Articles by Scott Veggeberg

From disdain to hype, to mixed results in clinical trials, a sobering reality is setting in for researchers pursuing antiangiogenesis as a treatment for cancer: It is not as straightforward as once hoped. The idea is that choking off a tumor's blood supply will slow or eliminate its growth. But several clinical trials following this line of inquiry have failed or been discontinued. This past February, for example, Sugen, a division of Peapack, NJ-based Pharmacia, announced it was aborting its P

The human genome contains perhaps some 75,000 genes, but owing to post-translational modification and fragmentation of the encoded proteins, the human proteome likely contains many times that number of proteins. Protein microarrays would help scientists parse out the intricate relationships between so many targets, but these tools have heretofore been difficult to produce. Whereas DNA is a robust molecule, easy to amplify and spot onto slides, proteins are difficult to manufacture in quantity, a

Times have certainly changed since the first automated peptide synthesizer hit the market in the mid-1980s. Early machines were capable of processing one peptide at a time, a major improvement over manually adding reagents, washing between reactions, and moving on to the next step. You just set up the synthesizer, and in the morning there was your peptide. Nowadays, the choices are growing, as more manufacturers offer instruments for large-scale preparation or for multiple, simultaneous prepara

SUPPLIERS OF DNA SEQUENCERS, SYSTEMS, AND SOFTWARE American Bioanalytical Inc. Natick, MA Circle No. 101 on Reader Service Card Amersham Corp. Arlington Heights, IL Circle No. 102 on Reader Service Card Applied Biosystems Division of Perkin-Elmer Foster City, CA Circle No. 103 on Reader Service Card Beckman Instruments Inc. Fullerton, CA Circle No. 104 on Reader Service Card Biomed Instruments Inc. Fullerton, CA Circle No. 105 o

SUPPLIERS OF DNA SEQUENCERS, SYSTEMS, AND SOFTWARE American Bioanalytical Inc. Natick, MA Circle No. 101 on Reader Service Card Amersham Corp. Arlington Heights, IL Circle No. 102 on Reader Service Card Applied Biosystems Division of Perkin-Elmer Foster City, CA Circle No. 103 on Reader Service Card Beckman Instruments Inc. Fullerton, CA Circle No. 104 on Reader Service Card Biomed Instruments Inc. Fullerton, CA Circle No. 105 o

With the bomb-building out and global economic competitiveness in, Los Alamos, Sandia, and Livermore alter focus The end of the Cold War, coupled with President Clinton's desire to make federally funded research a better engine for national competitiveness, has left the Department of Energy's three weapons laboratories searching for new missions. While weapons development is down, nuclear nonproliferation research is growing, as are environmental and energy research. And Cooperative Research

As enthusiastic support for the superconducting supercollider cools off, advocates step up efforts to save the megaproject Proponents of the superconducting supercollider are mounting a vigorous public relations campaign to win over Congress and the United States public and to head off a repeat of last summer's House vote to kill the $8.3 billion project. Funding for the Dallas-based SSC was restored last year only through the 11th-hour mobilization of dozens of physicists to converge

Reemerging infections and drug-resistant microbes are topics that are capturing considerable attention among microbiologists these days. And evidence of their interest is by no means confined to such microbiology journals as the Journal of Virology or the Journal of Clinical Microbiology. Indeed, these topics dominated the entire August 21 issue of Science magazine last year. Writing in that issue, for example, was Harold Neu, a medical pharmacologist at Columbia University's College of Physic

The space station Freedom project, which underwent its most recent redesign in 1991, will face outright cancellation by Congress unless it can come up with yet a new design that cuts development and deployment costs in half, according to officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. At the behest of Vice President Al Gore, a blue-ribbon advisory panel, chaired by Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Charles Vest, is working with the space agency to work up options

Despite chill winds on Wall Street, investors continue to place bets on fledgling biotechnology companies.

Stock market declines have taken their toll on established firms, but startup ventures still attract backing Launching a new biotechnology company calls for a number of key ingredients, as any wide-eyed scientist who has tested the entrepreneurial waters will attest. You need your enlightened concept, of course, and the enduring visionary force that eventually is to hammer your concept into shape as a viable product. You also need the right people--and the proper blend of them--to keep the

The American Association for the Advancement of Science returned to Boston, the city of its birth, for an annual meeting held February 11-16 that drew 5,000 scientists and students, plus more than 700 reporters. The meeting, which seemed to touch upon the entire breadth of science, featured appearances by such science luminaries as Harvard University pop-paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and cosmologist George Smoot of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, who led the group that, in his words, "discover

Some of the most influential papers in 1992, according to data provided by the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information, were in immunology. This is not surprising, given the field's applications in stemming AIDS, cancer, and other pressing diseases. The most cited paper published within the last two years is from the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tbingen, Germany (K. Falk, et al., Nature, 351:290, 1991). This paper, which by the end of February 1993 had been referred to i

Plant researchers appear to be catching up with the efforts of those scientists in the better-funded and more visible Human Genome Project. With a critical mass of information forming on the genome of a model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, including libraries of gene sequences and a number of important chromosome maps, molecular biologists working with plants are at the threshold of important breakthroughs on previously intractable problems. They are on the brink of understanding the mechanisms o

As his radical ecology experiment meets with criticism, even ridicule, he shows more interest in mainstream science Texas billionaire Edward Bass, best known for his bankrolling of Biosphere 2, now appears to be focusing his largess a bit closer to the scientific mainstream. The Biosphere 2 project, an experiment set up near Tucson, Ariz., attempting to establish a sealed, self-sustaining, three-acre module with eight humans inside, has taken a beating from the press and scientists over its la