After years of clinical studies in Germany, St. John's wort (Hypericum perforatum) is poised to undergo scientific scrutiny in the United States as a treatment for depression. Never clinically tested in this country, the yellow-blossomed, roadside weed, native to much of America's Northwest and to many other parts of the world, is now the focus of four such trials. Perhaps foremost among them is a $4.3 million study funded by the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) in the National Institutes

The principal resource of the 21st century will not be labor, or raw materials, or even capital, according to such prominent business consultants as Peter F. Drucker, professor of social science and management at Claremont Graduate University. It will be knowledge: a fundamentally different resource from the other three.1 In science, especially in biotechnology, where the pace of gathering and transferring knowledge is rapid, proper management of this central resource is already a major challen

If many epilepsy sufferers remain refractory to current therapies, it isn't for a lack of research and development effort. Presentations at the recent annual meeting of the professional American Epilepsy Society (AES) in San Diego described a spate of novel medications, advances in imaging technology, new surgery techniques, and the promising early results of a clinical trial using xenotransplantation. But the question remains: Will research finally dispel the stubborn mysteries of epilepsy tha

Research Research: Do Energy Transport Systems Shape Organisms? By Steve Bunk Brian Evans/lightSpace BEAUTY OF LIFE: This computer-generated image illustrating how organisms grow proportionally represents only a tiny portion of image E on the following page. Could it be that the way organisms transport resources is the most pervasive influence on biological structure and diversity? Curious though it may seem, recent research suggests that networks for transporting the materials essential

November marked one year since the war against HIV took another frightening twist. It was learned that, like guerrillas sneaking into a sleeping army command post, the virus could conceal itself from combination drug therapy by hiding in resting CD4+ T cells--the immune cells that order destruction of such foreign invaders, yet themselves are primary targets of HIV. But November also marked the emergence of a new weapon in the fight against these latent viral reserves, a fight still far from wo

How proteins fold is a central mystery of the life process that for decades has eluded explanation. But biologists are getting help on the problem nowadays from physicists, who bring quantitative theorems and new technologies to the task of showing how one-dimensional amino acid sequences determine the three-dimensional shapes of proteins. Such knowledge could guide structure-based design of drugs to treat a range of diseases now thought to be caused by misshapen proteins. "We're just beginnin

Let's say you want to build the best biomedical research facility, bar none. The catch is, it will be in Kansas City. Can you still hope to lure top scientists away from their prestigious postings in world capitals to an untested center in Missouri? Philanthropists Virginia Stowers and James Stowers Jr. think so. And they have a plan to make it happen. On 10 acres across the street from the University of Missouri, the foundations already are being laid for their six-story, 594,000-square-foot

For a thing that is "nothing," placebo has been much in the news lately. Whenever the media have mentioned placebo this year, it often has been in the context of clinical trials overseas for treatments to prevent perinatal HIV transmission. The studies were controversial because most of them employed placebo controls with the various treatments being tested, although trials in the United States and France already had indicated that the antiretroviral drug zidovudine (AZT) reduced the incidence

What does the job market ask of young life scientists? Changes in the marketplace in recent years have complicated the answer to this seemingly simple question. As more and more young scientists react to the shrinkage of attractive job opportunities in academia by seeking industry positions and other alternatives to university-based careers, they are finding that the trend of recent decades toward increasing specialization is being accompanied by a new demand for more broad-based skills. Rapid

A colleague here at The Scientist recently interviewed a microbiologist on the telephone. They were talking about bacteria, and the scientist commented that if he were an alien who had just arrived on Earth, he would surely be confused about the purposes of the kitchen sink and the toilet in a modern home. Based on microbiological evidence, he explained, he would no doubt incorrectly conclude that the respective uses of these amenities were reversed. As my colleague related this story, we crin

With a flourish of the checkbook and a call for research proposals, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has summoned into prominence a virtually new discipline of science: astrobiology. When the principal investigators of the first 11 member organizations in NASA's Astrobiology Institute gathered on June 10-11 in Washington, D.C., no definition of astrobiology had been formally adopted and no director chosen. Many of the members had never met and knew little or nothing of each oth

Before the April 17 launch of Neurolab, the 16-day space shuttle Columbia flight during which 26 studies of the nervous system would be conducted, researchers differed in opinion concerning the microneurography experiment. Either the thin needle placed in a nerve just below the knee of an astronaut would show that electrochemical signals were being transmitted normally from brain to blood vessels via the autonomic nervous system, or the nerve activity would be greater in microgravity than on Ea