In eukaryotic genetics, the one-gene/one-protein concept has, for the most part, breathed its last. Researchers have rallied behind mechanisms such as alternative splicing, which may allow a lowly 30,000-gene genome to produce the dizzying variety of proteins that some believe is necessary to produce beings as complex as humans. Alternative splicing--the post-transcriptional editing process that can result in various mRNAs--was previously seen as an interesting but relatively uncommon sidesh

Front Page Bibliographies for the Penguin Faithful; Legible Lab Labels; High-Power Proteomic Fractionation SOFTWARE WATCH | Bibliographies for the Penguin Faithful Courtesy of Larry Ewing EndNote, the commercial bibliographic management program, has been a godsend to scientists, provided they work on PCs or Macs. Those who depend on Linux are out of luck--or at least, they were. Now Pybliographer (www.pybliographer.org), from French programmer Frederic Gobry, is trying to fill the void. Th

SOFTWARE WATCH | Green Tea, Anyone? Scientists who have unlimited hardware budgets, a dedicated IT staff versed in the arcana of networks, and lots of time on their hands probably find setting up a computer cluster a breeze. Everyone else knows it's difficult and expensive. A new Java software program called GreenTea (www.greenteatech.com) offers an alternative. Instead of a cluster, GreenTea works as a peer-to-peer client, chopping large computing tasks into smaller, more workable fragmen

Foundations | Pauling, Meselson, and Socrates The Ava Helen & Linus Pauling Papers, Courtesy of Oregon State University  Pauling sent this telegram to President Kennedy in 1962. Matthew Meselson anticipated a lecture that night in 1954 when he heard Linus Pauling's slippety-slap footfall outside the lab. Meselson, then a graduate student in Pauling's lab at Caltech, had neglected his lab duties to organize scientists against atmospheric nuclear testing. Instead of a dressing-down

Courtesy of NASA When the space shuttle Columbia erupted into flames on re-entry, killing its crew of seven astronauts, criticism of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration grew to a fever pitch. Attackers came from all sides. Government experts wanted to know where the money was going, and science policy gurus questioned whether NASA could not better use its $15 billion (US) yearly allotment. The outcome of this debate and resultant soul-searching is especially relevant to the smal

Courtesy of University of California, San Francisco The science of yeast genetics was still in its infancy some 30 years ago, and one of its thorniest problems wouldn't go away: How do diploid yeast cells transform themselves into haploid cells, so that they can mate and reproduce through meiosis? A young University of Oregon researcher named Ira Herskowitz proposed that a cassette of DNA dropped out, only to be replaced by a copy of another cassette of DNA, and that this event altered the ve

In early June, University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor Ignacio Chapela moved his office chair to the main quad of the campus and started conducting his affairs in public. Yes, Berkeley has nice enough weather to work outside, but Chapela was not there for the sunshine. He was staging a protest to decry his lack of tenure. Chapela's protest did not last more than a few days. He returned to his air- conditioned office after getting a promise of fair treatment from the chancello

Getty Images Tis a good time to be a life scientist. Thanks to increases in the National Institutes of Health budget, a flood of defense spending, and a gradual warming in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, experienced investigators are in great demand. For senior US researchers, the benefits of the federal largesse appear in 2003 paychecks, according to The Scientist's latest salary survey. The average senior researcher, who holds a PhD and leads a lab, will earn $73,351(US) th

Front Page One-Stop Genome Shop; A Safer Squeeze Bottle; Watching -- and Manipulating -- Stem Cell Growth SOFTWARE WATCH | One-Stop Genome Shop Sequenced genomes are no longer a rarity. Scientists have sequenced more than a hundred organisms and released the results on public databases. Many of those databases speak in different languages, however, making cross-referencing and comparative genomics difficult. Christos Ouzounis and his colleagues at the European Bioinformatics Institute in

Front Page Tracking and Archiving PDFs; Clasp that Cover Slip; Electrifying Gene Therapy SOFTWARE WATCH | Tracking and Archiving PDFs When Martin Kucej, a molecular biology postdoctoral fellow at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia, couldn't find a journal article on his shelf of documents, he decided to digitize all the documents pertaining to his research project. But he could not find a program that would allow him to do that and share the library with his laboratory colleagues,

The charge that scientists are bad writers is hardly an aphorism. Just read any scientific paper outside of your field and you'll quickly be lost in a jungle of jargon and poorly explained concepts. Yet most scientists struggle mightily with wordsmithing, some going so far as to hire consultants, because they understand the importance of a well-written manuscript. The same does not always apply to illustrations, a catchall term for all graphical representations of scientific data, including d

Frontlines | Investing With Your Brain's Heart Anne MacNamara When it comes to money, smart people act reasonably instead of emotionally to make good decisions, right? Not according to research conducted by an international team of neurologists, economists, and psychologists (J. Dickhaut et al., "The impact of the certainty context on the process of choice," Proc Natl Acad Sci, 100:3536-41, March 18, 2003). The results, based on brain scans of people making economic decisions, show that emo