August 2000

They're here. Gene chips, carbon nanotubes, and other products, that is, that show that the science of the very small is getting very big. And in biological and biomedical research, nanotechnology--the manipulation and construction of materials and structures at sizes of billionths of a meter--is becoming increasingly important, shrinking the borders between biophysics, biochemistry, structural biology, and other life science fields while seeding new industries. Central to this are exploi

Neurons die all the time--routinely during nervous system development and to a limited extent in healthy adults. But understanding exactly how they die under less-than-ideal conditions could be the key to treating a number of neurological maladies--from stroke and brain trauma to neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. As cell death research proliferates, much of it focused on cancer, investigators continue to debate the extent to which neurological ailment

Graphic: Cathleen Heard A week after the controversial XIII International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, a much smaller gathering in Atlanta took a broader view of the current emergence and reemergence of many infectious diseases. The International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases 2000, held July 16-19, attracted more than 2,000 attendees representing 35 nations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Society for Microbiology, the Council of State

The bacterium that causes cholera has joined the elite club of organisms whose genomes have been sequenced. Since 1817, seven pandemics of cholera have left millions dead from the dehydration caused by relentless diarrhea. But the disease has been noted for at least 1,000 years. "Cholera is one of the most ancient diseases we know about. Its home is the Ganges delta in India and Bangladesh; it has a long history there. It became a worldwide disease in 1817, when the first pandemic started

Fewer than 40 years ago heat shock proteins (HSPs) seemed to many researchers little more than a curiosity in Drosophila. Elizabeth Craig, professor of biomolecular chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, remembers that some scientists used to regard HSPs as "something weird that a fruit fly does." She has been studying these proteins and the genes responsible for them in yeast for more than two decades. Today HSPs are the object of intense work by scientists in the United States and

Courtesy of Photographic Services, Indiana University Jeffrey Palmer Mention gene sequencing and most people probably think of disease cures and supercrops. But genes mean a whole lot more, including deep insight into how present-day species got here. Indiana University biology professor Jeffrey Palmer practically invented the field of plant molecular systematics and phylogeny--using genes to inform taxonomic relationships and evolutionary history. According to Palmer's colleague at India

From left, Mike Karberg, Alan Lambowitz, and Huatao Guo Usually considered useless stretches of bases, introns are removed from RNA before it is translated into a protein. Now Alan Lambowitz, director of the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas, and his colleagues have put group II introns to good use (H. Guo et al., "Group II introns designed to insert into therapeutically relevant DNA target sites in human cells," Science, 289:452-7, July 21, 2000). Eventual

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When a terrorist cult released lethal sarin gas in a crowded Tokyo subway in 1995--killing 12 people and making hundreds of others ill--police, fire, and emergency rescue teams rushed to the scene to treat and evacuate those who were ill and to contain the damage. In that case, it was apparent immediately that a toxic substance had been released. But what would have happened if the terrorists had released deadly organisms such as those that cause smallpox or anthrax? A microbe released in

Two Views I was pleased to see Ricki Lewis' article "Reevaluating Sex Reassignment."1 The piece is good as far as it goes, but it fails to do justice to the academic work that has been under way for the past five years, and which has used reasoned analysis to call for a change in the practice of sex reassignment surgery at birth. Such academic work has argued instead for greater gender variation and autonomy for the patients on whom surgery is now imposed. I recommend to the readers of The Scien

Above, from left: Xu Luo, Xiaodong Wang, and Imawati Budihardjo. In apoptosis, death signals from outside a cell are conveyed to various organelles inside a cell through an intricate network of molecules acting as messengers. These two Cell papers outline two independent identifications of a critical missing link in this signaling pathway. They show that the cytosolic protein Bid carries a death signal from the cell membrane to the mitochondria. Identifying Bid's signaling role allowed research

Easy Estimation The dotMETRIC™ protein and nucleic acid assays from Geno Technology Inc. of St. Louis make estimating protein and nucleic acid concentration simple and quick, with no expensive equipment. To estimate protein concentration, 1 µl of protein solution is mixed with the supplied dilution buffer and spotted onto a test strip. The resultant spot diameter is proportional to the concentration of the sample. The assay takes only eight to 10 minutes to perform and can detect as

A few years ago, when I was relatively new to the University of Connecticut Health Center, I invited Barry Bloom, my mentor from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, to present a seminar sponsored by a Burroughs Wellcome Visiting Professorship. We have a ritual in the immunology graduate program that is, I suspect, not unique to us. Following the seminar, we arrange for the graduate students in the program to share lunch with seminar speakers and talk to them. This is usually a somew