North Carolina-based freelance writer Kelly Rae Chi became fascinated by the controversial idea that synapses weaken overnight, resetting the brain and improving learning the next day. But the effort to synthesize all the ideas in the field—the result of which is presented in "Disappearing before Dawn"—disrupted her sleep. "At some point in the process of writing this I was screaming in

Associate editor Andrea Gawrylewski has graced the pages of The Scientist for more than three years, starting as an intern in October, 2005, fresh from journalism graduate school at Columbia University. Since then, she has written on the order of 200 articles for every section of the magazine and online, including seven features. Her favorite—and most challenging—piece,

Hans Kristian Kotlar began his career as a cancer researcher and says he was "the last idealist who left to turn industrialist." His professed "love of a pretty woman" lured him to another part of Norway, where ended up using his early training in polymer chemistry to work for StatoilHydro, the Norwegian state oil company which chiefly operates in the North Sea. Now the head of StatoilHydro's

As a grad student at the University of Edinburgh, Elie Dolgin wrote and recorded science radio shows and podcasts in between experiments with C. elegans. Within only weeks of defending his thesis, Dolgin became an editorial intern at The Scientist. "I liked The Scientist because, even though I was no longer a practicing scientist, for the first time I felt I was part of a sc

Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and literature instructor at Brooklyn College Daniel Grushkin is used to seeing parallels between literature and science. In this month's Notebook (The istope diet), Grushkin shares the story of researchers analyzing an ancient iceman's hair for details of his diet. "The idea in literature is if you write a book, a masterpiece, you will be immortalized, but

Phyllis Wise has spent more than 30 years trying to understand the role of estrogen in animal models, and found that the hormone protected the body from injury following stroke. So, in 2002, when the Women's Health Initiative announced that hormone therapy appeared to cause more harm than good, Wise, based at the University of Washington, and her colleagues were shocked. Wise and her

Ari Helenius is intrigued by the deceptive simplicity of a virus: "You can understand it on a molecular level, know every component of it, but its interaction with host cells turns on extremely complicated biology." This veteran virologist at ETH Zurich has spent a career tracking the complex interactions of pathogen and host (see "Foundations: Viral Cell Entry"). In "The Orange and the Circus Tent"

Over a career that spans more than half a century, John Holland, a professor of psychology, electrical engineering, and computer science, invented genetic algorithms, or computer code inspired by evolutionary biology. A MacArthur fellowship recipient, Holland is "really not quite sure" how he became interested in biology, but says he remembers being hooked by "the notion of combining mathematics

Thirty years as a physician and professor of medicine and pharmacology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and several stints as chair of FDA advisory committees exposed Alastair Wood to the challenges and pitfalls of the drug development process. Today, as managing director of Symphony Capital, a private equity firm dedicated to the biotechnology industry, Wood spends his time working to

Billions of identical cells come together to shape the body of molecular and developmental geneticist Gad Shaulsky. That fascinates him. The question of how different cells compete and cooperate to form whole organisms drives Shaulsky's research at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he is an associate professor. "How come proliferation and survival, which are the most fundamental requirements of life on earth, are being restrained in multicellular organisms - and societies

Journalist and author Fran Hawthorne has covered health care and business for more than 20 years for the New York Times, Fortune, Worth and Newsday among others. She is also the author of four books, including Inside the FDA, and most recently, Pension Dumping, published in April. In Diverting a Diet Drug, Hawthorne explores how a pharmaceutical company transitioned a weight-loss drug from being prescription-on

Brian Stauffer is a Miami-based illustrator who blends photography, paintings and found objects to explore contemporary social issues. His work regularly appears on the covers and pages of The New York Times, Time, Rolling Stone, and New Scientist, among others. In 2005, his portrait of George W. Bush for The Nation was voted one of the top 40 magazine covers of the past

Kenneth Buetow is the director of the National Cancer Institute Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology. He is also an intramural researcher at NCI, working on genomics. In 2004, Buetow and colleagues launched the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) to help researchers manage and integrate the ever-growing dataset of clinical, genomic, imaging, pathological, and proteomic

As a young assistant professor at the University of Washington in the late 1980s, Randall Moon stole into his quiet lab during a holiday break to run one experiment. He had a hunch that the INT-1 gene played a crucial role in development. It turned out he was right: In that one experiment he discovered a critical signaling pathway and the direction of his career for the next 15 years, which he writes a

Steven Reiner has been professor of immunology and a member of the Abramson Family Cancer Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania since 1999. He received his MD from Duke University and has held research positions at the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Chicago. In "Separate and unequal," he recounts how he and his colleagues answered one of the most pressing questions in immunology: How do lymphocytes replenish and diversify? "It was sur

F. Stuart Chapin III, known as Terry, has been a professor of ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks since 1973. He studies the effects of changes in climate and wildfire on Alaskan ecology, with a particular focus on developing sustainable ecosystems and human communities. In this issue, Chapin introduces a five-part feature on the effects of climate change on the biosphere. "Scientific assessments now clearly demonstrate the ecological and societal consequences of huma

In 1985, as a professor of physiology at Tufts University School of Medicine, Lewis Cantley and his colleagues discovered the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway that determined much of his later career. Now, as a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School, Cantley continues to investigate PI3K, the biochemical pathways that regulate normal mammalian cell growth, and the defects that cause cell transformation. In "From Kinase to Cancer," he discusses how the past two

Since beginning his career as an engineer for Douglas Aircraft, Frederick Sachs has been a research fellow at NIH's biophysics laboratory, and served as both an NIH physiology reviewer and NSF consultant. His most recent work, as professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Buffalo, pinpointed a protein in tarantula venom as a potential drug candidate to treat atrial fibrillation. In a provocative Opinion, Sachs proffers that funneling more money into the NIH budget ha

As an assistant professor in the School of Communication at American University, Matthew Nisbet studies scientific and environmental controversies. Part of his work involves examining the interactions between experts, journalists, and the public. He tracks these issues in his blog, Framing Science (http://scienceblogs.com/framing-science). In "The Future of Public Engagement", he and Dietram Scheufele, professor of life sciences communication at the University of Wisconsin in Madison

Neuroscientist Jerold Chun has studied brain development at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. since 2003. In "How the lysophospholipid got its receptor", Chun tells the story of how his research group, in the search for genes that are activated in the embryonic brain, stumbled upon a new receptor and answered questions that had lipidologists stumped for years. "We didn't come from the lipid field and didn't understand many of the nuances of this discipline," Chun say