S. Jay Olshansky, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago's School of Public Health, is an author of The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Aging. He, Daniel Perry, executive director of the Alliance for Aging Research, Richard Miller, professor of pathology at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Robert Butler, founding director of the National Institute on Aging, call for an extension of healthy life in In Pursuit of the Longevity Dividend. "We're not proposing that we should live for 500 years, or 1,000 years, or become immortal," says Olshansky. "We're proposing a modest but achievable sevenyear delay."
Marc Vidal, director of the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, describes his and colleagues' efforts to create a "serious map" of the human interactome, "a complete set of macromolecular interactions in the cell," in Time for a Human Interactome Project?...
Michael Rossner has been managing editor of the Journal of Cell Biology for almost nine years and editorial director of Rockefeller University Press for three. He previously served as in-house editor of the journal Chemistry and Biology after earning a PhD in molecular biology at the University of Edinburgh. In How Journals Can Guard Against Image Fraud, he describes techniques he developed four years ago for screening manuscript figures for evidence of manipulation. "Across the board we find fraudulent manipulation...like deleting a band from a gel...in 1% of accepted papers," he says.
Maria W. Aanderson joined the staff of The Scientist in 2003 and has been assistant publisher since last year. As editor of this issue's Best Places to Work for Postdocs, Anderson says she has noticed a trend over the course of several surveys: Unlike tenure track researchers, who report in the polls that they prefer smaller, college-town communities, postdocs seem to be happier in or near relatively large cities or large universities.
Boston-based freelancer Keith O'Brien has written for The Boston Globe, National Public Radio, and The New Orleans Times Picayune. In Wish You Were Here, he tells the story of a small Michigan town's biotech resurrection after Pfizer laid off nearly 1,200 people there in 2003. A local group created an innovation center and "said ëhey, why don't you go into business for yourself?'" O' Brien says. "I was impressed by the foresight that Southwest Michigan First had in preparing for the possibility of losing jobs."
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