April 2005

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.

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

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."

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

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

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.

Metastasis, the leading cause of cancer deaths, remains a poorly understood phenomenon.

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.

The biochemical pathway that senses amino acid deficiencies in yeast is also at work in mammals, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis.

National Cancer Institute researcher Eric Huang and colleagues have identified a mechanism that promotes mutations under hypoxic conditions.

Japanese researchers have identified a sperm protein that is essential for the fusion of the sperm and egg membranes during fertilization.

In June 2003, the US Environmental Protection Agency surprised Plymouth State University in New Hampshire with a routine inspection of how their labs were managing chemical waste.

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 &#

Hundreds of scientists at Hungary's universities may lose their jobs after the government mandated a 7.5% raise for faculty on January 1 but did not provide enough money to cover the extra expense.

More than 8,000 scientists took to the streets of Paris and other cities across France in March to protest against the government's proposed reforms of the science system.

Eric Poehlman, a well-known obesity researcher with more than 200 articles to his name, says he fabricated data in 17 applications for US federal grants and agreed to be barred for life "from seeking or receiving funding from any federal agency in the future, including all components of the Public Health Service."

ve questions such as, "Can women do math?" Women can do math, they can do science, and they can do engineering.

currently works at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, where his research centers on the evolution of color vision in humans.

One day in the early 1990s, Bert Vogelstein was showing fellow cancer researcher Sandy Markowitz around his lab at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore.