July 1998

Four years after its discovery, the weight-controlling protein hormone leptin is still making news. At the American Diabetes Association meeting in Chicago June 14, researchers from Amgen Inc. of Thousand Oaks, Calif., announced promising results of a Phase I clinical trial of leptin. And more than 100 papers and posters featured leptin at the Endocrine Society's annual meeting in New Orleans, June 24 to 27. Much of the excitement, though, lies beyond leptin, with the other players in the sign

About ten years ago Antonia Demas, a self-described "middle-aged woman,'' returned to graduate school after raising a family, intending to develop the work she had been doing informally for many years. Volunteering in an elementary school in Trumansburg, N.Y., near Ithaca, she had used food and cooking in the classroom as teaching tools, and she proposed to explore ways of tying the school lunch program to the academic curriculum and improving education about nutrition. She has now become embro

SEALED AND DELIVERED: Pasteurized Eggs has won USDA's first seal certifying the efficacy of the process for making eggs nearly Salmonella-free. The difference between pasteurized and unpasteurized eggs from the shell is hardly visible. The pasteurized ones (top) are slightly cloudier. Eggs, sunny-side up, have been on the path to becoming a relic of the past. Salmonella enteritidis (SE) has become one of the most common causes of bacterial foodborne illness in humans in the United States, an

In science, things often aren't as simple as they seem. This is certainly the case for the genetic code. Even as elegant experiments in the 1960s assigned DNA and messenger RNA (mRNA) base triplets to specific amino acids, researchers were wondering if a protein's blueprints were the sole meaning imparted by those long strings of A, T, G and C. But back then, they could do little more than wonder. Today, with more than a dozen genomes sequenced, researchers can ask age-old questions as well as

Who sets research priorities and goals at the National Institutes of Health? Obviously, scientists who have requisite knowledge of biomedicine play a major role. But a recent study by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) calls for changes at NIH that could give the public a bigger part in setting the scientific agenda. And an IOM report released July 8 is bound to stir debate over priority setting at the nation's single largest source of funds for biomedical research. In March of this year, IOM, un

Editor's Note: In this essay, the authors--both scientists and writers--discuss recent science news stories and express their opinions on how the stories were handled by the media, as well as how scientists and journalists deal with each other. In this issue of The Scientist, we also have two other features on communicating science: Commentary on page 8 and Opinion on page 9. The "B" word--breakthrough--divides scientists and journalists as no other. Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather invoke it regula

Observant readers may have noticed a small but significant change on the front page of this issue of The Scientist --we have changed the subtitle of our publication from "The Newspaper for the Life Sciences Professional" to "The News Journal for the Life Scientist." While this change is of no earth-shattering importance in the greater scheme of things, it has significance to our editors and writers, and it affects the way we present ourselves to the world. The content and appearance of The Scie

STATE OF THE ART: Washington University's Marc R. Hammerman turned his wife Nancy's idea into reality when he transplanted developing kidneys into adult rats. ARTFUL SCIENCE The skilled hands of a surgeon can only do so much to assure the success of an organ transplant. Despite great advances in medicine, the body's immune system remains the ultimate judge of whether to accept or reject. But researchers at Washington University (WU) in St. Louis have found a promising method for growing kidney

S.Q. Jing, D.Z. Wen, Y.B. Yu, P.L. Hoist, Y. Luo, M. Fang, R. Tamir, L. Antonio, Z. Hu, R. Cupples, J. Louis, S. Hu, B.W. Altrock, G.M. Fox, "GDNF-induced activation of the Ret protein tyrosine kinase is mediated by GDNFR-alpha, a novel receptor for GDNF," Cell, 85:1113-24, 1996. (Cited more than 170 times since publication) Comments made by Gary M. Fox, Department of Molecular Genomics, Amgen Inc., Thousand Oaks, Calif. Gary M. Fox, left, and Shuqian Jing Below the spatula and to the left i

Paul Volberding C.C. Carpenter, M.A. Fischl, S.M. Hammer, M.S. Hirsch, D.M. Jacobsen, D.A. Katzenstein, J.S. Montaner, D.D. Richman, M.S. Saag, R.T. Schooley, M.A. Thompson, S. Vella, P.G. Yeni, P.A. Volberding, "Antiretroviral therapy for HIV infection in 1996--Recommendations of an international panel," JAMA-Journal of the American Medical Association, 276:146-54, 1996. (Cited more than 180 times since publication) Comments by Paul A. Volberding, chairman of the board of the International A

Packard CytoGem localization of cellular peroxisomes and nuclei. Green fluorescent protein (GFP) has been busy in the 1990s, having been removed from the jellyfish Aequora victoria and transfected into just about every type of cell possible. Since the first such application of GFP was reported (M. Chalfie et al., Science, 263:802-5, 1994), new uses for this workhorse have arisen on a regular basis. One of the latest developments of GFP technology is found in Packard Instrument Company's coll

Cells transfected using FuGENE 6 reagent and protocol supplied by Roche Molecular Biochemicals. MCF-10A cells transfected with a GFP construct (pGreenLanternn-1; Gibco/BRL) and fixed with formaldehyde and counter-stained with DAPI to reveal nuclei. GFP expression (green) was detected by fluorescence microscopy using a standard FITC filter set. DAPI staining (various shades of blue) was detected by fluorescence microscopy using a DAPI filter set. Transfected cells have a light blue (almost whit

Date: July 20, 1998Precast Gels Warning: Neurotoxin. Cancer suspect agent. This product contains a compound known to cause cancer. Wear gloves, eye protection, and dust mask and use in a fume hood. Wash thoroughly after handling. Skin contact, inhalation, or ingestion may cause nervous system disorders. In case of contact, flush with water for 15 minutes. Yuck. The label on your bottle of acrylamide makes itself clear: weighing out acrylamide and pouring your own polyacrylamide gels is a poten

Date: July 20, 1998CCD Cameras, Image Processing Software For the biologist interested in cell structure-function relationships or cell and tissue dynamics, the quest has long been for a magnifying detector that is stable, quantitative, and sufficiently sensitive to eliminate phototoxicity or photobleaching and, in the limit, allow continuous observation without perturbation. If the data from one's detector can be immediately analyzed and displayed in a favorite software application, so much th