A revolutionary new way to make monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) was born during a walk on the beach in La Jolla, Calif. During that stroll in 1984, Steve Benkovic, a professor of organic chemistry from Penn State University, and Richard Lerner, director of the Research Institute of Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, vented their frustrations - frustrations that arose from screening hybridoma-derived MAbs for catalytic (enzyme) activity. Monoclonal antibodies are of vital importance in diagnostics becaus

Back in 1975, Georges Köhler and Cesar Milstein of the Medical Research Council, Cambridge, England, fused a mouse myeloma cell with a B cell to manufacture monoclonal antibodies (MAbs). Their breakthrough was viewed by the scientific community as nothing short of brilliant. In nearly every situation requiring a single component to be isolated - in distinguishing a tumor from normal tissue, for example - monoclonals proved a valuable tool. The natural diversity of these immune system prote

Last December, the Merck Index celebrated its 100th birthday. The 2,350 pages of the latest edition, the 11th - with 10,000 entries, 8,000 structures, 62,000 synonyms, and 129 pages of charts and tables - seem a far cry from the original 170 pages published in 1889. The first edition, named for the German company (originally a pharmacy) founded in 1668, was written for the physician, chemist, and pharmacist, listing "whatever chemical products are to-day adjudged as being useful in either medi

Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy now standard in chemistry laboratories, is also fast becoming part of the technologic repertoire of biochemists, geologists, materials scientists, and even food scientists and farmers. In the early years of this analytical tool, its applications were largely confined to the physical sciences. Now, however, several major advances have fine-tuned and, at the same time, expanded the capabilities of NMR, so that today the technology is proving valuable in a

Undergraduate science labs were once pretty predictable—pulleys and circuits, rocks and minerals, titrations and unknowns, bacterial brews and pickled piglets. But today’s science lab student, in one short session, can breed a litter of kittens, trace the trajectory of a fall on Venus, predict the timing and force of an earthquake or a volcano, “experience” a car crash or being born, or, in the rather unscientific prose of one catalog, “empathize with the hopeles

Since the 1 920s, when researchers began to study chromosomes, the analysis of human chromosomes has presented a particularly tough technological challenge, simply because there are so many of them. When displayed under a light microscope. the strands of human genetic material tend to bunch together maddeningly, overlapping and intertwining like so much spaghetti. For these reasons, it wasn’t until 1956 that the correct number of 46 human chromosomes (23 pairs) was clearly demonstrated.

When B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced that they had achieved cold fusion last March, the scientific community understandably clamored for details. But information was not forthcoming, at least in part because patents were rapidly being filed on the work. Even though scientific secrecy can be maddening in cases such as this, patents are very much a part of science. In today's environment, when even organisms and equations are being patented, filing a patent application can be comp

They all told me not to do it. Don’t go to lunch or dinner with them, they said. Don’t accept their free books, pens, calendars, or slides. Don’t take or return their calls. Duck into the bathroom when you spy their suits coming down the hall. And never even consider committing that ulti mate act of masochism called textbook writing. Because next to a premed given a B+, the creature most to be avoided is the acquisition editor. So warned my colleagues at Miami University in 1