I grew up in the 1960s and 70s near Stony Creek, a small brook in southeastern Pennsylvania. The water brimmed with fish and minnows, which I brought home in paper cups as specimens to pore over. Maybe it was the splashing around in the creek or the creepy-crawly treasures I found under the rocks, but this and other outdoor experiences fostered an interest in animals, mostly of the aquatic variety, which stayed with me until I chose a major in college. A love of science can come from any experie

Editor's Note: This is the first article in a series on sex-based differences in the biology of males and females, a topic that has gained momentum over the last decade. Subsequent articles will cover sex-based differences in brain structure and strokes, genetics, autoimmunity, and drug metabolism. Lisa Damiani When I was a kid, I always wanted to know why there were two sexes," recalls Florence Haseltine, director of the Center for Population Research at the National Institute of Child Health

Three years ago, the University of California, Berkeley, plant and microbial biology (PMB) department negotiated an exclusive research relationship with Novartis Agricultural Research Institute that allowed the company to review graduate student and postdoc work before publication. But the university didn't consult the students before trading away their intellectual property rights, provoking lasting anger and confusion, according to a sociologist's report commissioned by the university. Many

Ask a woman if her period affects her body beyond the reproductive system and she'll probably answer with a resounding yes. This seemingly basic question is now being asked by numerous investigators in various areas of women's health research. From the timing of mammograms to the mind-altering effects of drugs, researchers are now learning that the hormonal swings during a woman's menstrual cycle affect more than just reproduction, like metabolism rates and pain. A woman's menstrual cycle starts

The field of pharmacogenetics, the study of inherited differences that influence a person's response to drugs, rivals bioinformatics in claims about how it will revolutionize pharmaceutical research. To be sure, pharmacogenetics and its allied discipline, pharmacogenomics (the use of tools such as microarrays and proteomics to study drug response) has opened a wealth of research questions and job opportunities. But scientists are still working to untangle the ethical and research complications t

When a data safety monitoring board found the AIDS drug Remune provided little benefit to patients involved in clinical trials, the principal investigator, James O. Kahn, put an end to the project. But when he and his colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco and Harvard University decided to publish the results, they ran into an obstacle: their project's corporate sponsor. Immune Response Corp. (IRC), the drug's manufacturer, filed legal documents alleging that the UCSF team h

The use of recruiters, headhunters, or staffing firms is not the first job-hunting strategy that comes to mind for a scientist. Although the occasional postdoc keen on an industry job uses a headhunter,1 and executive search firms regularly find suitable candidates for academic positions like department chairs and deans,2 "there's this whole world of contacts" that many research scientists haven't explored yet, says David Jensen, founder and principal consultant of Search Masters International I

Ask not what you can do for your professional society, but what your professional society can do for you. Douglas Sweet certainly took this sentiment to heart. Last year he signed up to use the online resume posting service and the placement service organized by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) at the Experimental Biology meeting. "The placement service was the best way for me to meet many potential employers, in my field and all in one place," says Sweet, an

Graphic: Leza BerardoneThis is the beginning," pronounced J. Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics in Rockville, Md., at a press conference at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in February. "There [are] 30,000 genes, and up to one-quarter of a million proteins [encoded by them] in 100 trillion different combinations--that's how many cells we have. That's why we don't think this is the blueprint for humanity; it's the starting point of understanding how t

The face of pharmaceutical researchers is changing. An increase in the diversity and number of foreign-born researchers working at private firms mirrors the increase in foreign graduate students and postdocs currently in the proverbial pipeline of scientists. According to a National Academy of Sciences report,1 nearly half of the approximately 52,000 postdocs in the United States are foreign-born, with half remaining in this country for work, including research and management positions at pharma

Defining "aging research" as a field can be an elusive task. "It's difficult to wrestle this down to specific disciplines because it is so broad," says Daniel Perry, executive director of the Alliance for Aging Research (AAR), a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. "I believe that the most important research is going to be done in areas where you never hear the word aging. A lot of science that adds to our understanding of aging goes by other names." William A. Haseltine, cha

Ray Gosine Striving solely for a tenure-track position at a university is not a foregone career path for many graduate students and postdocs these days. The stigma of "selling out" really does not apply anymore for scientists choosing a career in the private sector. Nevertheless, there are distinct differences and yet some similarities regarding working in either setting. One difference is in salaries, with industry positions usually commanding more pay than academic jobs.1,2 A less tangible a