April 2001

Scientists and publishers generally agree that the Internet is sparking a science publishing revolution.1 They have yet to agree, however, on how to cultivate that revolution without alienating one another. The latest effort to push the online publishing envelope has a sizable group of scientists threatening to boycott journals whose content is not freely available in a public database six months after publication. This call for a "public library of science" (PLOS) has already caused quite a sti

In southeastern Minnesota, the residents of little Winona are being besieged by messages from the future. On the radio and in newspapers, on billboards and handouts, the town's approximately 27,000 residents are being exhorted to join a pilot program that will put their individual health management information online. Going well beyond mere E-mail communication between physician and patient, the Winona Health Online1 project foreshadows a not-too-distant time when many Americans will have person

The commercial fishing and conservationist communities have clashed many times over how to protect fishery resources and conserve marine ecosystems while also supporting the economies dependent on the oceans. However, a new twist in the argument is the louder call from both sides for better scientific support for fishery management decisions. Fisheries management approaches often focus on single species protection by limiting the number of days fishermen can work, the types of fishing gear use

The field of human genetics has never been "politically correct." The first gene screens created in the 1970s, for sickle cell disease and Tay-Sachs disease, targeted African American and Ashkenazi (eastern European) Jewish populations, respectively. This targeting made economic sense as these conditions are more prevalent within these populations. It isn't that genes discriminate, but that the human tendency to select mates like themselves tends to keep particular gene variants within certain g

A single all-embracing effort to characterize the human proteome is an unlikely prospect (D. Steinberg, "Is a Human Proteome Project Next?" The Scientist, 15[7]:1, April 2, 2001). Nevertheless, smaller-scale--though still massive--proteomics projects keep springing up. On April 4, Myriad Genetics Inc. (MGI), Hitachi Ltd., and Oracle Corp. announced a $185 million, three-year collaboration to identify all protein-protein interactions and biochemical pathways in the human body. Myriad Proteomics I

As foot and mouth disease raced across England and into Europe, shock waves spread well ahead and deep scars remained behind. The United Kingdom sagged under the weight of withering tourism, huge agricultural losses, and wholesale disruptions in the movement of people. Prime Minister Tony Blair called out the army and even postponed national elections. Air passengers arriving in Atlanta disinfected their shoes while cattlemen from Kentucky to Kansas wondered whether the plague would strike here

A recent article 1 emphasized the increasing obesity within the American population, and the author criticized the Food and Drug Administration for not allowing wider use of olestra to reduce fat/caloric intake. This article crystallizes what is wrong with much health-related research today. It is a classic example of looking for a 'magic bullet' approach to a serious problem rather than making the comprehensive lifestyle changes required. I have been conducting a text-mining study on the disc

Researchers are inching ever closer to a treatment for the inherited neurodegenerative disorder Huntington's disease (HD). Following close on the heels of recent optimistic reports on fetal cell implants1,2 comes a report from Johns Hopkins University that sheds light on a possible mechanism of neuronal destruction in HD.3 The work reveals possible new drug targets. Legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie's fight with HD brought the disease into the public eye in the 1960s. Today, some 30,000 peopl

A study of 2,480 AIDS patients has found that they have 2.4 times the risk of contracting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) if they carry a certain polymorphism. Charles S. Rabkin, HIV-cancer coordinator at the National Cancer Institute, presented this preliminary finding at last month's meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in New Orleans. The polymorphism, a cytosine-for-guanine substitution in the interleukin-6 gene's promoter region, results in decreased plasma levels of IL-6. R

Antibiotics that enable ribosomes to "read through" premature stop codons (nonsense mutations), which truncate proteins, may kick-start a new approach to gene therapy. A team of researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and from the Women's and Children's Hospital in South Australia applied a long-ago observation about the antibiotic gentamicin on ribosomes to correct the enzyme deficiency that causes Hurler syndrome, in cultured fibroblasts from patients.1 The antibiotic apparent

Courtesy of Amersham Pharmacia BiotechThe Ready-To-Run separation unitUntil December 31, 2001, Amersham Pharmacia Biotech of Piscataway, N.J., is offering a free 24-reaction Ready-To-Go™ PCR beads kit with the purchase of a Ready-To-Run™ separation unit. The new Ready-To-Run separation unit is an agarose gel electrophoresis system for the rapid screening of PCR products. The system is expandable for higher- throughput applications. Ready-To-Go PCR beads are room-temperature stable be

From 2-D electrophoresis to microscopy, much of the data generated in today's laboratories is image-based. Until recently however, there was no way to efficiently search the contents of images and to correlate them with other types of data. To address this problem, two companies have developed systems that bring the full power of the informatics revolution to bear on visual data. According to Suzanne Mattingly, vice president of marketing at Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Scimagix, up to 70 perc

Many students are interested in majoring in biology because they liked it in high school or because they have plans to attend medical school. But when majoring in science, discouragement can set in when faced with the daunting task of memorizing many facts, which are frequently forgotten once the course is over. Today's student often feels bored and/or intimidated by science. While classroom instruction pursues the goal of critical thinking, the actual performing of research is what requires co