Articles by Nadia Halim

Big-City Excitement Meets Country Charm By Nadia Halim Greater Philadelphia offers something to fit every lifestyle and budget. Courtesy of Select Greater Philadelphia RELATED ARTICLES Growth and Development A Region Poised for (More) Growth Navigating the Network Where Do We Go from Here? Covering 11 counties in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, the Greater Philadelphia area offers a lifestyle to fit every budget and taste. You can s

For this article, Nadia S. Halim interviewed Charles Kurland, professor of molecular biology at Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. Data from the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that Hot Papers are cited 50 to 100 times more often than the average paper of the same type and age. S.G.E. Andersson, A. Zomorodipour, J.O. Andersson, T. Sicheritz-Ponten, U.C.M. Alsmark, R.M. Podowski, A.K. Naslund, A-S. Eriksson, H.H. Winkler, and C.G. Kurland, "The genome sequence of Rickettsia prowazekii

For this article, Nadia S. Halim interviewed James Ihle, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and chairman of the department of biochemistry, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, Tenn. Data from the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that Hot Papers are cited 50 to 100 times more often than the average paper of the same type and age. S. Teglund, C. McKay, E. Schuetz, J.M. van Deursen, D. Stravopodis, D. Wang, M. Brown, S. Bodner, G. Grosveld, and J.N. Ihle, "Stat5a and

Recently published positive results should help the troubled fields of stimulating angiogenesis and gene therapy move ahead. Jeffrey Isner, professor of medicine and pathology at Tufts University School of Medicine and colleagues have shown that vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF165) delivered via a naked DNA vector directly into the heart improved blood flow to ischemic areas of the heart (P.R. Vale et al., "Left ventricular electromechanical mapping to assess efficacy of phVEGF165 gene t

Pharmacogenomics, the application of genotyping to patient therapy, holds great promise for solving a long-standing problem: differences in individual responses to drug treatments. The ultimate goal is to maximize drug efficacy while minimizing side effects. The time when a report with each person's genetic code will guide doctors in personalized medicine is still far away, but pharmacogenomics already is allowing physicians to make treatment decisions regarding human immunodeficiency virus type

Stopping Ebola in Its Tracks Richard Preston brought the threat of emerging infectious diseases to the consciousness of his readers in The Hot Zone. The book graphically describes how the Ebola virus causes massive internal bleeding, which kills up to 90 percent of the people it infects. Now National Institutes of Health scientists are making promising advances to stop disease spread. Researchers have identified a viral protein that destroys endothelial cells, the cells that line the blood vess

From left, Mike Karberg, Alan Lambowitz, and Huatao Guo Usually considered useless stretches of bases, introns are removed from RNA before it is translated into a protein. Now Alan Lambowitz, director of the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas, and his colleagues have put group II introns to good use (H. Guo et al., "Group II introns designed to insert into therapeutically relevant DNA target sites in human cells," Science, 289:452-7, July 21, 2000). Eventual

A theme is emerging in antiangiogenesis research: Small molecules stored within large proteins in the body can stop cancer cells from creating new blood vessels. Many enzymes that a tumor uses to invade surrounding tissue generate these angiogenesis inhibitors, but a tumor can locally override the effect of the inhibitors by generating angiogenesis stimulators. If researchers could shift this balance by increasing the concentration of endogenous angiogenesis inhibitors, they could potentially ar

Above, from left: Xu Luo, Xiaodong Wang, and Imawati Budihardjo. In apoptosis, death signals from outside a cell are conveyed to various organelles inside a cell through an intricate network of molecules acting as messengers. These two Cell papers outline two independent identifications of a critical missing link in this signaling pathway. They show that the cytosolic protein Bid carries a death signal from the cell membrane to the mitochondria. Identifying Bid's signaling role allowed research

NIAID Pushes for Vaccine Development The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is responding full force to President Bill Clinton's call to increase vaccine development efforts against globally important diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria. "Vaccines are a major public health tool, so it makes sense that more public dollars should be spent on this research," says Margaret Johnston, assistant director for AIDS vaccines at NIAID. NIAID has launched four n

Courtesy of Kevin Becker Four different autoimmune diseases map to the same 10cM region on the long arm of chromosome 16. Common, complex diseases such as diabetes, asthma, and cardiovascular conditions are the next challenge gene hunters face. These researchers have successfully identified many rare Mendelian disorders that are caused by mutations in one gene. But common diseases are difficult to study because they don't segregate in a Mendelian fashion. Although common diseases tend to cluster

Exciting preclinical data have led scientists to a search for a "bypass in a test tube," a drug that stimulates the growth of blood vessels. However, efforts in the past year to stimulate angiogenesis in patients have been discouraging. "We need to go back to the lab and do some more preclinical experiments and gain a better understanding of the mechanism," says Napoleone Ferrara of the department of molecular oncology at Genentech Inc., South San Francisco, Calif. When the leg or heart a

Acknowledging that it is important for medical schools to adapt educational programs to changes in the real world, Michael Whitcomb, senior vice president for medical education at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), explains, "Successful medical education will produce doctors who are effective practitioners." The AAMC is establishing three Medical School Objective Project (MSOP) expert panels on health care quality, clinical research, and basic science. The MSOP was started four

Model of an inhibitor targeted to g-secretase interacting with presenilin. The background shows an Alzheimer's brain that carried a presenilin mutation, with immunohistochemistry revealing abundant amyloid plaques (red-orange patches). For years researchers have been perplexed by the identity of g-secretase, an enzyme that cuts amyloid precursor protein (APP) into amyloid ß (Aß) fragments that form telltale plaques in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. Now researchers from Merck Rese

Biomedical scientists from 16 countries who are supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's (HHMI) International Research Scholars program will meet as a group for the first time this month in Maryland. The meeting provides a forum for both technical presentations and discussions about how researchers in different parts of the world might work together more effectively. Since 1991 HHMI has awarded more than $53 million in five-year grants to 177 research scientists working at their home i