March 1999

When J. Craig Venter proposed last May to use the "shotgun" technique to sequence Drosophila, many scientists doubted that blasting such a large genome into billions of base pairs, then reassembling it in one fell swoop would succeed.1 On the brink of the project's beginning, skepticism remains. But an agreement between Celera Genomics Corp. of Rockville, Md., and the University of California at Berkeley's Drosophila Genome Project Group, may render that uncertainty irrelevant. The Berkeley gr

Call it the angiogenesis inhibitor shuffle. Bristol-Myers Squibb of New York dropped clinical plans for the protein angiostatin, but is proceeding to Phase I with a small molecule. A National Cancer Institute lab that last fall questioned the viability of endostatin now confirms the protein can be synthesized and may be back on track for human tests. And a third, unnamed protein, not yet reported in the scientific literature, has been licensed to Genzyme Corp. of Framingham, Mass., with clinica

What's the biochemical basis for our learning and storing the names, events, sights, and sounds that stay with us for a lifetime? Can we, in fact, reduce and explain these bits of nostalgia in terms of the inner workings of cellular and molecular mechanisms, phenomena in the brain at the synapses between neurons? Seth Grant and Richard Morris More than 30 years ago, investigators believed that they'd taken a huge step toward doing precisely that. Terje Lomo, then a Ph.D. student at the Univer

Eric Carmen/ARCADIS Geraghy & Miller Phytoremediation--the use of trees and plants to help clean up toxic waste sites--is not only a growing science; it's also a growth industry. One report estimates that the phytoremediation market in the United States will expand from $16.5-$29.5 million in 1998 to $55-$103 million by 2000 and to $214-$370 million by 2005.1 In addition to offering job opportunities for environment-related physical scientists, the industry also will need life scientists, s

Edited by: Eugene Russo J. Taunton, C.A. Hassig, S.L. Schreiber, "A mammalian histone deacetylase related to the yeast transcriptional regulator Rpd3p," Science, 272:408-11, 1996. (Cited in more than 195 papers since publication) Comments by Stuart L. Schreiber, professor of chemistry at Harvard University Stuart Schreiber Vincent G. Allfrey, now a professor emeritus at Rockefeller University, first detected histone deacetylase, or HDAC, activity in nuclear extracts 34 years ago; soon

 In March 1996, a laboratory from the University of Rochester announced the discovery of an enzyme integral to unlocking the still-mysterious intricacies of DNA transcription and gene activation, the most basic of cellular processes.