March 2002

The movie begins with three compartments, or vacuoles, docked like nanometer-sized flying saucers inside a yeast cell. The boundary membranes, which look like interior walls, are where the three vacuoles meet. Suddenly, they break loose, flapping inside the outer membrane in what has become a single organelle. This is membrane fusion—essential for transferring chemical information inside cells—and, until now, nobody knew how it happened. The previous model of a radially expanding por

Tom Sargent remembers the day a student in his lab forgot to add boiling chips to phenol before firing up the heater on the distillation apparatus, and the panicked shouting and tearing off of the lab coat, goggles, gloves, and shoes that ensued when the phenol superheated and boiled over. "Fortunately he wasn't hurt," said Sargent, now chief of the section on vertebrate development at the National Institute of Child and Human Development, "but what a mess." Then, there was the time he hooked up

See also: "Partners in Research, Competitors in Pay" The year was 1987 and Bill Mahaney was doing what he does; playing in the dirt. Mahaney, a geology professor at York University in Toronto, was standing on a mountain in Rwanda with primatologist David Watts, observing some very hairy miners. The mountain gorillas were digging holes measuring 2 to 3 meters deep, and then eating the soil, presumably, in search of vitamins. Such dining is called geophagy. Courtesy of NASA/Marshall Space Flight

This year's annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science attracted about 6,400 scientists, science journalists, and others to Boston Feb. 14-19. Topics of discussion ranged from bioterrorism to dinosaurs to ice cream to bird brains (www.aaas.org/meetings). Following are notes on just a few of the sessions. Age-Old Dilemma: Genes vs. Environment As neuroscientists strive toward unearthing the very roots of human emotion and thought, the ethical and legal ramifications

In the 1940s, the mass production of penicillin led to a sensational reduction in illness and death from bacterial disease. A resulting golden era of bacterial research emerged with new classes of antibiotics, and by 1969, US Surgeon General William H. Stewart told Congress: "The time has come to close the book on infectious disease." As a result, fewer new students specialized in bacterial physiology, and federal funders shifted their focus to more immediately pressing diseases, as did many pha

Traveling the road from basic research to marketable product takes a vehicle that can make many turns, twists, dips, and climbs, much of which takes place in the valley of death. That's the period during which a technology or product of research is too new to market; it shows commercial promise, but more research is needed to validate its apparent potential. Until that research is done, and the potential affirmed, traditional funders of commercial ventures—who generally want to know what t

Some members of the Ohio State Board of Education are maneuvering to have "intelligent design" (ID) taught to Ohio students as an alternative to teaching them about biological evolution.1 These board members were pursuing the inclusion of ID in the biology curriculum despite unambiguous opposition from the relevant science advisory committee. One board member apparently regards this development as a chance for Ohio "to be on the cutting edge." Unfortunately, this cutting edge will only serve to

I would like to bring the following aspects into the discussion on deoxygenating ballast water.1 There is a vast difference between real circumstances in ballast tanks and a laboratory circumstance—much bigger difference than usual between the laboratory and the field. To make any even indicative conclusions, some trials should be carried out in a small-scale real situation. The biggest difference is that in an untreated or poorly treated ballast tank you have already various degrees of ru

The vision of the International Space Station1 has become a fiasco because of the needless vision that helped create it. It was literally a Star Trek-inspired capital sink, and manned Mars missions will be no better, because there's no scientific imperative for the project. If approved, it will be less a fantasy of exploration than just another massive pork barrel, and almost certainly stripped of any scientific value by the shortcuts built into the project to allow the expensive technological c

I can understand that a scientist wants to proceed with all kinds of tests and missions,1 but the truth of the matter is that there is nothing out there [in space] that we know of that is of much value. Sure we can point to the global communications improvements attributed to our encounter with space, and that is a wonderful thing. As a matter of fact, it looks to me like it is the only wonderful thing out there. If Mars were made out of solid gold, we couldn't afford to go get it. Let's be hone

Early in his career, Russ Altman and members of his lab at Stanford University devised a new data analysis strategy. They drafted the manuscript about their approach and, before sending it to a computer science journal, showed it to the biologists whose raw data they had used. These colleagues expressed great distress at seeing their results in the methods paper, and insisted the team delay submitting the manuscript until they prepared a paper detailing the biological conclusions. Altman agreed

A gadabout scientist in business suit and silk tie replaces yesterday's white-coated gent stuck in the lab. Today's life science researcher works in an interactive profession that requires enormous amounts of conversation, idea sharing, and plenty of social skills. "Science is politics," says Alexander Heyl, a genomics researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany. And networking is part of the politics. "Networking is important because it keeps you current in your field and makes yo

When I gave birth to my son a couple of years ago, I wondered how I would balance my work and family life, day to day. How would I meet a big deadline if the daycare center informed me my son had a fever? What would happen if my train from the office got delayed? I decided to work at home, and with my husband's help, my family has muddled through. Bench scientists usually can't work at home, however. They can only seek employers who will allow them to dash to daycare centers should their childr

Groucho Marx, Cleopatra, and Thor. Such popular names from history and mythology often enter discussions in a gene lab, and usually not even during the coffee breaks. Though seemingly trivial, and unrelated to the business of genetics, these mythic monikers not only help postdoc trainees and their mentors weather long hours of workplace toil, but they also offer answers to a tall question: "So what do I name this gene?" Mountains, machines, and maneuvers typically take their discoverers' surname

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It may still be winter, but the United States is already girding for a resurgence of human West Nile virus infections. This year, the sentinels for the advent of West Nile season will be not only dead crows on city streets or in suburban backyards, but animals at zoos nationwide, thanks to a program that is the brainchild of veterinary pathologist Tracey McNamara of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx, NY. McNamara, who, in 1999, first realized that the dead birds found on the grounds of th