Benjamin Lewin founded Cell in 1972 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and with unprecedented speed, built a collection of science journals that rival—and many say outperform—heavyweights Nature and Science.

With a population of just 143,000, the city of Dundee may not seem the kind of glitzy destination that competes with knowledge centers such as San Francisco and Boston: Golf and mountain climbing qualify as top entertainments, and it takes less time to fly from New York to London than to drive there from Dundee. If fresh air fails to lure prospective lecturers to Dundee University's life science division, the median annual salary of researchers in the region--$37,757 (US)--probably won't start

Women still earn slightly less than men do in the life sciences, though the difference narrows as both advance in their fields, according to a salary survey conducted by Abbott, Langer & Associates and sponsored by The Scientist and the American Institute of Biological Sciences. Midcareer female scientists in the United States, who have worked for five to nine years since obtaining their PhDs, earn a median income of $55,000 (US), roughly 92% of the $60,000 their male colleagues earn. Wom

Richard Tapia often tells disadvantaged children about his own humble upbringing in the barrios of Los Angeles. Then he tells them that he earns six figures as a mathematician. "People are shocked when they find out how much money I make," says Tapia, now Noah Harding Professor in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics and director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education at Rice University. "[Counselors] told me I should be a trash worker or a mechanic, and not b

Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) is aggressively recruiting researchers for its new Center for Developmental Biology, including scientists who want to work with human embryonic stem cells. The Japanese government has pledged to provide a budget of $48 million (US) per year to the center, which aims to recruit 30 research teams staffed with 250 scientists. Currently the center has 25 research teams, including a laboratory for stem cell biology, and a stem cell organog

Douglas Brutlag challenges students in his computational biology classes at Stanford University to search the large proteomics databases for yeast membrane proteins. Without knowledge of the database lexicons, the students generally come up well short of the mark. "They find 20 to 200," says Brutlag, professor of biochemistry and medicine at Stanford's School of Medicine. "In fact, there are almost 2,000 proteins." The problem: linguistics. "These are controlled vocabularies," Brutlag explain

Photo: Courtesy of Karen Vousden Karen H. Vousden, head of the Cell Growth Regulation Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, Frederick, Md., and her friend Xin Lu, a professor at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in London, found a way to get instant recognition at the many p53 meetings they attend: They wear similar blue sweaters. Twins from separate nations, the chums may have started a trend. At the 11th International p53 Workshop in Barcelona this past May, the pals teased two

Photo: Courtesy of Carl Feldbaum Carl Feldbaum Financiers and biotechnology business leaders suspended their networking for a few minutes at the BIO 2002 annual convention in Toronto as Carl Feldbaum, chairman of the powerful US Biotechnology Industry Organization, urged them to cooperate with their competitors and assist the poor. Feldbaum's 10-point Biotechnology Foreign Policy,1 introduced over a sumptuous lunch, would provide appropriate and affordable vaccines and drugs for developi

Frontlines Image: Erica P. Johnson Stop brain drain now Six of Europe's Nobel laureates chastised the European Union's policies on research funding with a letter to all 12 EU leaders demanding action. The six--three winners of the medicine prize in the 1970s and 1980s, two physicists, and a chemist--want funds doubled to stem the flow of talented young scientists from Europe to the United States. "Brain drain--young talented scientists leaving their countries--is making itself felt in most

When researchers consider disease model options, cows generally remain in the pasture. But a bovine tuberculosis epidemic in the United Kingdom has made the grazers invaluable, not only for studying ways to stymie Mycobacterium bovis, the bovine version of the tubercle bacilli that causes disease, but the human version, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, as well. At the Fourth World Congress on Tuberculosis, held recently in Washington, DC, tuberculosis (TB) investigator Glyn Hewinson, Department of Ba

Biotech investment banker predicts market will rebound and tips systems biology as hot area for investment.

Former Greenpeace director opens BIO 2002 conference with a scathing attack on group's antiscientific approach.