The problems of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection require legions of researchers and an urgency that relies on teamwork, creative thinking, and previous studies. The Scientist went behind the scenes of two unrelated HIV papers that appeared in the January 2000 issue of Journal of Virology to find out what tweaked the researchers' imaginations and led to intriguing results. The papers lay at opposite ends of the HIV spectrum. One looked at T-cell responses in infected children; t

©1999 Myrna WatanabeMeeting attendees at the Great Wall A 30-yuan (about $3.60) card will admit you to the Badaling entrance of China's Great Wall. But you don't just swipe it through a slot as you might at a gasoline pump or cash machine. You place the card in the slot of the magnetic strip reader and a real, live attendant will retrieve the card and hand it back to you. This is the conundrum that is China: It is using cutting-edge technologies but clinging to the old ways. This, according

Early this month, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) announced that it had received the largest single grant ever made for AIDS research. The William A. Gates Foundation, which gave IAVI $1.5 million last June, granted IAVI $25 million over a five-year period, which the organization will use in part for work on two to three new HIV-vaccine candidates. IAVI, a New York City-based international scientific organization created to aid in bringing HIV vaccines and technology to develo

As the role of college and university president increasingly becomes that of chief fundraiser, the trend is to fill the post with an individual whose administrative experience outweighs his or her academic credentials. Politicians and business leaders--people with an eye on sources of money, from legislatures or bottom-line savings--also fit the fundraising requirements. David Baltimore Despite this trend, a small number of people trained in the biological sciences have become college preside

Virologist Hans Wolf of the University of Regensburg in Germany has been working on the etiology of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) in areas of China since 1979. Researchers from the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI), too, have been working with their Chinese colleagues on cancer epidemiology and etiology. The reasons for this cooperative research vary, but as Federico Welsch, associate director for international affairs at NCI, points out, "They have some cancers that are rare in the develop

On Jan. 14, the day before Science published an article on a formalin-fixed fused immunogen that induced neutralizing antibodies to HIV-1 envelope glycoproteins,1 Jack Nunberg's telephone rang endlessly. Nunberg, head of the Montana Biotechnology Center at University of Montana, Missoula, is senior author of the paper, coauthored by his former graduate student Rachel LaCasse (now at University of Alabama, Birmingham), colleagues at University of Montana, and two scientists at New York Universit

Peter Brazutis INTERNATIONAL EFFORT: Yunzhen Cao left the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York last summer to set up an AIDS research lab in China. Her researchers will be trained at Aaron Diamond, whose David Ho is pictured on the wall. Epidemiogical Deficiencies Epidemiological studies in Yunnan Province1 indicate that in some areas there is a high rate of HIV-seroprevalence among IV drug abusers--in some places as high as 85.7 percent. Furthermore, the infected drug users a

IMPROVEMENT ON THE WAY: NAWHO President Mary Chung says that better education within the Asian American community will incease participation of Asian American women in clinical trials. Asian Americans comprise approximately 4 percent of the U.S. population, and they now account for 4 percent of the women enrolled in U.S. National Institutes of Health-sponsored clinical trials. This satisfies the spirit of the NIH Guidelines on the Inclusion of Women and Minorities as Subjects in Clinical Resea

By In the early 1950s, when Jonas Salk produced the first inactivated polio vaccine and Albert Sabin later produced a live, attenuated, oral polio vaccine, the individual researchers' names were permanently linked to the products. But development of an HIV vaccine--a task President Bill Clinton has charged researchers to accomplish by 2007--requires the skills of so many scientists and so many laboratories worldwide that it would be impossible, and perhaps even improper, to link any vacci

The first large-scale clinical trial of any HIV vaccine got a green light this month from the Food and Drug Administration. And VaxGen Inc. of South San Francisco, Calif., announced that it would begin almost immediately Phase III clinical trials of its bivalent gp120 vaccine. The approval did not come without VaxGen fighting criticism and negative speculation ( M. E. Watanabe, The Scientist, 12[12]:1, June 8, 1998, and The Scientist, 11[22]:1, Nov. 10, 1997). This concern was conveyed in an a

May 18 marked the one-year anniversary of President Bill Clinton's pledge--some say more politically motivated than realistic--that there will be an AIDS vaccine by the year 2007. READY FOR PHASE III: Donald Francis of VaxGen is ready for Phase III trials of its AIDS vaccine to begin. The field of AIDS vaccine research has been and remains acrimonious. The basic researchers who insist on proof of immune response prior to large clinical trials disagree with the vaccine researchers whose experi

Hispanics are the fastest growing minority group in the United States, predicted to reach about 15 percent of the population within the next two years. But these numbers are not reflected in the percentages of Hispanic students in college and graduate school. As debate swirls over what is causing Hispanic students to drop out of the educational system, several organizations are working to increase the numbers of Hispanic students in the pipeline to science programs in four-year colleges, as wel