December 2004

It's interesting that you claim there is absolutely nothing to back up the belief that it is our exposure to chemical toxins in the environment, caused by industry and nonorganic farming, which is to blame for the soaring rates of cancer over the past 30–40 years.1 How can you say in one fell swoop that our food is safe if you haven't conducted extensive research to establish that significant levels of various chemicals are never inserted into the food supply system? You can't, but you cho

Your correspondent suggests that science may be making the combat theater safer for soldiers.

you may want to consider the other type of structured water, namely, inside proteins.

he had his doubts about its validity.

In March, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) created the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, meant to be the centerpiece of a new national system to prevent bioterrorists from seeing research they could transform into bioweapons (see http://www.the-scientist.com/news/20040305/04). But since then, the board has never met, its members have not been chosen, and its professional staff is not yet in place. As of earlier this month, the news page of its Web site had not

reported that several high-level scientists and officials at the National Institutes of Health had collectively received more than $2.5 million in consulting fees and stock options from drug and biotech companies, the NIH, Congress, and scientists are still at odds over the agency's conflict-of-interest rules.

Asia started this year braced for another SARS epidemic, but the real infectious disease story turned out to be avian influenza, which spread wildly among the region's poultry in January and February.

Richard Clapp, whose yet unpublished study of cancer deaths among IBM workers at semiconductor plants has been the subject of controversy, says he is finally submitting his data to a print journal.

The body of a caterpillar is the site of both a great feast and a gruesome familial struggle.

Charles Darwin spotted it.

The first published study linking gene to disease is often far from the last word on the subject.

magazine, 71% of American men believe their dogs understand them at some telepathic level.

Sometimes, the number of times a paper has been cited barely begins to describe the importance of the work.

Researchers have identified a key enzyme in sea urchin egg fertilization.

Small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) appear to silence genes in mice without triggering an immune response, according to researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

By exploiting a malaria parasite's "Achilles heel," researchers in Germany say a transgenic whole-organism vaccine for humans may be possible.

If you want to know how biology will be practiced in the coming decades, check out a recent National Academy of Sciences colloquium on frontiers in bioinformatics.

Analyzing protein and DNA sequences has become a daily routine in most life-science laboratories.

islaunching the most inexpensive microarray scanner to date.

Discovering molecules that modulate protein-protein interactions is challenging, because the protein interfaces generally lack recognizable binding sites.

Targeted retroviral delivery of DNA is effective but hard to control, and can often prove cytotoxic due to insertional mutagenesis.

X-ray crystallography typically is used to capture static images of molecular structure.

When a working map of the human genome was announced in June 2000, it was immediately clear that it would open new avenues of study and transform the life sciences, both in academia and in industry.

The career outlook for life scientists hit a rocky patch at the start of the 21st century.

This past spring the Novartis subsidiary, Sandoz, made a bid to sell a copycat version of human growth hormone in the European Union and was rejected, triggering a law-suit between Sandoz and the EU that is still ongoing.

The renowned Canadian literary scholar, Northrop Frye, once wrote: "The more trustworthy the evidence, the more misleading it is."

A post-election "lame duck" Congress recently returned to Washington, DC, and approved an omnibus funding measure for fiscal year 2005, which began October 1.

A majority of Swiss voters support a new law that will allow stem cells to be extracted from 7-day-old human embryos for research purposes.

Stem cell researchers in Asia expressed relief at the recent United Nations decision to move away from a total ban on human cloning.

It's been six years since human embryonic stem cells appeared on the public radar screen, and we still don't know what to call them.

The holidays seem to add a burden that pushes people over the edge.

By long-standing policy, scientific data are not public until a reviewed manuscript is published.