Mina Bissell is Distinguished Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which she joined in 1972. Bissell writes about the ecology of tumors on page 30 with Berkeley colleagues Paraic Kenny and Celeste Nelson. Bissell was first intrigued by how cells - particularly cancer cells - preserve their identities in vivo, since "you put them in a dish... and they forget where they came from." "The tumors are not an island," she says. "We need to be treating cancer as the problem of the organism... by changing the microenvironment and the signals that the cells receive."
Paddy Woodworth has been writing for publications such as the Irish Times, the Times of London, and the BBC for nearly 20 years. On page 38, he writes about coupling economic and ecological approaches to save habitats while helping those who live there. "There are ways of simultaneously restoring natural capital...
After earning his MD and PhD in cell biology at Harvard, Lincoln Stein became interested in genome analysis while working with Eric Lander's group at the MIT Genome Center. He is now professor of bioinformatics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he has worked for nine years. The white paper of a committee he recently led to audit available resources for storing large datasets produced by genome-scaled research appears on page 24. Though he has long felt that hiring biological experts for such work is crucial, he calls it a costly endeavor at $250,000 per year for a typical repository.
Anne Harding is a New Jersey-based freelancer who has covered health, medicine, and science for publications such as Reuters Health, The Lancet, and the British Medical Journal. She has been contributing to The Scientist for two years. On page 46, she writes about the technologies being developed to help life scientists interpret the massive quantities of information that are coming out of microarray data, proteomics, and the interactome. "Leaders in this field know that it's essential to have scientists and software engineers collaborating closely - even sitting together at the bench - to make programs that work," she says.
Irving Weissman's lab was the first to identify and isolate hematopoietic stem cells in mice. On page 35page 35, Weissman, director of Stanford's Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, writes with Michael Clarke, professor in medicine and cancer biology?at Stanford, about how some of these stem cells can turn into cancer. The?next step, says Weissman, is "to characterize the genes that are mutated, silenced, and epigenetically activated in leukemia or cancer stem cells themselves."
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