Nobel prize-winning geneticist linkurl:Joshua Lederberg,;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54279/ liposome pioneer and essayist linkurl:Gerald Weissmann,;http://www.med.nyu.edu/medicine/rheumatology/about/details.html?au=weissg01&info=education Lasker Prize-winning microbiologist linkurl:Carol Greider;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/24797/ -- these are only a smattering of the scientists whose thoughts, reflections, and tribulations have been recorded in oral histories as part

Michael E. DeBakey, heart surgeon, inventor, teacher, and research advocate, died late last Friday, July 11th, at the age of 99. DeBakey was "the greatest surgeon of the twentieth century," his colleague George Noon said in a linkurl:statement;http://www.methodisthealth.com/tmhs/newsItem.do?channelId=-1073829253&contentId=1073905926&contentType=NEWS_CONTENT_TYPE from Methodist Hospital in Houston, where he spent most of his career. During his 70 years as a surgeon, DeBakey performed over 60,

Festooned with jiggling eyeballs, threatening skeletons, and impaled floating heads, Feo Amante's horror thriller linkurl:website;http://www.feoamante.com/ seems an unlikely place to catch up on science. But sandwiched between the "Scary Top 10" and "Big Horror," movie and science buffs alike can check out "Science Moments," short critiques of the use, or lack thereof, of science in film. In 1998, Eddie "Feo Amante" McMullen Jr. started the website as a platform for struggling horror and thrill

Researchers have determined the crystal structure of the Ebola virus surface protein that binds host cells, they report online today in linkurl:Nature.;http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html The findings open the door to solving the long-standing mystery of the virus's mechanism of infection and designing drugs to combat the deadly hemorrhagic fever caused by linkurl:Ebola.;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22846/ The paper is a "breakthrough," said linkurl:Lijun Rong,;http://www.

A clinical trial for an investigational arthritis drug has been put on hold after a subject in the trial, a bodybuilding father of three with no history of heart problems, suffered two heart attacks and died, the company developing the drug linkurl:announced;http://www.medigene.de/englisch/index_e.php today (July 8). Peter Munro, 48, was participating in a Phase 1 trial for RhuDex, a compound that blocks T-cell activation to prevent inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis, at a clinic outside of

The soil-dwelling model organism C. elegans, long assumed to lack any visual system whatsoever, in fact appears to be strongly responsive to light, according to a linkurl:paper;http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn.2155.html published online yesterday (July 6) in Nature Neuroscience. The study identifies four sensory neurons that act as photoreceptor cells driving this phototaxic behavior, and suggests a conservation of phototransduction between vertebrates and worms. "The

British biologists have received government approval to create the world's first human stem cells from hybrid embryos, part pig, part human. The Warwick Medical School team, led by linkurl:Justin St. John;http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/med/staff/stjohn of the Clinical Sciences Research Institute, was granted the country's third animal-human embryo license from the linkurl:Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority,;http://www.hfea.gov.uk/ which goes into effect today (July 1). The team plan

In the largest ever study of bird genetics, a five-year international collaboration has redrawn the avian family tree. The report, published in Science this week (June 27), proposes surprising new classifications and suggests that environmental adaptations arose multiple times in bird history. "It's an important paper that represents a very comprehensive study," said linkurl:Larry Martin,;http://www.nhm.ku.edu/paleontology/ldmartin.htm Curator of the National History Museum at the University

The director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) was chosen as a finalist last week (June 18) to receive a national public service award for developing PubMed Central. "I think it's a recognition of the value of PubMed Central," linkurl:David Lipman,;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CBBresearch/Lipman/ who launched PubMed Central in 2000, told The Scientist. "For that, I'm really thrilled." The award, called the Service to America Citizen Services Medal, has been presented

Researchers have discovered a conserved mechanism among vertebrates that determines body segment number, according to a study published online in Nature today (June 18). The number of body segments an organism has varies greatly between species: our vertebrae, a measly thirty-three in number, hardly stack up to the 300-plus in our slithering co-vertebrates. But anatomists and embryologists have puzzled over a mechanism to explain the difference."If you were to ask most biologists w