February 1998

With the passage last year of Proposition 215 in California and similar measures in Arizona and other states, voters have indicated their belief that marijuana should be made available for medicinal purposes. In response, the Office of National Drug Control Policy requested that the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences undertake an 18-month study to assess the science base, the therapeutic use, and the economics of medical marijuana. The study will not be completed until th

Editor's Note: Scientists looking for a crash course in effective communication of their research findings should catch Alan Leshner in action. During recent months, the personable director of the Rockville, Md.-based National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has been moderating a series of "Town Meetings" in such metropolises as Philadelphia, Dallas, Chicago, and Atlanta. In the keynote talk he gives on the myths and realities of drug abuse and addiction, he juxtaposes graphs and cartoons with a

SPREADING THE WORD: Materials developed by NIDA use a neuroscience approach to teach students about the dangers of drug abuse. A new program from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), "Mind Over Matter," is using neuroscience research results to teach, rather than preach to, students about the dangers of addictive drugs. "People have historically seen drug abuse as purely a social problem that results from voluntary behavior and remains voluntary. But science has taught us that addictio

Membership in the Institute of Medicine (IoM) is becoming a family affair. Increasingly, members of the same family-husbands and wives, and also parents and their offspring-are being elected to the honor society. Six couples now boast membership. There also are four instances in which a parent and a son or daughter have been elected to the institute. And in one extraordinary case, there's a husband and wife and their daughter. "Perhaps both nature and nurture helped to shape the offspring," say

Edited by: Steve Bunk THERE THEY ARE: Harvard's Wilma Wasco and colleagues found the subcellular locales of the presenilins, in the endoplasmic reticulum and the Golgi complex. D.M. Kovacs, H.J. Fausett, K.J. Page, T.W. Kim, R.D. Moir, D.E. Merriam, R.D. Hollister, O.G. Hallmark, R. Mancini, K.M. Fstein, B.T. Hyman, R.E. Tanzi, W. Wasco, "Alzheimer-associated presenilins 1 and 2: Neuronal expression in brain and localization to intracellular membranes in mammalian cells," Nature Medicine, 2:2

Edited by: Steve Bunk M.P. Boldin, T.M. Goncharov, Y.V. Goltsev, D. Wallach, "Involvement of MACH, a novel MORT1/FADD-interacting protease, in Fas/APO-1- and TNF receptor-induced cell death," Cell, 85:803-15, 1996. (Cited in more than 250 publications as of January 1998) Comments by David Wallach, Department of Biological Chemistry, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel Photo: Mike Goldberg DIRECT ROUTE: David Wallach of the Weizmann Institute wrote a paper that he says provided the f

In the few years since the introduction of peptide nucleic acid, or PNA (P.E. Ni et al., Science 254:1497-1500, 1991)-a nucleic acid analog with a peptide rather than sugar-phosphate backbone-no less than 200 papers detailing some 25 different applications of the technology have been published. Antisense inhibition, strand invasion, PCR clamping, all manner of hybridizations, and even the routine detection of single base changes in DNA are but a few of the proven uses of PNA. PerSeptive Biosyst

Sensitivity, ease of use, and shelf life are all considerations in choosing detection systems for Western blots and dot blots. Chemiluminescent substrates allow the sensitive detection of targeted proteins in immunoblotting protocols with stable, hard-copy results on film-all without the hazards and other problems associated with the use of radioactive probes. Numerous chemiluminescent substrates are commercially available. They generally consist of luminol and H2O2 with undisclosed chemical e

Date: February 2, 1998 Chart 1 Chart 2 Prokaryotic expression systems, reviewed in the September 1, 1997, issue of The Scientist were part of the early repertoire of research tools in molecular biology. Although the expression of recombinant protein in prokaryotes provided a means to develop other research tools (antibodies, for example ) and study basic aspects of biological function, the scope and depth of this research were limited, especially with regard to eukaryotic proteins. The de novo

Date: February 2, 1998 Chart 1 Spectrophotometry is a technique most scientists have used at some point in their careers. Whether for confirmation of a compound's identity or for quantitation of a protein, spectrophotometry in the ultraviolet and visible spectrum has rapidly found increasing applications in numerous fields within the last few years. To help meet this demand, manufacturers of instrumentation for UV/Vis spectrophotometry now provide machines with a wide spectrum of features and