July 2001

In theory, using cellulosic biomass makes a lot of sense. Take what would otherwise be waste or animal feed--agricultural and forestry residues, recycled paper, and other organic waste--treat them with acid and the right enzymes, and create relatively clean-burning ethanol and other byproducts. In doing so, there would be less landfill, pollution, and a reduced national dependence on oil, more than 55 percent of which comes from overseas. In reality, while the apparent energy crisis has made so

A paneless window offers a view from an overhead walkway onto the artificial ocean of the Biosphere 2 Center, or B2C. It's a strange and fascinating sight, here under the Santa Catalina Mountains near dry little Oracle, Ariz., about 30 miles north of Tucson. Except for the walls and ceiling of glass triangles that enclose this million-gallon simulation of a Caribbean-type sea, the only obvious, unnatural object is a vacuum pump that provides a tidal pulse at the 25-foot deep end. Near the shallo

Two years do not a trend make, but it does seem that with each passing summer, the number of human West Nile virus cases tends to decline. That said, there is no reason to relax. No one can predict reliably from year to year whether this, or any other mosquito-borne viral illness, might come back to infect humans, says Jim Miller, West Nile coordinator for New York City. "West Nile has been well documented since it was introduced here two years ago. It's a totally new virus in this part of the w

Thirty-five years after mammography screening demonstrated a 30 percent mortality reduction,1 researchers are still searching for an ideal breast cancer screening tool. At the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in San Francisco, members of an Institute of Medicine panel described their recommendations to spur development of such a test. Earlier this year, the panel issued a report titled Mammography and Beyond: Developing New Technologies for the Early Detection of Breas

Mae West once said, "Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly." Slow is certainly the word when it comes to plant sex, but that didn't stop a lot of people from taking a peek at a flowering Titan arum in the University of Wisconsin's botany greenhouse recently. When the department's prize arum decided to do its thing, the university on the shores of Lake Mendota in Madison let the whole world play voyeur every 30 seconds via a video camera connected to the Internet. Why the fuss? The Titan ar

President George W. Bush announced his intention to nominate physicist John H. Marburger director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, following concerns from members of the scientific community that the president had diluted the power of the position by waiting so long to fill it (M. Anderson, B. Maher, "White House help wanted list worries scientists," The Scientist, [15]13:34, June 25, 2001). Marburger directed the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) since 1

The biotechnology business has ridden a roller coaster in the financial markets for the past 18 months. The gyrations have been enough to make even the most stalwart investor swallow hard. Enthusiastic over the potential of human genome sequencing and depressed about the downturn in the dot-com markets, investors drove up values in biotech stocks by 300 percent and more. But by spring, the high-tech stocks' Titanic pitches had finally helped tow biotech stocks down by 50 percent. Now, with analy

Backers of a new cluster of business incubators in St. Louis hope to make America's heartland a hotbed of new life sciences companies. Five venture capital funds are now operating in an area where risk capital was once a rarity. Three have raised more than $60 million to invest in technology and life sciences firms; two more plan to raise another $300 million. "It's astounding when you think about it-five funds trying to raise money at the same time, when our kind of money is very scarce in th

Increased scrutiny by federal drug regulators and continued mergers and acquisitions activity could curb expansion in biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, according to analysts and economists. A capacity constraint caused by a shortage of manufacturing facilities also could chill the overheated biotech market and job growth as companies exhaust their three-year funding cycles in the next few years, cautions Robert Toth, portfolio manager of the medical technology fund of EGM Capital in S

For the first time ever, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) wants to support M.D.s who aim to bridge basic science and clinical research. HHMI has opened a national competition to recruit up to 10 investigators who hold M.D.s or M.D.s plus Ph.D.s for patient-oriented research. Nomination invitations were sent to 119 institutions, including medical schools, research institutes, schools of public health, and selected independent hospitals. A committee of distinguished scientists will choos

Chronobiologists, those who investigate circadian rhythms, or daily clocks, are finally making concrete links between sleep patterns in humans and a menagerie of well-studied animal models. 

An international group of researchers recently provided a glimpse of how disease shapes evolution in its work on G6PD (glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase) deficiency, an X-linked, hemopathologic trait that confers resistance to malaria (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/expresspdf/1061573v1.pdf). The study, involving genetics, evolution, anthropology, and more, offers insight into nature's response to malaria, which kills 2 million annually. As with sickle cell, G6PD deficiency correlates to a reduced risk

For this article, Steve Bunk interviewed Rudolf Aebersold, cofounder, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle. Data from the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that Hot Papers are cited 50 to 100 times more often than the average paper of the same type and age. S.P. Gygi, Y. Rochon, B.R. Franza, R. Aebersold, "Correlation between protein and mRNA abundance in yeast," Molecular and Cellular Biology, 19:1720-30, March, 1999. (Cited in 114 papers) At virtually all levels of life sciences, fro

For this article, Steve Bunk interviewed Claire M. Fraser, president, the Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, Md. Data from the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that Hot Papers are cited 50 to 100 times more often than the average paper of the same type and age. K.E. Nelson, R.A. Clayton, S.R. Gill, M.L. Gwinn, R.J. Dodson, D.H. Haft, E.K. Hickey, J.D. Peterson, W.C. Nelson, K.A. Ketchum, L. McDonald, T.R. Utterback, J.A. Malek, K.D. Linher, M.M. Garrett, A.M. Stewart, M.D. Cotton