Food allergies affect up to 6 percent of children under the age of 3 and around 1.5 percent of adults.1,2 That may seem like peanuts compared to the huge number of people who suffer from allergic rhinitis. But food allergies--especially peanut and tree nut allergies--pack a potentially serious punch. There is absolutely no safe way to treat or prevent them, and about 100 people die in the United States every year from food-induced anaphylaxis. The best those with severe allergies can do is carry

Foodborne infections and bacterial antibiotic resistance garner tremendous attention in the public health arena. So it should come as no surprise that a decades-long debate is heating up over whether antibiotic-resistant bacteria from food animals pose a threat to humans. Concerned that you just can't keep antibiotic resistance genes down on the farm, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Veterinary Medicine has moved to impose regulations to help curb the development of antibi

While the ethics of human cloning has dominated recent discussion of reproductive technologies, research involving human embryos has always been a political hot potato, entangled with the twin issues of abortion and the beginning of human life. Restrictive policies and negative public attitudes surrounding embryo research have made it increasingly difficult for the infertility research community to improve the success rates for assisted reproductive technologies. According to the Centers for Di

Since the first successful bone marrow transplant in 1959, thousands of patients with lethal diseases such as severe leukemia, aplastic anemia, and inherited immune deficiencies have been successfully treated with hematopoietic stem cells (HSC). But for all the success stories, transplant physicians seeking to make HSC safer and more widely available continue to grapple with the problems of a limited donor pool, graft rejection, and graft-vs.-host disease (GVHD). Bone marrow for many years was

The laboratory is shrinking. Scientists and engineers are borrowing miniaturization, integration, and parallel-processing techniques from the computer industry to develop laboratory devices and procedures that will fit on a wafer or microchip. A growing number of companies and investors are betting that the technology will revolutionize drug development, genomics, environmental monitoring, forensics, and clinical diagnostics, in much the same way the microprocessor transformed the computer indu

Now that summer is in full swing, all but the most dedicated couch potatoes are playing on departmental softball teams, hitting the tennis courts, or laboring in the garden. For a growing number of scientists, however, exercise is more than a seasonal diversion-it's the focus of a thriving discipline that integrates molecular and cellular biology, physiology, nutrition, and behavioral sciences. One important trend, not only in exercise science but also in physiology, is the integration of mole