Photo: Courtesy of King Pharmaceuticals OLD DRUG, NEW USES: Ace inhibitor ALTACE Clinical trials are under way in the United States to test new uses for angiotensin I-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, as lab researchers around the world continue to compile evidence of further possibilities for the antihypertensive drugs. Meanwhile, a paper to be published this month presents a detailed theory that ACE functions at the start of a signaling pathway common to major diseases that are other

Image by Joel Ito and P. Michael Conn The first clinical trials to test protein misfolding therapies are so new that researchers haven't yet agreed on a collective name for the compounds being administered. Variously dubbed chemical chaperones, pharmacological chaperones, and pharmacoperones, these small molecules correct the misfolding of proteins that recent research has implicated in a host of diseases, both rare and prevalent. In such "conformational" diseases, misfolded proteins may lose

Photo: Courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service, Thomas L. Wellborn, Jr. DEADLY PARASITE: Myxobolus cerebralis causes whirling disease, a trout-killing infection that is devastating in some wild trout populations. In a Quonset hut dubbed the "parasite factory" on the University of California's sprawling Davis campus, the bed in a tankful of water is strewn with what looks like snippets of rusty thread: worms that harbor a deadly European parasite called Myxobolus cerebralis. It causes wh

Image: Courtesy of Barry R. Lentz  LOVING WATER AND OIL: The illustration shows a full length phosphatidylserine molecule of the sort that would occur in a platelet membrane. The molecule has a water-loving "head" end (left end with several red balls in the figure) and an oil-loving "tail" end that holds it in the membrane. The researchers used a molecule with the tail end shortened to about a third of its physiological length so that the whole molecule remains in solution instead of formi

Worst-case scenarios don't come much uglier than the plume of an aerosolized biowarfare agent infiltrating a city. What happens then? Do alarms ring, evacuations and vaccinations begin? Or will anyone even know what the cloud contains? The answer could depend on efforts to improve molecular recognition systems that identify biowarfare agents in the air, water, or food. Problems of accuracy and efficiency that have dogged such technologies for decades are approaching resolution, but even then,

The holy war against evolution has escalated again, with attempts by creationists to construe an explanatory statement accompanying a federal law on education as evidence that the US government approves the teaching of intelligent design theory alongside Darwinian evolution.1 Obviously, intelligent design should not be taught as a science, anymore than, say, phrenology should be. But this raises a public relations issue: The desperate fruits of prohibition are too well known; look what happens

Image: Anthony Canamucio Even as a furor arose recently in the US Congress over failures to communicate between intelligence agencies that contributed to America's unreadiness for the terrorist attacks last September, President George W. Bush's proposal to create a Department of Homeland Security was being concocted in extreme secrecy. This left many government officials in an awkward position: having staunchly defended the administration's opposition to the idea of a new department, they were

Can the United States cope with biological terrorism? The anthrax deaths have invested this question with new urgency, eliciting many opinions at the Pentagon and in Washington's think tanks. But the dubious benefit of prior experience on which to base those opinions is scarce. One way to get the experience is by the technological play-acting known as simulation. The US Army has used virtual reality simulations for combat training since the late 1980s. Trainees are placed inside a module, three

Consider a human baby, so young she cannot distinguish herself from the world. Her parents, beset by the fears and longings of adulthood, gaze anxiously upon their daughter's knitted brow. Her serious expression, at once reminiscent of her mother and comical on an infant's face, causes the parents to fret: When will the crease become a wrinkle? When will the physical assault of being alive begin? Their concern might seem absurdly premature, but the fleeting nature of life has long prompted peopl

Stung by anthrax mailings after suicide skyjackings, the United States is hurrying to erect an electronic line of defense against further bioterrorism. At least five sophisticated biosurveillance systems are under development with federal funding to nonprofit and to proprietary ventures; two other groups already have products on the market. The goal is to install a national sentinel network that can detect suspicious trends in medical data and in illness behavior before diagnosis, to help contai

The story of how the late lawyer and entrepreneur Franklin C. Salisbury joined forces with the late Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi is legendary within the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) that they cofounded in 1973. Two years before that, Salisbury read an article about Szent-Györgyi, who had won the 1937 prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of vitamin C. At the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., the famed Hungarian scientist was working

One more genomewide linkage map, this for a fish called the three-spined stickleback, was announced late last year to not much fanfare.1 But rather than just another stride in the march of genomics, the accomplishment heralded a new way to approach a question that has stumped evolutionary biologists for decades: What is the architecture of genetic change? The model organisms for which linkage maps have been created are often bred in the laboratory to express certain phenotypes, and they can reve