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

The flaws that mar proteins as drugs would be a lot easier to eliminate, or at least reduce, were it not for the one thing that gives protein engineers fits: allergic reactions. The protein engineer's doctoring arts are balm for many a malady, but not allergic reactions. A protein too unstable, too toxic, maybe too costly to manufacture, or burdened by some other problem, changes for the better when the appropriate amino acid residues are altered. The catch is that protein engineers never know w

Time after time, Steven A. Rosenberg, chief of the surgery branch in the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Clinical Oncology Program, has seen cancer immunotherapy destroy melanomas that conventional therapies leave unmolested. When immunotherapy works, even bulky metastatic tumors are destroyed. The frustration and tragedy, he says, speaking recently to a Grand Rounds audience at the National Institutes of Health, "is that it happens in only a small percentage of patients." For nearly 20 year

A biochemist's unintended wander into gene therapy may have achieved one of gene therapy's long-sought goals: a way to deliver cytocidal genes to metastatic cancer cells dispersed throughout the body while leaving normal cells unharmed. Fred Hall of the department of surgery at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has developed an ingenious seek-and-destroy cancer vector. What makes Hall's attempt at tumor-targeted gene delivery out of the ordinary is that his vector doesn't hom

For this article, Tom Hollon interviewed Seamus J. Martin, professor of medical genetics at the Smurfit Institute, Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Data from the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that Hot Papers are cited 50 to 100 times more often than the average paper of the same type and age. E.A. Slee, M.T. Harte, R.M. Kluck, B.B. Wolf, C.A. Casiano, D.D. Newmeyer, H.G. Wang, J.C. Reed, D.W. Nicholson, E.S. Alnemri, D.R. Green, S.J. Martin, "Ordering the cytochrome c-initiated ca

For this article, Tom Hollon interviewed Anne Brunet, a postdoctoral fellow in the division of neurosciences, Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Data from the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that Hot Papers are cited 50 to 100 times more often than the average paper of the same type and age. A. Brunet, A. Bonni, M.J. Zigmond, M.Z. Lin, P. Juo, L.S. Hu, M.J. Anderson, K.C. Arden, J. Blenis, M.E. Greenberg, "Akt promotes cell survival by phosphorylating and inhibiting a forkhea

With an arsenal of 17 approved drugs and intricate rules for deploying each one, a physician's battle to shut down HIV replication is like chess against an opponent too strong to be driven from the board, so keeping the game going is the only alternative to losing. Today's best strategy for suppressing HIV calls for using three or four inhibitors in combination. As with a chessboard siege defense, conserving pieces while sealing off each new attack, doctors try to pick drug combinations that pre

Few drug discovery stories have offered researchers as many chances for dismissive disbelief as the one William B. Coley launched with his bacterial lysate treatments for cancer. If, perhaps, he looks down from above, he's probably watching the development of immunostimulatory oligonucleotides with a keen sense of excitement and anticipation. "For who would have thought," marvels Robert L. Bratzler, CEO of Coley Pharmaceuticals Group, "that DNA, which was not supposed to have immune stimulation

A good gene pool, like love, is where you find it. Now genomics researchers have two new ones to swoon over: one from Estonia, a crossroads of Scandinavian cultures and the northernmost of the former Soviet Union's Baltic republics; and from Tonga, an island kingdom half a world away where a Polynesian people has lived in near-perfect isolation for close to 3,500 years. Tonga and Estonia laid final plans last November and December, respectively, for national gene pool exploration programs aimed

The drive to double spending by the National Institutes of Health between 1998 and 2003 reached its halfway point Dec. 15, when Congress approved a new NIH budget that represented a 50 percent increase from just three years ago. A 14 percent boost of $2.5 billion propels NIH spending to $20.3 billion for fiscal year 2001. The support expressed by President-elect George W. Bush during the presidential campaign to double NIH spending signals that the agency remains on track to double its budget in