April 2007

By Meredith SmallCOMPANIES SUPPORTING OTHER COMPANIESIn the biotechnology world, service groups pick up crucial aspects from development through sales.Mark WickerJASON VARNEY | VARNEYPHOTO.COM In Greensboro, NC, Mark Wicker runs his own company, Carolina Research Glass, where he produces one-of-a-kind, hand-blown laboratory glass. One of only 600 scientific glass blowers in the country, Wicker works in Pyrex and produces about 500 objects a month. "I make drug- and aerosol-delivery devices, is

In our May issue, contributor Jerry Guo traveled to the Wolong Nature Reserve in China's Sichuan Province to learn what researchers there are doing to increase the panda population. Here, see the pandas at play ? and what they leave behind.

State of North CarolinaOffice of the Governor20301 Mail Service Center • Raleigh, NC 27699-0301Michael F. EasleyGovernorFebruary 26, 2007Dear Readers:Almost 25 years ago, North Carolina led the way to build a new economic engine called biotechnology. We created the world's first government-sponsored biotechnology center and began making systematic, long-term State investments in biotechnology infrastructure.Today North Carolina is the nation's third largest biotech state, with more than 350

Tarheel Teamwork Today's science depends on teamwork as experts from many fields come together. North Carolina's business leaders, government officials, and scientists started working together decades ago, and the results appear in the state's already powerful and continually growing science community. This section explores the history behind North Carolina's commitment to science, including the creation in 1959 of the 7,000 acre Research Triangle Park roughly in the center of the state. A qua

By Dennis MeredithTHE STATE OF LIFE SCIENCENorth Carolina combines academic, industrial, government, and private resources to drive research, development, and manufacturing A half century ago, the world was only beginning to grasp the stunning implications of Watson's and Crick's double-helix DNA structure. Amidst those earliest glimmerings of the genetic revolution, North Carolina was already laying the foundation for its 21st-century success in biotechnology. In 1959, however, the evidence o

By Angela SpiveyTHE SEEDS OF GROWTHThree governors help harvest the benefits of biotechnology.Governor Jim Martin© ASSOCIATED PRESSIt was 1977, and Jim Hunt, the newly elected governor of North Carolina, was determined that his traditionally agricultural state would start growing a more fruitful economy. "Early in his first term, Hunt clearly sent out a signal across the state that he was interested in higher-paying jobs," says Ferrel Guillory, who covered Hunt's governorship for the Raleigh New

By David SchoonmakerWELCOMING BIOTECH WITH OPEN ARMSThrough the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, the Tarheel State encourages industry investment. In 1984, biotechnology was anything but a household word, especially in North Carolina. Nonetheless, a group of Tarheel visionaries saw the future as it might be and set about to make it happen. The North Carolina Biotechnology Center was created that year by the state legislature as the nation's first private, nonprofit organization to further

STATEWIDE SCIENCE In many respects, the dividing line between academics and industry blurs across many areas of North Carolina. As depicted here, this state provides a home for some of the most powerful research institutions in the world. Much of the academic work, however, leads to new applications, as shown here in the work on stem cells by Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine's Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the genetic approach to diseases taken by Ol

Slideshow: The whirling fish kill Andrea Gawrylewski visits a western Maryland fishery as workers haul nearly 40,000 pounds of rainbow trout infected with whirling disease out of the raceways. var FO = { movie:"http://www.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/53046/fishy.swf", width:"550", height:"450", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); Please download the Adobe Flash Player to view this content:

By Russ CampbellTHE STATE OF ACADEMIC RESEARCHWorking together drives academic projects across the state. Several years ago, Duke University created a task force to look at the study of the psychological sciences around its campus in Durham, NC. "A question came up on whether the departments should be merged," says James N. Siedow, vice provost for research at Duke. "There was really good psychological research going on all over campus, but there was nothing tying everyone together. So ever

By Russ CampbellTHE STATE OF ACADEMIC RESEARCHWorking together drives academic projects across the state. Several years ago, Duke University created a task force to look at the study of the psychological sciences around its campus in Durham, NC. "A question came up on whether the departments should be merged," says James N. Siedow, vice provost for research at Duke. "There was really good psychological research going on all over campus, but there was nothing tying everyone together. So ever

Credit: © SHARON MORRIS" /> Credit: © SHARON MORRIS In the 1940s Jules Freund, inventor of Freund's adjuvant, worked on developing antibodies in horse to rabbit serum globulin. In a 1947 Journal of Experimental Medicine study, Freund describes the horses by number: 1026, 999, 1127. To others, they had names like Sylvester, Moses, and Doc Fried. The horses had retired from the New York City police department to reside at stables on a 170-acre plot of land in the tiny tow

Wake Forest University Health SciencesA Research and Economic EngineLast April, Kaitlyne McNamara walked across TV screens and into the hearts and imaginations of millions of viewers around the world. A victim of spina bifida since birth, Kaitlyne was finally living a more normal life after suffering for years with a tiny bladder. That story - about the world's first successful implantation of laboratory-grown organs in humans - was big news in 2006. Such big news, in fact, that Discover magazin

By Becky OskinTRANSLATING ACADEMICS TO APPLICATIONSToday's basic research transforms tomorrow's medicine and technology.Prenatal ultrasound image of a 12 week gestation fetus during an amniocentesis session. (Image was captured using a GE Voluson 730 Expert Ultrasound with a 3D probe.) Stem cells are more or less the body's blank-canvas cells that can produce virtually any others; they promise huge advances in medicine, perhaps one day even curing spinal injuries and more. There are problems,

By Mike MayTHE STATE OF INDUSTRIAL RESEARCHNorth Carolina's industry rejuvenates traditional fields and spurs new ones. Harry Hart understands that traditional crops, corn and tobacco, can no longer sustain his family farm. In fields that once lay fallow in the winter, Hart now cultivates the cool-weather canola plant, whose seeds are rich in oil. In his own backyard, Hart extracts the oil and mixes it with methanol and a catalyst in 50-gallon drums to produce a clean-burning biodiesel fuel

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3-D Neurogenesis: Catch a 3-D glimpse of new neurons in the brain This spinning 40-micron section of rat hippocampus shows new neurons in the granule cell layer of the dentate gyrus. Mature neurons are labeled in green with NeuN and proliferating cells are labeled in red with BrDU. The video was generated by BrainCells Inc, a La Jolla, Calif. company searching for new antidepressant drugs based on their ability to stimulate neurogenesis in the hippocampus. All antidepressants on the mark

Growing a New Antidepressant Nine years ago, Rusty Gage shattered a neuroscience dogma when he showed human brains give birth to new neurons. Today, a company is eager to take those findings to the clinic.By Kerry Grens ARTICLE EXTRAS 1 and Liz Gould and Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller had published a suite of studies on the effects of stress on neurogenesis in rodents.2 But the field was sparkling wi

A HARSH DECREE Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated ARTICLE EXTRAS1 "I think it really was a turning point in the acceptance of the phenomenon as being real," Gould says. In the late 1990s Gould observed neurogenesis in the adult tree shrew as well,2 but the question remained: Did it occur in humans? "For us to believe it's more than an epiphenomenon, we needed to see if it occurs in humans," Gage s

Talecris Biotherapeutics

Talecris BiotherapeuticsYou would be excused for supposing that Talecris Biotherapeutics, Inc., founded on April 1, 2005, is a young company. In truth, though, its roots go much deeper - both scientifically and into the North Carolina Piedmont - than might be obvious at first glance. Talecris was formed when two private investment firms provided the capital to acquire the blood-plasma business of Bayer HealthCare LLC's Biological Products Division. Among those assets were Bayer's state-of-the-ar

The paper trail By Kerry Grens ARTICLE EXTRAS Growing a New Antidepressant A Harsh DecreeBrain Cells Video 1928 Histologist and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramon y Cajal writes in Degeneration and Regeneration in the Nervous System, "In adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated." San

By David SchoonmakerINTENTLY FOCUSEDDemonstrating the power of combining scientific curiosity with product safety. STEVE PETTEWAYJASON VARNEY | VARNEYPHOTO.COM Stephen R. Petteway, Jr. regularly asks himself, "If I were a patient, what would I want to see in my products?" Unmet patient needs are his primary motivator, and he encourages the same attitude among the roughly 330 scientists, engineers, and technicians he directs at Talecris Biotherapeutics'

By Rachel DickinsonTURNING NATURE INTO TECHNOLOGYNorth Carolina's natural resources could spawn many advanced industries. Red Tide: A massive fish kill caused by toxic harmful algae bloom. Gymnodinium breve algae.© BRIAN DOMBROWSKIIn August 2006, the decade's worst red tide - an algal bloom that can be deadly to fish, turtles, sea mammals, and humans - hit Puget Sound in Washington State and shut down shellfish beds all along the sound. Such blooms have an impact on ocean waters around the w

The Death of Faith? Darwin's theory was part of a larger cultural shift towards naturalistic philosophy. Why is he still the target of so many attacks?By Brendan Maher ARTICLE EXTRASSPRING BOOKSStem Cells on ShelvesAn Awkward SymbiosisHigh in the TreesBloody IsleThe Enchantment of EnhancementBooks about BodiesNew Lab Man

An Awkward Symbiosis Can fiction and scientific autobiography coexist? By Jennifer Rohn ARTICLE EXTRAS SPRING BOOKS Stem Cells on Shelves The Death of Faith? High in the Trees Bloody Isle The Enchantment of Enhancement Books about Bodies New Lab Manuals In Brief Luminous Fish: Tales of Science

High in the Trees What can you learn about ecosystems from the top of a 100 meter redwood?By Andrea Gawrylewski ARTICLE EXTRASSPRING BOOKSStem Cells on ShelvesAn Awkward SymbiosisThe Death of Faith?Bloody IsleThe Enchantment of EnhancementBooks about BodiesNew Lab ManualsIn Brief The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, By Richar

Bloody Isle When genetics and history compete, who wins?By Newamul Khan ARTICLE EXTRASSPRING BOOKSStem Cells on ShelvesAn Awkward SymbiosisThe Death of Faith?High in the TreesThe Enchantment of EnhancementBooks about BodiesNew Lab ManualsIn Brief Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland, By Bryan Sykes, 320

By Myrna F. WatanabeSUCCESS IN TWO CAREERSCultivating an eye for targets. DANI BOLOGNESI JASON VARNEY | varneyphoto.com By all accounts, Dani Bolognesi has been tremendously successful. His Duke University laboratory did the early work on identifying anti-HIV activity in what would become AZT (zidovudine), the first drug developed against the disease. In March 2003, the Food and Drug Administration approved Fuzeon, an HIV fusion-inhibitor drug that cam

By Ed FieldTHE STATE OF REGENERATIVE MEDICINENorth Carolina has the resources, but needs a plan to advance. Ed Field is president and CEO of Aldagen, a clinical stage, regenerative medicine company in Durham, NC JASON VARNEY | VARNEYPHOTO.COM One of the most promising forms of emerging therapy is the use of a person's own or a donor's cells to treat a variety of diseases. This approach, often called cell therapy and more recently regenerative medici

The Enchantment of Enhancement Just because we can create superhumans, should we? By Faith McLellan ARTICLE EXTRASSPRING BOOKSStem Cells on ShelvesAn Awkward SymbiosisThe Death of Faith?High in the TreesBloody IsleBooks about BodiesNew Lab ManualsIn Brief The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, By Michael J. Sandel

BEYOND THE BENCHIn a state as advanced as North Carolina, science extends far beyond the lab bench or manufacturing line. For one thing, this section shows how scientific companies turned several North Carolina towns into high-technology centers. In addition, a state driven by science needs a strong academic system to keep up with the demand for workers. The article on here shows training in science that includes high school students, community colleges, and world-renowned universities. Conseque

Books about Bodies When the fictionalized glamour of forensics science recedes, will the stories still captivate?By Katherine Ramsland ARTICLE EXTRASSPRING BOOKSStem Cells on ShelvesAn Awkward SymbiosisThe Death of Faith?High in the TreesBloody IsleThe Enchantment of EnhancementNew Lab ManualsIn Brief Cause of Death: Forensic Files of a Medical Examiner, By Stephen D. Cohle and Tobin T. Buhk, 32

New Lab Manuals Everything I needed to know about science I learned in Driver's Ed.By Wendy Chao ARTICLE EXTRASSPRING BOOKSStem Cells on ShelvesAn Awkward SymbiosisThe Death of Faith?High in the TreesBloody IsleThe Enchantment of EnhancementBooks about BodiesIn Brief Recombinant DNA: Genes and Genomes - A Short Course, By James D. Watson, A

By Peter GwynneSHOW US THE MONEYDespite limited sources of capital, would-be entrepreneurs with solid biobusiness ideas can usually obtain financial support.Art PappasJASON VARNEY | VARNEYPHOTO.COMIt might lack the intellectual cachet of life science in Boston-Cambridge and the Bay area, but North Carolina boasts a significant amount of research in biomedical fields. The work consistently produces both intellectual property and scientist-entrepreneurs eager to exploit it by forming startup compa

Award-winning investigative reporter Katherine Eban's work has appeared in the New York Times and The New Yorker. Her first book, Dangerous Doses, exposes the exploits of pharmaceutical drug counterfeiters and polluters. On page 32, she explores the technology recently developed to bolster national security. She notes that "as a country we've spent billions on high-tech security gizmos and helpmates in the war on terror with much less information about whether those gizmos work, and

Want press coverage? Here's what to do - and what not to do.

"It is virtually useless to search for single factors as causes of complex diseases or to ascribe cause-effect relationships by simple, isolated, biochemical mechanisms." Hormones in milk Re: "What's in your milk?"1 Although Ron Kensinger claims that pasteurization reduces IGF-1, the opposite has been found.2 In addition, there is a huge difference in the ability of the body to regulate endogenous chemical signals compared to those which are foreign. There is a c

Rainbow Trout affected by whirling disease." />Rainbow Trout affected by whirling disease. In the early hours of a frigid March morning, a dozen men in waders and coveralls plunge into the icy raceway waters of the Bear Creek fish-rearing station in Accident, Md. Using large plastic baskets, they haul more than 50 pounds at a time of rainbow trout out of the cold water and into even colder air, where the fish are weighed and then tossed into a front-end loader, to be trucked to a plan

Alkis Psaltis has seen more than his share of sheep with the sniffles. Over the past year or two, in the course of researching the role of bacterial biofilms in sinusitis, woolly ruminants with nasal congestion have become almost a daily event for the scientist at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide, Australia. "Basically, the sheep get runny noses," Psaltis explains. "They get a purulent discharge and all the signs of an inflammatory response, including frank pus and friable muc

When the University of Nottingham, UK opened its new Center for Healthcare Associated Infections, a facility dedicated to studying and controlling "superbugs," The Guardian newspaper interviewed its director, Richard James, about why such a research center was necessary. He said: "This is a sophisticated army with astonishing weapons. And each time we develop something new, [bacteria] develop a defense for it." The use of such war metaphors in science and medicine is not new. As ear

Knockout mice reveal a path to necrosis.

The paper: F.W. Turek et al., "Obesity and metabolic syndrome in circadian Clock mutant mice." Science, 308:1043, 2005. (Cited in 90 papers) The finding: Joe Bass and others at Northwestern University found that mice with a mutated Clock gene showed both abnormal circadian rhythms and feeding behavior. Metabolic problems included obesity and abnormally high levels of blood cholesterol. The surprise: Circadian variatio

Credit: COURTESY OF ELSEVIER" /> Credit: COURTESY OF ELSEVIER The paper: E. Weisberg et al., "Characterization of AMN107, a selective inhibitor of native and mutant Bcr-Abl," Cancer Cell, 7:129-41, February 2005. (Cited in 89 papers) The finding: Imatinib (Gleevec) stunned the world with its high cure rate for chronic myeloid leukemia through the inhibition of tyrosine kinase Bcr-Abl. But, BCR-ABL mutations are a common cause of relapse

Credit: © STEPHEN J. KRASEMANN / PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC" /> Credit: © STEPHEN J. KRASEMANN / PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC The paper: C. Michaloglou et al., "BRAFE600-associated senescence-like cell cycle arrest of human naevi," Nature, 436:720-4, 2005. (Cited in 92 papers) The finding: Two groups of researchers from the Netherlands teamed up with US colleagues to show that the introduction of oncogene BRAFE600 induced cell-cycle arrest in human

Asger Hobolth at North Carolina State University's Bioinformatics Research Center and his team used a hidden Markov model to estimate that chimps and humans diverged from a common ancestor only about 4.1 million years ago.1 Hobolth looked at the probability distribution of 1.9 billion DNA base pairs across humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, searching for differences in the historical sequences. "Because recombination causes different parts of the genome to have different

Credit: © DARRYL SLEATH" /> Credit: © DARRYL SLEATH Birds, fish, and arthropods are among the animals that can distinguish linearly polarized light. For insects, perceiving the diurnally changing orientation of polarized light - called E-vector analysis - is a way to assist navigation. Stanley Heinze and Uwe Homberg, animal biologists at Philipps University in Germany, looked at locusts and uncovered the neural structure responsible for E-vector analysis - the protocerebral bridge lo

O.G. Shcherbakova et al., "Organization of β-adrenoceptor signaling compartments by sympathetic innervation of cardiac myocytes," J Cell Biol, 176:521-33, Feb. 12, 2007. The authors work suggests that the differential signaling of the beta1-adrenergic and beta2-adrenergic receptors in myocytes may, in part, be due to the differential localization and scaffolding of these receptors at specialized zones. Overall, this is a careful and beautifully presen

Credit: © LEAH FASTEN PHOTOGRAPHY" /> Credit: © LEAH FASTEN PHOTOGRAPHY Rachel Wilson isn't used to backing down from a challenge. The subject of her graduate work at the University of California, San Francisco - lovingly referred to by peers as "the project of death" - sought the molecular mediator of retrograde signaling, how postsynaptic cells communicate with presynaptic cells. As the list of candidates on her legal pad dwindled, her colleagues offered some less than helpful advi

In 1981 Sidney Pestka and colleagues at Roche purified recombinant human leukocyte interferon from bacteria setting the stage for its structure elucidation. Credit: COURTESY OF SIDNEY PESTKA / PBL BIOMEDICAL LABORATORIES" />In 1981 Sidney Pestka and colleagues at Roche purified recombinant human leukocyte interferon from bacteria setting the stage for its structure elucidation. Credit: COURTESY OF SIDNEY PESTKA / PBL BIOMEDICAL LABORATORIES In 1957, Alick Isaacs and Jean Lindenmann, b