April 2005

could mislead the reader into thinking that it is just fantasy that the policy of the MPG is to grant different contractual conditions to PhD students based on their nationality.

In your article on postdoc working conditions you quote Keith Micoli of the National Postdoctoral Association as saying that the wording of a NIH National Research Service Award "prohibits institutions from classifying fellowship recipients as employees."

I would like to report a significant drawback of the 6x polyhistidine (His) tag for affinity chromatography.

present his thoughts on the likely very important roles of regulatory RNA species in metazoan development, and I have joined the ranks of passionate amateurs intrigued by the implications.

If you are concerned that British science is on life support, you should worry no more. British science, it turns out, has been saved.

In the fall of 2003, researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston were facing a problem.

walking barefoot every day through a corridor of filthy, unwashed floors.

As one of the world's biggest funders of biomedical science, the Wellcome Trust can usually gather scientists to a party like honey attracts bees.

Every drug has a story behind it.

The Google search engine has revolutionized knowledge dissemination over the Internet.

Evolutionary biologists, both theoreticians and empiricists, have argued for decades about the relative merits of two speciation scenarios: allopatry and sympatry.

A time-honored tradition for choosing teams, riding shotgun, and settling other childish disputes, the game called rock-paper-scissors has been around far longer than humans have been playing it.

Figuring out how denatured proteins morph into their folded, active forms isn't just a challenge; it's one of the most elusive problems in biology.

DNA oligonucleotides are pretty inexpensive these days.

Clifford Siporin, the president of Greystone Pharmaceutical Consultants, a contract research organization (CRO) in Parkland, Fla., has a challenge.

Last November, California voters passed a $3 billion proposition, fondly known as Prop. 71, to fund stem cell research.

Looking to cure a host of neurodegenerative diseases, StemCells, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, has transplanted human neural stem cells into the brains of thousands of mice.

Biodefense Spending DataIn late February, 758 microbiologists signed an open letter claiming that the number of NIH grants for research on bacteria and yeast had dropped precipitously since 2000 compared to the previous five-year period (see http://www.biomed-central.com/news/20050301/02). That drop, they say, was due to funding being siphoned off into billions of dollars in biodefense spending. In response, NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases claimed just the opposite &#