Officials at the National Institutes of Health are anticipating that problems will arise with implementation of the Shelby amendment. Passed by Congress last year, the amendment mandates that scientists make data from federally funded projects publicly available under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). "FOIA is too crude an instrument for this; it was never designed for scientific data sharing," commented Wendy Baldwin, NIH deputy director for extramural research, at a session of the America

Young boy drinking from a tube well Researchers estimate that as many as half of the four million tube wells in Bangladesh are pumping out groundwater contaminated with naturally occurring arsenic. In many contaminated wells, arsenic levels exceed 500 parts per billion (ppb), a level 50 times higher than the safety recommendation from the World Health Organization (WHO). With foreign aid, the Bangladeshi government is finally tackling the problem years after its discovery in 1992. It has a tough

© Cell PressA transmission electron micrograph of Sup35 protein that has formed amyloid fibers from its prion structure Though mounting evidence points to prions as the infectious element in diseases such as scrapie and Creutzfeldt-Jakob (CJD), direct proof is missing. A prion has the same amino acid sequence as the normal protein, but it has an altered structural form. The protein-only hypothesis states that a prion can cause disease and also spread it without transmitting any genetic mate

Internet Resources ScienceWise.com, which was started 10 years ago as the Federal Information Exchange and then renamed Research and Management Systems, plans to add new services that could translate into more time in the lab and less time searching for grants and science information. As a one-stop Web site, ScienceWise.com will provide access to journal articles, scientific supplies and equipment, and news and employment information. Most importantly, the site will have information on small-bus

Global Effort Against Cancer Paul F. Engstrom Cancer cannot be successfully fought in isolation. In recognition of this, more than 100 international leaders of government, patient advocacy, cancer research organizations, and corporations signed The Charter of Paris Against Cancer at the first World Summit Against Cancer this month. Paul F. Engstrom, senior vice president for population science at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, comments, "I saw more than the usual commitment to put more dollars int

The discovery of hybridoma technology 25 years ago allowed researchers to isolate specifically defined monoclonal antibodies.1 Enthusiasm soared as researchers envisioned in their hands the magic bullet against cancer. Then reality hit: Many obstacles stood in the path toward using monoclonal antibodies as standard therapy. With Food and Drug Administration approval of Herceptin for certain breast cancer tumors last fall and Rituxan for B-cell lymphomas in 1997, cancer researchers have regained

Methylation as a Cancer Switch Courtesy of Richard Roberts, New England BiolabsReaction model: Methyltransferase (white) is methylating cyclic carbon 5 of a cytosine nucleotide. The tenuous link between cancer and epigenetic changes, changes in gene expression without DNA mutations, has been strengthened by Joe Costello, assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues (J.F. Costello et al., "Aberrant CpG-island methylation has non-random and tumour-type-specifi

Photo: James PlattFriends and colleagues: From left, K. Brooks Low, David Bermudes, John M. Pawelek When the public hears about Salmonella, it is usually in a warning about food poisoning, but a group of researchers in New Haven, Conn., is using the bacteria to target cancer. It turns out that Salmonella preferentially colonize and multiply within a tumor, thereby inhibiting growth. Vion Pharmaceuticals is taking advantage of this trait by genetically altering Salmonella typhimurium to reduce th

The University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Human Gene Therapy (IHGT) and its director, James M. Wilson, faced increasing pressure from the federal government in late January. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration suspended all eight of the institute's gene therapy clinical trials on Jan. 21. A few days before, the Office for Protection from Research Risks at the National Institutes of Health launched an investigation into whether a clinical trial violated federal regulations governing patien

For this article, Nadia S. Halim interviewed Shigekazu Nagata, professor of genetics, Osaka University Medical School, Japan, coauthor of this Nature paper. Data from the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that this paper has been cited significantly more often than the average paper of the same type and age. M. Enari, H. Sakahira, H. Yokoyama, K. Okawa, A. Iwamatsu, and S. Nagata, "A caspase-activated DNase that degrades DNA during apoptosis, and its inhibitor ICAD," Nature, 391:43-50, Jan

For this article, Nadia S. Halim interviewed Ronald Evans, professor in the gene expression laboratory, Salk Institute, La Jolla, Calif., and Hongwu Chen, postdoctoral fellow, Salk Institute. Both are coauthors of this Cell paper. Data from the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that this paper has been cited significantly more often than the average paper of the same type and age. H. Chen, R.J. Lin, R.L. Schiltz, D. Chakravarti, A. Nash, L. Nagy, M. L. Privalsky, Y. Nakatani, and R.M. Evan

Multipurpose Hormone Scientists at Baylor College of Medicine have identified a new role for leptin: potent inhibitor of bone formation acting through the central nervous system (P. Ducy et al., "Leptin inhibits bone formation through a hypothalamic relay: a central control of bone mass," Cell, 100:197-207, Jan. 21, 2000). This is the first indication that the brain has a central role in controlling bone formation and density. The researchers worked with two groups of mice; one mutant strain was