"This isn't just three-dimensional biology--this is four-dimensional analysis," enthuses molecular biologist Harvey R. Herschman, director of basic research at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of California, Los Angeles. UCLA is home to one of three new In vivo Cellular and Molecular Imaging Centers, or ICMICs, established early this year with the support of grants from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The other two centers are at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
"The focus today is really on molecular--in imaging, biology, genetics, pharmacology, and medicine," says
UCLA's Michael E. Phelps, who co-developed positron emission tomography (PET) in the mid-1970s1,2 and serves as chair of the department of molecular and medical pharmacology at UCLA School of Medicine. "With the sequencing of the genomes and the proteomes taking us to a very fundamental molecular characterization of how cells function and how they ...
