By Megan Scudellari Nice Shot Why vaccines are pharma’s Next Big Thing. ILLUSTRATION BY Jason Raish Late at night, a feverish young girl shuffled into her father’s room complaining of a sore throat. Maurice Hilleman examined the swollen bumps on his daughter’s neck. It was 1963. She had the mumps, a common childhood disease at the time, caused by a virus that inflames the salivary glands. Most cases are mild, but severe inf

By Megan Scudellari Dimmer-switch Drugs A growing number of companies are exploring molecules that modulate targets, rather than just switching them on or off. It started with an obsession. In 2002, Vincent Mutel began to talk about allosteric modulators, think about allosteric modulators, even dream about them. Few drug companies were pursuing allosteric modulators—small molecules that regulate a receptor or enzyme by binding to a site disti

#sidebar p { font-size: 11px; } By Megan Scudellari The Regeneration Recipe Can natural regenerators such as the newt teach scientists about the ingredients needed to grow new limbs and organs? Even in, say, mammals? Top: © Jose Manuel Gelpi Diaz Middle: Joel Sartore Bottom: © DK Limited/CORBIS he first cut is too small. With gloved hands, Nobuyasu Maki slices the cornea again, this time with more

By Megan Scudellari Qi-Jing Li: The hallway immunologist © Bryan Regan Photography Entering the lab on his first day as a PhD student, Qi-Jing Li "looked like a kid in a candy store," recalls Manuela Martins-Green, Li's doctoral advisor at the University of California, Riverside. Twelve years later, his expression hasn't changed much. Li strolls into his brand-new lab at Duke University Medical Center and shows off his new microscope,

Charting the Human Metabolome The success of a database of metabolites has whetted researchers' appetites for more. By Megan Scudellari Courtesy of The Human Metabolome Project After researchers coined the term "metabolomics" in 1998, it appeared in only one or two papers per year. But bolstered by decades of research in analytical chemistry, the field—which focuses on the complete set of small molecule metabolites in a cell, tissue

Blue Crab Credit: Wpopp / Wikimedia" />Blue Crab Credit: Wpopp / Wikimedia It was late last September when 73-year-old farmer Archie Page pulled a six-inch blue crab out of his pond in Swansboro, NC. After catching it, Page spent the day parading around in his pick-up with the crab in the back. "I couldn't believe it," he says with a soft Southern twang. Two months later, standing on a rickety dock a

Credit: © Matt Kalinowski Photography" /> Credit: © Matt Kalinowski Photography When Michael Laub arrived at Stanford University in 1997, genomics was in its infancy, with many DNA technologies just being developed. So when he wanted to study cell cycle gene expression in Caulobacter crescentus, he decided to build his own DNA microarray. But the equipment he needed to make primers for the array was booked

Best Places to Work 2008: Academia This year's top institutions give researchers more than a place to do great science. They offer the opportunity to nurture, and be nurtured in return. By Megan Scudellari Related Articles Best Places to Work in Academia 2008 The art of WE at UAB Dead Sea Science Survey Methodology Slideshow: BPTW 2008 Academia Type of Institutions How respondents spend their timeRanking Tables: Top 40 US Academic Insti

Temperatures outside Nomura bank in London climbed into the high summertime registers as six biotech executives in dark suits filed into windowless rooms. The men were immediately segregated into two groups and told they had two days to turn a university spin-out into a billion dollar public company. Oh, and the two groups were competing against each other in a biotech "wargame," and wo

Credit: COURTESY OF Jennifer M. Warner / Department of Biology, University of North Carolina-Charlotte" /> Credit: COURTESY OF Jennifer M. Warner / Department of Biology, University of North Carolina-Charlotte The paper: S. Leininger et al., "Archaea predominate among ammonia-oxidizing prokaryotes in soils," Nature, 442:806-9, 2006 (Cited in 84 papers) The surprise:

Credit: Frank Vincentz / wikimedia.org" /> Credit: Frank Vincentz / wikimedia.org The paper: M. Lagouge et al., "Resveratrol improves mitochondrial function and protects against metabolic disease by activating SIRT1 and PGC-1α," Cell, 127:1109-22, 2006. (Cited in 139 papers) The finding: In 2006, Johan Auwerx of the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in France and colleagues trea

When a new antibiotic isolated from Rhodococcus fascians is dripped onto a paper disc (white) in the middle of a plate full of other bacteria (orange), all the bacteria near the filter disc die. Credit: ® Kazuhiko Kurosawa" />When a new antibiotic isolated from Rhodococcus fascians is dripped onto a paper disc (white) in the middle of a plate full of other bacteria (orange), all the bacteria near the filter