June 1999

At Cornell University there is "preliminary discussion on a national symposium" to be held at the upstate New York campus to discuss, among other things, the rising costs of subscriptions to commercially published academic journals, according to Ross Atkinson, Cornell's deputy university librarian. The backdrop for the potential symposium? A number of recent significant events in the world of academic publishing: The release in December 1998 of the Journal Price Study1 by a Cornell Universit

It's going to be a preprint service. It's going to be a reprint repository. It's going to kill off society journals. It's going to save them. It's going to compete with commercial titles. It's going to complement them. There appears to be no consensus on the effect E-biomed, a potential government-backed electronic publishing service proposed by Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health, will have on other journals--both paper and electronic. Nor does there appear to be much a

John Losey thought his Nature paper might attract some attention, but not the media "whirlwind" of "a good 60 calls" that disrupted his life for a few days. Losey, assistant professor of entomology at Cornell University, "expected to be busy, but not quite this busy." What prompted the fuss? By claiming that a gene for a Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxic protein makes corn pollen poisonous to Monarch butterflies,1 Losey's team ignited another round in the volatile politics of genetically modifi

Editor's Note: The National Academy of Sciences has elected 60 new members and 15 foreign associates from 10 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. In this article, The Scientist presents photographs of most of the new members and comments from some of them. A full directory of NAS members can be found online at www.nas.edu/nas. When in 1977 the genes of eukaryotes were found to be riddled with nonprotein-encoding stretches of bases,

"Thermotoga was selected because it is near the base of the Woesean tree," says Craig Venter, TIGR chief scientific officer and president of nearby Celera Genomics Corp. The Woesean tree is the three-pronged depiction of the domains of life named for Carl Woese, the University of Illinois microbiologist who discovered the Archaea in 1977.2 The Archaea are microorganisms that lack nuclei as do traditional Eubacteria, yet have transcriptional and translational machinery and other characteristics

"Drink milk," advertisements demand. Fight osteoporosis before bone loss occurs. They make a good point, considering that nothing on the market will restore a significant amount of lost bone mass. Current therapies can only stop or help slow down the process. However, scientists at Chiroscience Research and Development in Bothell, Wash., hope to actually treat osteoporosis. They have identified a novel gene coding for a protein that may be involved in bone-density control. This "bone mass gene

Date: June 7, 1999Precast Gel Table FMC Latitude™ Midigels Analyzing DNA on gels is not what it used to be. In the last two years, several new precast gels for nucleic acid analysis have been introduced to life scientists. Based on some novel and creative ideas, a few of these products have undoubtedly raised more than a few eyebrows. Others have probably generated comments like "It's about time." For example, it takes some adjustment to consider running a dry agarose gel--one that eli

MALDI-TOF Table Micromass' laser-addressable sample array target for MALDI Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization-time of flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry has become, in recent years, a tool of choice for large-molecule analyses, especially for proteins. Published applications address protein and nucleic acid sequence, structure, purity, heterogeneity, cleavage, posttranslational modification, and a host of other molecular characteristics that are often difficult to study