Twice yearly, World Health Organization health officials meet to strategize against influenza, a malady that kills at least 250,000 people each year. In a chess match of sorts, they work to predict their opponent's next move, in this case by modifying vaccines to compensate for changes in the critical viral antigen hemagglutinin, which triggers the host's long-term immune memory. It takes several months to manufacture and distribute flu vaccines in sufficient quantities to inoculate vulnerabl

Richard Sykes by Bob Dob Illustrations Richard Sykes, rector (CEO) of Imperial College London, the number one university for international class research in the United Kingdom, is making a habit of remolding great institutions. He almost single-handedly created the world's second largest pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) through merger and acquisition during the 1990s before returning to his academic roots with Imperial College in 2001. This was the second time in eight years that

Michael Trott, © Wolfram Research,Inc. The possibility of mathematical power laws governing the scaling of fundamental biological properties, such as metabolic rate, within a species group has been strongly suspected for almost a century. But since 1997, the laws have been confirmed by overwhelming experimental evidence and backed by convincing mathematical theory. Before, research biologists were puzzled by the fact that a wide range of ultimately related properties, such as aortal surf

Corbis For 50 years, biologists have focused on reducing life to its constituent parts, first focusing on the cell, then working their way down to the genome itself. However, such achievements created a new challenge--making sense of the huge amounts of data produced. As professor Denis Noble, Oxford University, puts it: "It took Humpty Dumpty apart but left the challenge of putting him back together again." Systems biology attempts to reconstruct Humpty Dumpty as a series of overlapping math

Anne Macnamara Declining salary levels and a withering laboratory infrastructure have long threatened the United Kingdom's status as a major world research center. The Ministry of Education had a golden opportunity to reverse this continuing decline as part of a major higher education funding shakeup over the past few months. But senior scientists and lobbying groups charge that the government has failed to back up fine words with the necessary funding commitment. "I think it's pretty poor a