Joseph Paul Jernigan, 38, executed Texas murderer, flourishes in his resurrection in cyberspace and shows every sign of fulfilling his promise as a peerless instructor of anatomy and unique teacher of surgeons. He is also a champion sportsman whose versatility no single mortal can match. Jernigan, a.k.a. the National Library of Medicine's Visible Male, came under the spotlight of research medicine in 1994, in the form of a 15-gigabyte dataset of digitized photographs of 1,878 coronal slic

Barbara Mikulski If there is more "bullwhip and buzz saw" than "serenade by starlight" in the persona of U.S. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), it's because she isn't afraid to batter feelings in fighting for what she believes in. Certainly, not everyone likes the outspoken way she cuts through business-as-usual in pursuit of her goals. "Barbara, you just don't have a therapeutic personality," is how one of her teachers once put it, and Mikulski proudly declares that Ronald Reagan, George Bush,

Vaccinomics--the application of genomics and bioinformatics to vaccine development--is bringing a fresh approach to the Herculean problem of making vaccines against the various HIV-1 subtypes, or clades, spread around the world. With vaccinomics, says Annie De Groot, CEO of EpiVax, a young vaccine development company in Providence, R.I., a single vaccine against all HIV clades may be feasible. Her opinion is an about-face pivot from the current pursuit of HIV vaccines one clade at a time.

If you wanted to avoid bioflavonoids, it would not be easy. But who would want to? They are in all the good things: citrus fruits, berries, apples, root vegetables, herbs, and teas. Their inclusion in vitamin and mineral formulas stamps them with official, or at least commercial, favor. Undoubtedly, a food rich in bioflavonoids can stake a claim to the nutritional razzmatazz that ads call "natural goodness." Bioflavonoids are a family of more than 4,000 aromatic compounds derived exclusiv

How can members of Congress find out what they're getting for all the money they appropriate for biomedical research? Ten years ago, former Democratic Maine representative Peter Kyros and his associate Belle Cummins, along with Rep. George W. Gekas (R-Pa.), came up with an inspired answer: a command performance biomedical seminar program featuring a who's who list of scientists as invited speakers. On March 29, invited speaker Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health,

Copyright (c)2000 by the American Society for Clinical Investigation The crystal structure of AMP-PNP bound to Lck was used to make a model of the Abl kinase domain. Left, the general architecture of the Abl kinase domain; top right, topology of the ATP-binding cleft of the Abl protein kinase; bottom right, amino acid side chains lining the APT-binding cleft. "I feel so good that sometimes I forget I have leukemia," writes Gay Bratton of her experience with STI571, Novartis Pharma's experimenta

Ken Alibek People who make biological weapons live with the risk that they will die by them. Ken Alibek found that out in a visceral way one Sunday evening in 1983 when a phone call to his home informed him that the tularemia plant he directed had a problem. When he arrived at the plant, Alibek went to inspect a room suspected of being contaminated by a leak from Zone 3, the interior area reserved for culture of tularemia bacteria. Entering alone and turning on the lights, he found himself stand

Since the death last September of an Arizona teenager, the first person to die of gene therapy, many gene therapists are looking to gutless adenovirus vectors to mend the reputation of adenovirus-based gene therapy. Gutless vectors are named for their lack of adenovirus genes. If, as expected, they prove safer and provide longer lasting therapeutic gene expression, adenovirus vectors like the one that killed Jesse Gelsinger will likely be phased out for most diseases. Why Gelsinger died r

Prostate cancer can be detected early, thanks to digital rectal exams and serum measurements of prostate-specific antigen (PSA). Although the role of PSA in cancer is poorly understood, high PSA levels are usually interpreted as bad news about cancer progression. But now scientists at EntreMed, a biotechnology company in Rockville, Md., offer a more optimistic interpretation--one that may explain some paradoxical observations about PSA and cancer. Tumor-secreted proteins called tumor angio