsing toilets, levitating frogs, and acrobats making love in a magnetic resonance imager: Now who says scientists take themselves too seriously?

if (n == null) The Scientist - Are We There Yet? Researchers Differ on When a Genome Sequence Is 'Complete' The Scientist 13[15]:12, Jul. 19, 1999 News Are We There Yet? Researchers Differ on When a Genome Sequence Is Complete By: Karen Hopkin A great deal of fanfare and much celebration greeted the publication of the C. elegans sequence in Science this past December.1,2 "Caenorhabditis elegans made it big today as Human Genome Project researchers in

"It's like a cancer in the body of science," says Yuri Lazebnik of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. "If we don't take care of it, it will only get worse." The cancer, in Lazebnik's opinion, is the runaway commercialization of science. As researchers increasingly view their discoveries as potential blockbuster products, and new biotech companies spring up as fast as weeds along the intellectual highway, some academic scientists may be becoming more guarded about sharing their reag

December 10 marked another "major milestone" in molecular biology. An international consortium of scientists announced that they have obtained the first complete genetic blueprint of a complex animal. C. elegans Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, U.K., have sequenced the 97 million-base genome of Caenorhabditis elegans, biologists' favorite worm. The product of a nine-year effort, the C. elegans sequence joins those of E. coli and yeast in

to eliminate difficult-to-control pain while leaving normal sensation intact. Pain is a part of life. Often, a few painkillers and some rest are enough to soothe the scraped knees of childhood and the aches and sprains of adulthood. But for some, pain is not as fleeting or as easily dismissed. The pain from cancer, chemotherapy, arthritis, AIDS, and other diseases can be unrelenting and incapacitating. Some individuals even experience constant, bone-crushing pain for no apparent reason. For man

Compared to men, women are two to three times more likely to suffer from depression or anxiety disorders, 20 to 70 percent more likely to develop lung cancer from smoking, 10 times more likely to contract HIV during unprotected sex with an infected partner, and twice as likely to die within the first year after a heart attack. Women and men are different--and these differences may lead the way to a better understanding of health and disease in both men and women, says Phyllis Greenberger, exec

SERENDIPITY: Carol Yoon, a freelance writer in Bellingham, Wash., was convinced she would hate science journalism until she landed a fellowship that placed her at the Portland Oregonian for a summer. Carol Yoon, a freelance writer in Bellingham, Wash., was convinced she would hate science journalism until she landed a fellowship that placed her at the Portland Oregonian for a summer. "I did it on a lark," she says. Discovering that she enjoyed writing about science, Yoon remarks, was "a t

It's 8 P.M. on a Sunday and you've just loaded your samples onto a gel and switched on the power. You have an hour to kill, so you settle down to search the Web for sangria recipes for next week's departmental wing-ding. Is this (a) an efficient use of time or (b) a sad way to spend a weekend? If you chose (a), you might benefit from some time-management tips from scientists who've learned how to squeeze the most out of their work weeks. Sure, science takes time. "It's like a sponge," acknowled

Morning in Bethesda: The jet-lagged reviewers drag themselves to the hotel conference room for another day of bad coffee and endless grants. The wife of the study section chairman phoned at dawn to announce that she's leaving him for some hotshot postdoc. "Harvard," he reads from your application on top of the stack. "That's where her boyfriend works!" And you can kiss your R01 good-bye. If this is how you picture a study section, you're in for quite a surprise-a more pleasant one than our fic