March 1998

Question of the day: Why is basic research, particularly biomedical research, like highways and bridges? Answer: Because Congress loves them both, especially in this election year. 'MIRACULOUS': NIH, under the direction of Harold Varmus, would get an 8.4 percent increase in its budget under President Clinton's proposed plan. For that reason, as much as any other, the spending plan that Congress is now writing for the fiscal year that begins October 1 shapes up as one of the best research-fundin

Date: March 16, 1998 New Drug Development A regional lab visit highlights challenges of agency-wide change At the Food and Drug Administration's Central Region office in Philadelphia, cabinetsful of documentation offer only a vague notion of the paperwork involved in getting a new drug through FDA's review and approval process. Nicholas Falcone, the district office's coordinator of new drug applications (NDAs) and abbreviated new drug applications (ANDAs)-the latter for generic compounds-hefts

DECOY RECEPTORS: Genentech's Avi Ashkenazi suspects that using ligands to bind to decoy receptors present in healthy cells, but not in cancer cells, could trigger apoptosis in tumors. Scientists studying signal transduction have spent the past several years piecing together the cell's apoptotic machinery-the complex signaling mechanisms that tell damaged cells to commit suicide. The discovery of more signaling proteins and their receptors has given biotechnology companies potential tools to fi

CALLING ALL MENTORS: Washington's Steven Nourse says disabled students often are not encouraged by teachers and counselors to study science. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 requires that United States companies comply with mandates to improve accessibility for disabled individuals. Yet U.S. Census data show that disabled people constitute more than 10 percent of the general work force and only 2.7 percent of the scientific and engineering work force. To improve opportunities for th

Edited by: James Kling M. Packer, M.R. Bristow, J.N. Cohn, W.S. Colucci, M.B. Fowler, E.M. Gilbert, N.H. Shusterman, "The effect of carvedilol on morbidity and mortality in patients with chronic heart failure," New England Journal of Medicine, 334:1349-55, 1996. (Cited in more than 160 publications to date) Comments by Edward M. Gilbert, division of cardiology, University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City STANDARD OF CARE: Research by Utah's Edward Gilbert suggests that blocking nore

Edited by: James Kling P.A. Hoodless, T. Haerry, S. Abdollah, M. Stapleton, M.B. O'Connor, L. Attisano, J.L. Wrana, "MADR1, a MAD-related protein that functions in BMP2 signaling pathways," Cell, 85:489-500, 1996. (Cited in more than 115 publications to date) Comments by Jeffrey L. Wrana, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and department of medical genetics and microbiology, University of Toronto CHAIN REACTION: A team led by Jeffrey Wrana of the Hospital for Sick Children

It's 8 P.M. on a Sunday and you've just loaded your samples onto a gel and switched on the power. You have an hour to kill, so you settle down to search the Web for sangria recipes for next week's departmental wing-ding. Is this (a) an efficient use of time or (b) a sad way to spend a weekend? If you chose (a), you might benefit from some time-management tips from scientists who've learned how to squeeze the most out of their work weeks. Sure, science takes time. "It's like a sponge," acknowled

Companies produce DNA sequencing kits with the expectation that their kits will outperform their competitors' kits. While the majority of available kits boast better performance and superior results and have pictures to prove it, it is not always possible to reproduce the promised results of some kits. It has been my experience that you can't tell how good a kit is until you try the protocol yourself and see if the outcome is as advertised. Most importantly, though, does the kit you selected pe

Resolution of OligoPrep (left) versus standard agarose (right). OligoPrepTM Synthetic Meltable Gel Matrix From National Diagnostics Imagine that purification of DNA or protein fragments was unnecessary. Imagine an agarose gel that remains liquefied at room temperature after melting. Well, imagine no more. National Diagnostics (Atlanta, Ga.) has developed OligoPrepTM, a synthetic meltable gel matrix intended as an agarose replacement for the separation, purification, and recovery of DNA, PCR p

Good cash management is a fact of any researcher's life and is particularly important to most academic labs and companies where operating on a tight budget is the rule. LabConsumer has established Great Buys as a forum for communicating particularly goods deals which have come to our attention.Listed below are sale items that may be of interest to your laboratory. If your company has sales or promotions to announce, contact LabConsumer. ISC BioExpress Catalog Specials (www.bioexpress.com) Gen

Liquid chrom-atography is to the protein re-searcher what the hammer is to the carpenter. Liquid chromatographic techniques comprise a major portion of the repertoire of protocols the protein researcher can call upon to purify and analyze proteins. Modern liquid chromatography has come a long way since its infancy-when early matrices were capable of providing only crude separations-to modern matrices and technologies that can accomplish the purification of a protein to homogeneity in a single

More and more, products are developed "to make our lives easier". From self-cleaning ovens to fast-food drive-throughs to filing taxes by phone or computer (April 15 is rapidly approaching), more efficient and painless ways to go about our chores are developed daily, and biotechnology is no exception to this process. Preassembled, prepackaged bottle top filters are a prime example of a product designed to save scientists precious time in the laboratory. MSI Internally Supported Filter. Image c

"A giant killer macrophage? Doctor, this is madness!"

POWER EXCHANGE: Molecular biologist James Battey has become the second person to head NIDCD. SECOND GENERATION AT NIDCD Molecular biologist James F. Battey, 45, has been named the new director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) of the National Institutes of Health. Battey, who had been serving as acting director of NIDCD, succeeds the recently retired James B. Snow, Jr. Snow, a former University of Pennsylvania professor of otorhinolaryngology and h

The great scientist-philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington wrote that his words about "the soulless dance of bloodless electrons" might be truth, but they were not reality. He urged us to get away from theoretical speculations periodically and watch a sunset. Speculation is our business, but when people ask us about a technical matter, they deserve an answer that has real-world meaning, not a hypothetical argument. For example, one day consumer activist Ralph Nader was debating radiation pioneer Ralp

Comedienne Joan Rivers's familiar line "Can we talk?" is now featured as one of the public-service announcements heard inside New York City taxicabs encouraging riders to buckle their seat belts. Rivers's "can we talk," "we're-in-this-together," "let's-get-down-to-business" approach quickly and effectively establishes rapport with the people she is addressing. Her approach is one the scientific community should consider as we strive to be heard by our fellow citizens and our elected representat

Your article "Nobelists Beat Adversity to Advance Science" (P. Smaglik, The Scientist, Dec. 8, 1997, page 1) should be a renewed lesson in the history of science to individuals responsible for grant evaluations at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. The extant peer-review system forces scientists to fit their work and hypotheses into currently accepted paradigms and ignores the fact that scientific discoveries or technological developments during the next gran

'ABSOLUTELY AMAZING': Yerkes' Harriet Robinson notes that research in the field has grown at an extraordinarily rapid rate. With more pathogens developing resistance to antibiotics, and with the increasing vulnerability of human populations to infectious diseases, vaccine research has taken on a new urgency. Among the technologies being developed for the vaccines of the 21st century is the novel idea of using naked DNA-a simple loop of DNA containing an antigen gene-to induce an immune respons