Photo: Paul Smaglik Research equipment spills into the hallway of NIH's Clinical Research Center (Building 10). While an addition to that building is scheduled for completion in 2002, some NIH campus scientists wonder whether construction alone can contain the burgeoning intramural research program. Freezers, centrifuges, and tanks crowd the corridors of the National Institutes of Health's Clinical Research Center (Building 10). In one of that building's shared lab rooms, benches li

The chemoprevention field could be characterized as being in a double-blind double bind. One side of the field emphasizes taking a "whole food" approach to using food to prevent cancer. That approach entails having scientists closely monitor everything a necessarily small group of subjects eats over a necessarily short period of time. Such studies pick apart the complexities of diet and its possible roles in keeping cancer at bay. But the small numbers and short time frame put any conclusions o

Celera Genomics announced Sept. 9 that the Rockville, Md., company had sequenced the 1.8 billion base pairs that make up the Drosophila melanogaster genome. Now comes the tricky part--putting them together to form an accurate, contiguous fruit fly genome. "The sequence data is good," Paul Gilman, a Celera vice president, claims. "The question is, 'How good is our assembly?'" That's a question that critics of the company's "whole genome shotgun" sequencing approach--blasting the entire genome in

On Aug. 30 Harold Varmus, National Institutes of Health director, invited all members of the scientific publishing world to attend his version of a peer-review free-for-all. Several weeks later, it remains to be seen who will show up. The gala in question is PubMed Central, an Internet research repository first proposed by Varmus May 5 under the name E-biomed. The renamed repository will contain two kinds of research after its January 2000 addition to the popular PubMed Web site: non-peer-revi

When Paul R. Sanberg became a neuroscientist, he focused on Huntington's disease. When he realized that Parkinson's disease was related, he expanded his horizons. And when his father suffered a stroke about five years ago, he shifted his priorities. Some of the things he has learned since may help treat all three diseases, as well as a number of other neurodegenerative disorders. Following his father's stroke, Sanberg recalls months of trips between Tampa, where he worked as a researcher for t

HARDWIRED HUNGER Two distinct but adjacent sets of cells in the same part of the brain respond in opposite ways to the same hormone: leptin, which, when lacking in the bloodstream, results in a voracious appetite. A group led by Joel K. Elmquist, neuroendocrinology researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and assistant professor of neurology and medicine at Harvard Medical School, set out to understand the leptin pathway by injecting the hormone into rats and following its progress to

if (n == null) The Scientist - Promise and Problems Loom for Stem Cell Gene Therapy The Scientist 13[15]:0, Jul. 19, 1999 News Promise and Problems Loom for Stem Cell Gene Therapy By Paul Smaglik Photo courtesy of Harry Malech A network of gas-permeable plastic bags connected by tubing helps make ex vivo stem cell gene therapy more feasible. The insides of the bags are coated with recombinant human fibronectin fragments. That protein helps more r

If the size of a society provides a reading of the health of a field, gene therapy may be heading for a fruitful stretch. The American Society of Gene Therapy (ASGT) attracted 600 abstracts and 1,700 participants to its inaugural meeting in Seattle last year, compared to 1,000 abstracts and 2,100 participants to its second annual meeting in Washington, D.C., last month. In a conversation with News Editor Paul Smaglik, James Wilson, ASGT president and director of the University of Pennsylvania's

Technological developments helped make single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) databases possible. But further innovations will be necessary to make those records of thousands of genetic variations useful. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, remembers a swell of developments that crested in 1996. "The technology for finding SNPs seemed to be moving along pretty well," he recalls. "You could imagine getting a pretty good set." Enabling technologies included

The SNP Consortium collaboration of 10 pharmaceutical companies and the Wellcome Trust will spend $45 million over two years to identify and map about 300,000 randomly generated SNPs. The industry partners are AstraZeneca (London); Bayer (Pittsburgh, Pa.); Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (New York); F. Hoffmann-LaRoche (Nutley, N.J.); Glaxo Wellcome (Research Triangle Park, N.C.); Hoechst Marion Roussel (Kansas City, Mo.); Novartis (Basel, Switzerland); Pfizer (New York); Searle (Skokie, Ill.); and S

1982 The Human Polymorphism Study Center, the first academic institution to propose the systematic study of polymorphisms, is founded in Paris. Its primary objective: to make an inventory of all possible polymorphisms in the human population and associate them with diseases. However, the technology to take on such a project would not be advanced enough for more than a decade. 1995 An initiative led by the Wellcome Trust, of Cambridge, England, to form a consortium of pharmaceutical companies,

Hemophilia is an ideal model for gene therapy, speaker after speaker repeated during the American Society for Gene Therapy's (ASGT) June meeting in Washington, D.C. Successfully providing a single protein a few times should, in theory, cure the disease, they stated. And once introduced via vector, a therapeutic clotting protein need not be continuously produced or regulated, they added. What they did not mention--at least not as openly--was the double-edged nature of that "ideal" status. In oth