Articles by Tom Hollon

Courtesy of Patrick Russo, ISTC  BIOTECH THAW: The Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Puschino branch, an ISTC-promoted laboratory located 100 km south of Moscow. The Moscow-based International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) coordinates Russian research collaborations with Western organizations and promotes commercialization of Russian discoveries and technologies. This accurate but colorless description hides what gives ISTC far more import: its role as risk manager tasked with pr

In 1996, Jeff Trent and colleagues published the first paper describing DNA microarrays as tools for pinpointing gene variants underlying various tumor properties.1 Now, as president and scientific director of Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGEN), in Phoenix, Trent is using microarrays to look for gene expression patterns that can be applied to developing diagnostics. The role of microarrays, Trent says, "will be on the discovery side. Testing all 30,000 genes against a diagnosti

Until the advent of targeted therapies, dealing with cancer, outside of surgery, was not unlike waging guerrilla warfare on an enemy of unknown size: destroying the whole village was one fear, not knowing how many soldiers lurked in the surrounding hillsides, another. But new monoclonal antibodies and small molecule drugs are designed to concentrate cytotoxicity where needed and reduce damage elsewhere in the body--unlike the one-poison-kills-all-tumors approach that is chemotherapy. Their d

Basic research zeroes in on sperm and egg development

Since 1948, military men and women have smeared on DEET, otherwise known as N,N-diethyl-3-methylbenzamide, to repel the itchy, the deadly, and the otherwise annoying. DEET is effective but unloved--it literally melts plastic--and the US military has been working for some time to find a replacement. The newcomer is called SS-220. At the army's Aberbeen Proving Ground in Maryland, SS-220 has passed toxicity tests for short-duration exposure. Lab tests with human volunteers and mosquitoes, Anop

Photo: Courtesy of the Mammoth Site A DIG OF MAMMOTH PROPORTIONS: Earthwatch volunteers excavate mammoth fossils displayed in situ at the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, SD. This past summer, I found myself standing in an air-conditioned pit, trowel in hand, digging for mammoth bones, while tourists watched me work from behind a fence. I was helping Larry Agenbroad, whose Mammoth Site project in Hot Springs, SD, is one of the oldest affiliated with the Earthwatch Institute, an organization

Image: Anne MacNamara The exciting use of cDNA microarrays to reveal molecular subclasses of human tumors has spread to the study of animal models that mimic human tumors. With unsuspected subclasses of human lymphomas, melanomas, colon carcinomas, and breast carcinomas uncovered, researchers naturally have been inspired to apply microarray analysis to animal tumor models that in some instances have been studied for decades. How closely, they wonder, will experimental tumors resemble human tum

Image: Courtesy of Ali Fattom THE END IS NEAR: S. aureus attached to tissue If Scottish surgeon Alexander Ogsten ever daydreamed that discovering Staphylococcus aureus would win acclamation, it was before he crossed paths with the British Medical Journal and came away the worse for it, squashed like a cockroach caught scurrying across a tray of tea and crumpets. Upbraiding the upstart for daring to step beyond his place, the editor dismissed Ogsten's 1881 paper on the bacterium, jotting

Volume 16 | Issue 13 | 15 | Jun. 24, 2002 Previous | Next The Leprosy Watcher Armed with recent genomics data, Bill Levis ponders leprosy's immunological fork in the road--and awaits a government decision regarding his own career | By Tom Hollon Graphic: Marlene J. Viola Patients come to him by referral, dreading what they may hear after being poked and palpated and scrutinized by one puzzled

In patients with progressive external ophthalmoplegia (PEO), the muscles that move the eyes gradually deteriorate until the only way patients can follow an object is by turning their heads. Last year, Christine Van Broeckhoven and colleagues at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, linked PEO in a Belgian family to a point mutation in the gene for polymerase gamma, the DNA polymerase responsible for replicating the 16.5-kilobase mitochondrial chromosome.1 Now, William Copeland's lab at the Nationa

Ben A. Hitt is living proof that you can leave biomedical research without saying goodbye forever. More than 20 years since turning out the lights in the lab for what he thought was the last time, Hitt is not only back, he's in demand. Now chief scientist for Correlogic Systems, in Bethesda, Md., his phone hasn't stopped ringing since Feb. 16, when a paper in The Lancet1 announced that Proteome Quest, the pattern-recognition software he created, had identified a pattern among five serum proteins

In cocaine research, dopamine and glutamate make a brilliant star and supporting player, respectively. One takes center stage, the anointed crowd-pleaser; the other, though a leading actor in other productions, is so overshadowed that admiration of its performance is relegated to an acquired taste. A quick PubMed search recently disclosed their perceived importance: 3,628 abstracts on cocaine and dopamine, 178 for cocaine and glutamate. Courtesy of François ConquetFrançois Conquet Now

Your ancestors didn't travel to the New World on the Mayflower? Not listed in Burke's Peerage and Baronetage? No worries, mate. For a couple of hundred bucks, Oxford Ancestors, a new British biotech company, will add cachet to your lineage by extending it back at least 10,000 years.

Counting human genes ought to be straightforward. Tracking telltale signs--motifs for promoters, translation start sites, splice sites, CpG islands--gene counters must by now be mopping up, finalizing chromosomal locations of every human gene already known, and predicting whereabouts of all the rest. Insert one human genome sequence, turn the bioinformatics crank, and genes gush out like a slot machine jackpot, right? "No, no, no," says Bo Yuan, of Ohio State University, having a laugh over th

This is wisdom, listen up. Don't raid the fridge when you break into somebody's home. The cops will find your DNA on unfinished food and then CODIS will find you. Next thing you know, you're rotting in prison, just like the "honey bun bandit." You'll never hear fatherly advice like this from Paul Ferrara--too bad for B&E men (that's breaking and entering, to you). The conviction carried by his warm baritone and clear and sober eyes might make a young punk listen. But instead, the director o