File photo It is a sobering time for US stem cell researchers. Just days after a national election set the stage for the possible criminalization of embryonic stem cell research, a popular television program portrayed such cells incubating in patients in coma, ready to be used to treat a wealthy man's Parkinson disease. A video presented at the American Society for Human Genetics annual meeting in Baltimore a month earlier, however, told a very different story--this one real. The video showed

Human tissues collected by anthropologists provoke increasing controversy.

Image: Erica P. Johnson MORE MOSQUITO MAYHEM: The list of symptoms now associated with West Nile virus includes a condition reminiscent of paralytic poliomyelitis. The background is an electron micrograph of the poliovirus. When the West Nile virus arrived in the United States in 1999, its route of infection was the bite of an infected mosquito. Since then, WNV has proven its versatility: During the 2002 season, delivery came courtesy of transplants, transfusions, and breast milk. Now, t

Grants issued for new species inventory program, as similar project prepares to shut down.

Image: Anthony Canamucio The scene: the Baltimore Convention Center, Oct. 16, 2002. The laptops were aligned on the table next to the podium, their owners fidgeting in their seats just below, caffeined up, plugged in, and ready to go. A cacophony of cell phones sounded a final "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" before fading into temporary silence. Visions of stem cells graced the screen as the first speaker quickly checked his slides, and the huge room filled for this first symposium of the 52nd

The Faculty of 1000 is aWeb-based literature awareness tool published by BioMed Central. For more information visit www.facultyof1000.com. Science sometimes progresses by persistence and attention to detail. This was the case for the recent discovery that a bacterium and the fruit fly apparently share a strategy for signal release, despite one being a prokaryote and the other a eukaryote.1 The new view suggests that quorum sensing in bacteria and signal transduction in multicellular organisms

Photo: Courtesy of Agricultural Research Service Move over, Dolly. In the famous sheepstakes, Solid Gold (1983-1993) came first. Solid Gold is the first known sheep to have the callipyge condition--Greek for "beautiful buttocks"--and his descendants are shedding light on genomic imprinting, the difference in expression of a gene depending on which parent transmits it. In humans, derailed genomic imprinting causes cancer, autism, bipolar disorder, and other conditions. In 1983, a lamb was born

Image: Courtesy of Dan Skovronsky  The radioactive thioflavin T derivative specifically labels amyloid plaques in the brain of a living mouse (arrows, panel a). Postmortem specimen labeled with a flourescent dye for amyloid (panel b) confirms specific labeling of plaques in vivo. When actor Charlton Heston announced in August that he is "suffering symptoms consistent with Alzheimer's disease," he used qualified language because diagnosis is possible only postmortem. The lack of a clear s

Image: Courtesy of Hibiki Kawamata, Smith College A drug developer's dream, rationally designed to quell inflammation, COX-2 inhibitors are also prime candidates for preventing cancer or its recurrence. Gary J. Kelloff, chief of the chemoprevention branch at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), lists the requirements for a molecular target such as the COX-2 enzyme: It must be highly expressed in precancer or cancer cells and not in others; blocking it isn't toxic and doesn't disrupt normal func

Twenty scientists receive $1 million each to creatively wed teaching and research

Photo: Courtesy of Advanced Cell Technology In these days of rampant science phobia, a researcher associated with human cloning risks being linked to the few renegade scientists claiming to already have done the deed. Mike West's quest as president and CEO of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Worcester, Mass., is not to clone dinosaurs or replace children, but to customize cells to rebuild degenerating or injured human tissue. The company's late 2001 announcement1 that it had created a human

A major obstacle in genome sequencing, particularly in plants, is separating the protein-encoding genes from the repeats. Researchers at University of Georgia, Athens (UGA), using sorghum as a test case, have streamlined this process using a technique popular during the 1960s and 1970s--analysis of the renaturation kinetics of DNA, familiarly known as Cot curves.1 The revived approach is called CBCS, for Cot-based cloning and sequencing.2 The term "Cot" refers to the DNA concentration (Co) m