Articles by Victoria Stern

By Victoria Stern A Penny Saved Eight surprising ways to save from $10,000 to $6,000,000 © MICHAEL AUSTIN So you want to cut costs. There are the obvious techniques everyone’s considered—outsourcing, downsizing, and other painful steps. These can save a lot of money, but at this point, many companies can’t trim any more staff without cutting back on operations. Still, a few are finding additional creative ways to cut spending her

By Victoria Stern Dry out, put away The freezer meltdown was a huge disaster for Judy Muller-Cohn. One night in 1997, she lost millions of dollars’ worth of crucial DNA and protein samples. But this major meltdown at Mycogen Corporation, an agriculture and biotechnology company based in San Diego, ultimately had a happy ending for Muller-Cohn. “My husband and I knew that sample management was a major issue,” says Muller-Cohn. Her husba

By Victoria Stern Reviving hearts © Andy Crump / Photo Researchers, Inc. The paper: M. Laflamme et al., “Cardiomyocytes derived from human embryonic stem cells in pro-survival factors enhance function of infarcted rat hearts,” Nat Biotech, 25:993–94, 2007. (Cited in 140 papers) The finding: Charles Murry and his colleagues at the University of Washington demonstrated that cardiomyocytes derived from human embryo

By Victoria Stern Phineas Gage The image has been laterally reversed to show the features correctly since daguerreotypes are mirror images. From the collection of Jack and Beverly Wilgus On September 13, 1848, a 25-year-old railroad worker named Phineas Gage triggered an explosion that propelled a 3 foot 7 inch iron rod straight through his skull, destroying a good portion of his brain. Luckily, the iron missed the critical blood vessels and parts of t

From Private to Public As head of a unique pharma-academia consortium, Aled Edwards has helped scientists solve the 3D structures of hundreds of disease-related proteins and deposited them in an open access bank—at half the usual cost. By Victoria Stern As an undergraduate at McGill University in Montreal, Aled Edwards spent most of his time playing football and enjoying various intramural sports, like baseball and basketball—and in th

Drugs from D2 Philip Seeman's discovery of the D2 Dopamine receptor transformed psychiatry. He's hoping his new company does, as well. By Victoria Stern As medical students at McGill University in Montreal in the late 1950s, Philip Seeman and his wife Mary took classes at a local hospital to see what schizophrenia looked like. “That’s what changed my life,” says Seeman. The patients were extremely difficult to manage. “I was

By Victoria Stern A pipeline rerouted Crystals in gout. Light micrograph of uric acid crystals from a gouty joint, where they are causing an intensely painful attack of arthritis. © Alfred Pasieka / Photo Researchers, Inc. Thankfully, Barry Quart’s HIV drug appeared to be working. In recent Phase 1 testing, the compound, which blocks the activity of an enzyme HIV needs to continue its replication cycle, appeared to be well tolerated

By Victoria Stern Baby bellies © SPL / Photo Researchers, Inc. The paper: C. Palmer et al., “Development of the human infant intestinal microbiota,” PLoS Biol, 5:1556–63, 2007. (Cited in 101 papers) The finding: Chana Davis and her team at Stanford University School of Medicine designed a microarray to sequence small subunit ribosomal RNA (SSU rRNA) from microbes present in more t

By Victoria Stern Power Couples © Carl Wiens Three highly productive couples give advice on how to balance life at home and in the lab. Elizabeth Guenthner, a resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, might have thought twice about agreeing to go out with her internal medicine intern Gary Nabel, had she known their first date would turn out like a scene from Pulp Fiction. While deciding what to order, a masked man appea

Which papers made the biggest splash this year? linkurl:ScienceWatch,;http://www.sciencewatch.com/ a website that tracks and analyzes trends in basic science research, compiles bimonthly lists of the 10 most cited papers. From those lists, The Scientist pulled the five papers in biology published in the last two years which were some of the most cited papers in 2009. The two topics that dominate the top five papers this year: genomics and stem cells.(*All citation data, both ours and that of

By Victoria Stern Die, diabetes Courtesy of Haim Cohen and David Sinclair / Harvard Medical School The paper: J. Milne et al., “Small molecule activators of SIRT1 as therapeutics for the treatment of type 2 diabetes,” Nature, 450: 712–16, 2007. (Cited in 145 papers) The finding: Scientists at Sirtris Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Harvard University developed approximately 3,000 small molecules that mimic resveratrol, which

By Victoria Stern Beth Shapiro: Creatures Great and Small Courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation In 2001, while scanning a river bank in northern Alaska for fossils, Oxford PhD student Beth Shapiro saw her advisor Alan Cooper, a pioneer in the field of ancient DNA, tugging on something big embedded in the frozen earth. When Shapiro got closer, she saw that Cooper had uncovered a late Pleistocene-era woolly mammoth

Despite the slew of failures in the past, the most recent $105 million HIV vaccine study among 16,000 Thai volunteers is the first to show any (albeit modest) success. With this first sign of promise in HIV vaccine research, linkurl:Norman Letvin,;http://www.hms.harvard.edu/dms/immunology/fac/Letvin.html professor of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the Thailand trial, weighs in on the topic in an opinion piece published linkurl:

A cancer researcher tampered with data and fudged images in a presentation and grant application, the linkurl:Office of Research Integrity (ORI);http://ori.dhhs.gov/misconduct/cases/Ningaraj_Nagendra.shtml reported. Magnifying glass Image: WikimediaAccording to ORI's notice released this Fall, linkurl:Nagendra Ningaraj,;http://www.memorialhealth.com/aci/research/ningaraj.aspx formerly an associate professor of neurological surgery and cancer biology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine,

"Survival of the fittest does not mean survival of the strongest, but survival of those that best fit their environment," croons linkurl:Brett Keyser,;http://nightjarapothecary.net/2009/06/23/darwinii/ on the streets of Philadelphia, dulcet tones ringing from his guitar on a recent sunny Autumn afternoon. Though passersby shoot Keyser puzzled looks, his act makes perfect sense with this coming Tuesday marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's seminal work, On the Origi