April 1998

The logical outcome of gene mapping is nigh. Biotechnology companies are using genetic information to design new drugs that may go beyond merely slowing or stopping a disease process to inducing the regeneration or repair of damaged tissue. Looking past the conventional drug targets of enzymes and gene-coupled receptors, researchers are seeking out molecules in the pathways along which biochemical signals are transferred. In some cases, their work has led to compounds--now in clinical trials or

Photos courtesy of Engineering Animation, Inc. BIOLOGICAL DEFENSE: Among the tools to counter effects from biological weapons, bioengineered red blood cells (above) can patrol the circulatory system, sponging up viral particles and carrying them to the liver for destruction. Synthetic macromolecules, or dendrimers (right), can capture viral particles and prevent further viral destruction of healthy cells. Biological weapons have been around since medieval warriors hurled plague-ridden corp

BOUGHT OUT: Eileen Gorman lost her senior scientist position with DuPont when Dade International (now Dade Behring) purchased her research unit. She now runs her own consulting business. In retrospect, Eileen G. Gorman should have known. However, she had every reason not to worry. A chemist, she had survived constant restructuring--characterized by multiple name changes of her department--during her nearly 15 years with the Glasgow, Del.-based in vitro diagnostics unit of E.I. DuPont de Nemo

Seven life scientists are among the 15 honorees for this year's National Academy of Sciences award ceremony set for today at the NAS's 135th annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The meeting also includes the induction of academy members elected last year (E.R. Silverman, The Scientist, 11[9]:1, April 28, 1997). The academy is presenting its highest honor, the Public Welfare Medal, to David A. Hamburg, president emeritus of the Carnegie Corp. of New York. Hamburg, 72, is being recognized "for his

Polar science is receiving increased attention this spring with several new developments in the national and international arenas. At last month's meeting of the United States-Russian Joint Commission on Economics and Technological Cooperation, one of the major agenda items was Arctic sciences. This commission has met semiannually since it was initiated in 1993 by U.S. Vice President Al Gore and former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chenomyrdin to establish new intergovernmental agreements for

How should one teach nonscience majors science? In the modern university, nontechnical majors are, almost by definition, majors in the fine arts, the humanities, or the social sciences. Graduates from nonscience/nontechnical programs will not find work in laboratories, nor will they wear white lab coats or be involved with technical apparatuses, manipulations, or calculations. Their interaction with science will be in their everyday world. They should experience science in their university cou

Zygmunt F. Dembek's concern and alarm (Letters, The Scientist, Jan. 5, 1998, page 10) at the lack of dissection in biology courses might turn to shock when he learns that this same attitude and policy has already invaded veterinary schools. I recently graduated from the University of Wisconsin Veterinary School, and although we had dissection classes using large and small animals, the small animal surgery department made a policy decision that it was unethical to teach surgery to veterinary stu

Your article on the Office of Alternative Medicine (P. Smaglik, The Scientist, Nov. 10, 1997, page 7) quotes Robert Park as saying that it is difficult to set up a double-blind study of acupuncture. Actually, it is rather easy--it was done in the department of orthopedic surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, when I was a faculty member there. One of the residents was Asian, and his mother was an acupuncturist. For his research project he undertook to determine the efficacy of

Blocking and promoting angiogenesis--the development of blood vessels--is a rapidly advancing strategy that offers opportunities to treat a spectrum of diseases. The strategy views blood vessel growth and inhibition as the linchpin in certain diseases. Stopping the growth of blood vessels from tumors, for instance, means there is no highway for metastasis, the spread of cancer from its primary site. On the other hand, increasing blood vessel growth can help ischemic, or blood-starved, hearts.

V.V. Ogryzko, R.L. Schiltz, V. Russanova, B.H. Howard, Y. Nakatani, "The transcriptional coactivators p300 and CBP are histone acetyltransferases," Cell , 87:953-9, 1996. (Cited in more than 143 publications to date) Comments by Vasily V. Ogryzko, Laboratory of Molecular Growth Regulation, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development NEW TOOLS: NICHD investigators Vasily Ogryzko and Yoshihiro Nakatani used acetylation to begin to gain some insight into how chromatin is activate

DUAL ROLE: Ronald DePinho, a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, helped to both identify INK4a as a tumor suppressor and to demonstrate its involvement in the Rb and p53 pathways. M. Serrano, H. Lee, L. Chin, C. Cordon-Cardo, D. Beach, R.A. DePinho, "Role of the INK4a locus in tumor suppression and cell mortality," Cell, 85:27-37, 1996. (Cited in more than 134 publications to date) Comments by Ronald A. DePinho, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Albert Einstein C

Jerome Hart Photography CONTROVERSIAL: Widespread use of student evaluations on campuses has become a hot topic, according to Terry Favero, an assistant professor of biology who teaches human anatomy at the University of Portland in Oregon. Teaching evaluations have become a rite of passage in nearly all college courses. Shortly before the final exam, students typically complete a standardized form that asks general questions on aspects such as course organization, level of difficulty,

In the article "Programs Prepare Scientists For Business World" (P. Gwynne, The Scientist , 12[7]:4, March 30, 1998), incorrect information was given in a list of advisory council members for the Keck Graduate Institute. William Rutter and William Link should not have been included on the list. Instead, Larry Gold, founder and CEO of NeXstar Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Boulder, Colo., and Kwang-I Yu, president and CEO of bioinformatics firm Paracel Corp. of Pasadena, Calif., should have been listed

"Aarrrggghhhh!" My cry of frustration echoed down the hall. My latest attempt to subclone five important PCR products had failed yet again. After two months of fruitless effort, I was at my wit's end until a colleague suggested I try the TOPO TA Cloning® Kit from Invitrogen. "Look," he said, "all you need to do is to combine 1 microliter of your PCR reaction and 1 microliter of the pCR2.1-TOPO® vector, add 3 microliters of water, and wait 5 minutes. Then transform your competent cells

You might think there couldn't be anything new in size exclusion chromatography. Think again. Princeton Separations' CentriSpin columns are the latest addition to a variety of commercially available micro- and mini-spin columns. Three CentriSpin columns-- CentriSpin-10, CentriSpin-20, and CentriSpin-40, each with a different exclusion point--allow for a variety of applications. Princeton Separations' CentriSpin Columns These new columns contain a crosslinked dextran-polymer gel-filtration ma

Date: April 27, 1998 Author: Katharine Miller Repetitive Pipetters Survey Results In today's fast-paced, competitive world of biomedical research there is growing demand for products that increase sample throughput, either through automation or by operator efficiency. Manufacturers of experimental equipment have responded by constantly redesigning and refining their instruments, incorporating the latest technological advances with consumer input. Even the simplest, most ubiquitous laborator

Differential display, invented in 1992 by Liang and Pardee, ( Science, 257:967-71, 1992) has, in the few years since its description, become the premier technique for studying gene expression. Accordingly, a number of companies have jumped into the market with kits and tools for using this technology. The beauty of this method is that it enables side-by-side comparisons of complex expression patterns from as many samples as can fit on a gel, and eliminates the need for what can be at times tedi

LabConsumer recently took a look at custom oligo houses (J. Kling, The Scientist, 12(7) 18, March 30, 1998), and found that there's more than one kind of company: those that produce standard (commonly referred to as vanilla) oligos quickly and, for the most, part cheaply and those that specialize in oligos with an ever-increasing array of tags and modifications. Since there wasn't the time or space to do the latter group of companies justice in the previous article, this article revisits custo

WHAT FOLLOWS TAMOXIFEN? Warnings accompanied recent announcements from the University of Pittsburgh-based National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project and the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., that tamoxifen achieved a 45 percent reduction in the incidence of breast cancer compared to women who took a placebo in the Breast Cancer Prevention Trial. The 25-year-old drug still carries the risk of serious side effects for women over 50, officials said. But the overall results were