August 2005

The life sciences have been slow to embrace blogging.

was involved in some of the initial research on the importance and function of HIV coreceptors.

suggests that the inherent difficulty of quantifying certain parameters means the only way to understand some biological processes is to replace facts and coherent argument by appealing to randomness.

Helen Blau of Stanford has wisely observed, "Where we look and how we look determine what we see."

In a recent editorial, Richard Gallagher and Ivan Oransky conclude with the suggestion that "officials keep the human person of Pope John Paul II in view when crafting their next document.

have become very popular among life science graduate departments.

Soon after reproductive and developmental biologist Sudhansu Dey's group at the University of Kansas moved to new quarters at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., they began noticing that once well-established results on uterine gene expression and reproductive function in female mice procured from the same supplier, and of the same genetic strain, had become a lot less predictable.

Last year, after 15-year-old Katie Vanderwheele read an article about natural arsenic contaminating the drinking water in Bangladesh, she decided that tackling this global problem was a natural fit for a school science project.

bacteria can be found in every milliliter of human feces, and on a bad day in Reading University's food microbial science unit you can smell every one of them.

The yeast two-hybrid (Y2H) system can pump out vast quantities of data on a genome of any size.

The first statement that usually accompanies a talk or journal article on cellular biology is usually something like, "Life is complicated."

Cultivating scientific leaders is a bit like drug discovery.

Understanding the mechanisms that underlie aging remains a bedeviling problem, but not because of a lack of answers.

California may soon become the first US state to adopt legislation banning the manufacture and sale of children's products containing certain chemicals designed to soften plastics.

Courtesy of Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID, NIHIn a finding that further validates an emerging vaccine strategy, researchers in Italy and the United States have worked backward from genome to antigens to identify a protein cocktail that may confer global protection against group B streptococcus (GBS).1This discovery represents "one of the important ways in which the promise of genomics can be harnessed," says Victor Nizet of the University of California, San Diego, who did not participate in

In the largest study of its kind, researchers have shown that 35% of twin pairs have significant differences in DNA-methylation and histone-modification profiles.1 Moreover, the study suggests that gaps in epigenetic profiles widen with age. Arturas Petronis of the University of Toronto says, "It is good to have data that confirms what we long suspected."Manel Esteller of the Spanish National Cancer Center in Madrid and colleagues in Sweden, Denmark, Spain, England, and the United States studied

) colonies reveal an unexpected mode of reproduction.

Stereomicroscopes are not sexy

It's not often that an industry volunteers for tighter regulation and oversight.

Researchers have spent decades determining how proteins interact with each other in complex signaling networks by studying these relationships one at a time in isolation.

recently released the GenomeLab GeXP Genetic Analysis System.

Public health researchers have only a poor understanding of how infectious diseases spread.

In 2000, the type 2 diabetes drug Rezulin was withdrawn from the market after several dozen patients required a liver transplant or died due to liver failure.

With a PhD in chemistry and "a general passion" for the work, J. David Rozzell started making enzymes for drug companies seven years ago with a handful of employees in his Pasadena lab.

In June, Derek Lowe got some data.

The chief executive of the Hong Kong Hospital Authority, William Ho, has become the fourth top health official to resign in the aftermath of Hong Kong's SARS crisis.

Spanish science is in need of drastic and urgent reform if it is to keep pace with its European neighbors, according to a report that the Confederation of Spanish Scientific Societies (COSCE) released in June.

Courtesy of Scott Bauer, ARSFour weeks after delaying publication of a paper at the request of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the paper in late June.1 The study pinpoints areas in the dairy industry that are vulnerable to bioterror attacks.In the paper, professor of management science Lawrence M. Wein and graduate student Yifan Liu of Stanford University explain how bioterrorists could poison the US milk

For Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Cori Bargmann, the worm's the thing.