April 2006

Mina Bissell is Distinguished Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which she joined in 1972. Bissell writes about the ecology of tumors on page 30 with Berkeley colleagues Paraic Kenny and Celeste Nelson. Bissell was first intrigued by how cells - particularly cancer cells - preserve their identities in vivo, since "you put them in a dish... and they forget where they came from." "The tumors are not an island," she says. "We need to be treating cancer as the prob

What do natural disasters and cancer have in common? Ecology.

More on peer reviewYour recent article on peer review1 omitted the fact that far too many journals do not report back to their reviewers. Only if a reviewer gets the decision letter plus the other reviews will he be able to learn and improve. Learning about the decision only when the paper makes it - or doesn't - to Medline is not sufficient.Manfred Gessler Theodor Boveri Institute for Life SciencesWuerzburg, Germanygessler@biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.deYour

Credit: COURTESY OF JOHN HURLEY FOR THE PROGERIA RESEARCH FOUNDATION" /> Credit: COURTESY OF JOHN HURLEY FOR THE PROGERIA RESEARCH FOUNDATIONLeslie Gordon's son Sam was 22 months old when he was diagnosed with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria syndrome, a devastating disease in which children age rapidly and usually die between their 7th and 20th birthdays. Gordon, an MD/PhD, and her MD husband, Scott Berns, discovered an astonishing void of information on the disease, which is so rare that it

The list of fired medical journal editors became longer in February when the two top editors at the Canadian Medical Association Journal were fired after a dispute with the publisher over an article about emergency contraception. The deposed editors have joined a distinguished club whose members include: George Lundberg, whom the American Medical Association deposed as editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association after he published a sex survey in 1999 at the height of the

Credit: COURTESY OF ROBERTA FARRELL, ZYGEM" /> Credit: COURTESY OF ROBERTA FARRELL, ZYGEM Twenty-five years ago, New Zealand researchers Roy Daniel and Hugh Morgan made an arduous six-week expedition across sea, ice, and snow in search of thermophilic bacteria on the volcanic slopes of Mount Erebus, the world's most southerly active volcano. Erebus rises some 3,660 meters from Ross Island, in the icy oceans near Antarctica. As the two men made their way to within 90 meters of the summit,

Credit: © TED SOQUI/CORBIS" /> Credit: © TED SOQUI/CORBIS With its tropical climate and persistent moisture, New Orleans has long been a hotbed of fungal disease and research. But when hurricane Katrina blew through, the town quite literally became one giant mycology laboratory. "We're the mold capital of America now," says Seth Pincus, director of the Research Institute for Children at Children's Hospital, New Orleans. Mold is everywhere, on everything. Pincus, an immunologist,

Wildlife biologist Rick Hopkins Credit: COURTESY OF RICK HOPKINS" />Wildlife biologist Rick Hopkins Credit: COURTESY OF RICK HOPKINS When Vicki Long visited California's Western Riverside County Regional Conservation Authority to find out what it was doing to protect the mountain lion, her favorite cat, from land development, she decided the answer was "not enough." And while she had read every study she could get her hands on as part of her life-long fascination with the mountain lion, al

VITAMIN D FIGHT? >> On April 8th, at the 13th Workshop on Vitamin D in Victoria, British Columbia, Barbara Gilchrest, who gained notoriety for asking a colleague at Boston University to resign after he wrote a book that championed sunlight for the prevention of cancer, will be paired up with Edward Giovannucci, who champions sun exposure for adequate vitamin D. Gilchrest's talk will be entitled "Sun Protection and Vitamin D: Three Dimensions of Obfuscation."ECOLOGICA

Here's how to prevent critical biological data repositories from disappearing into the ether

Tony Hunter discovered tyrosine kinases because he was lazy - then the fun began

The fall and rise (and fall) of a pharmacogenetics poster child

Credit: JASON VARNEY/http://www.varneyphoto.comVARNEYPHOTO.COM" /> Credit: JASON VARNEY/http://www.varneyphoto.comVARNEYPHOTO.COM As a medical student at Catholic University in Rome, Enza Maria Valente remembers helping her genetics professor, a priest in his sixties, as he struggled to calculate probabilities for passing on a genetic disorder. "I would just pick up the answer even before he finished the calculations," she says.Despite her pedigree predilection, Va

Credit: COURTESY OF MARISA DOLLED-FILHAST, HISTO Rx" /> Credit: COURTESY OF MARISA DOLLED-FILHAST, HISTO Rx Traditional histopathology analysis has two basic problems. First, it isn't granular enough: Pathologists typically grade overall marker-staining intensity using a four-point scale. The other problem is that these measurements don't account for the sometimes-subtle changes in subcellular localization that can indicate disease. Beta-catenin, for instance, is a biomarker for colon can

New York State researchers would like to jump on the bandwagon for state- supported embyonic stem cell research. The heads of 17 New York universities and institutions with substantial biomedical research programs released a white paper (www.rochester.edu/news/pdfs/stemcellwhitepaper.pdf) in February that makes a scientific and economic case for the state to fund such research. The document, urges Albany legislators to pass two stem cell funding bills that would allocate $300 million and $125

Credit: © PHOTODISC" /> Credit: © PHOTODISC A new collaborative between the US Food and Drug Administration, National Cancer Institute (NCI), and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will bring scientific rigor and validation to biomarker research, say the agencies. The Oncology Biomarker Qualification Initiative (OBQI; www.fda.gov/oc/mous/domestic/FDA-NCI-CMS.html) will be "a partnership between these three agencies to really for the first time collectively think about how we creat

The National Academy of Sciences is organizing a new committee to periodically update voluntary guidelines it issued last year (http://nap.edu/catalog/11278.html?onpi_newsdoc02162006) on human embryonic stem cell research. A call by several scientific organizations and individual scientists prompted the decision, according to Bill Kearney, spokesperson for the Academy. The committee, under the auspices of the organization's National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, will be suppor

Credit: COURTESY OF GREG HAMM" /> Credit: COURTESY OF GREG HAMM In the middle of 1981, Greg Hamm was a 30-year-old software programmer newly hired by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory to head up its DNA data library-a database that did not yet exist. So he set about making one. "We had journals publishing sequence data in increasingly small point size type, which was useless," he says. "It was clear that one thing that was needed was a transmission format, a way to send the data f