March 2006

S. Jay Olshansky, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago's School of Public Health, is an author of The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Aging. He, Daniel Perry, executive director of the Alliance for Aging Research, Richard Miller, professor of pathology at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Robert Butler, founding director of the National Institute on Aging, call for an extension of healthy life in In Pursuit of the Longevity Dividend. "We're

FEATUREThe Longevity Dividend Redrawn from Koloman Moser's Frommes KalendarIllustrations by Joelle Boltan intervention, such as a pill, that could significantly reduce your risk of cancer. Imagine an intervention that could reduce your risk of stroke, or dementia, or arthritis. Now, imagine an intervention that does all these things, and at the same time reduces your risk of everything else undesirable about growing older: inc

FEATUREThe Longevity Dividend Your Money for Your Life How one company carved itself a piece of the anti-aging industry pie BY ALISON MCCOOKILLUSTRATIONS BY JOELLE BOLTWhen it comes to aging, consumers don't slow down for science. The pleas of thousands, starving for a pill that will slow, stop, or reverse the inevitable, clog the Internet. With an insatiable desire for something that doesn't yet exist, people are using themsel

FEATUREThe Longevity Dividend Plugging the Mitochondrial LeakBY NICK LANEWhy does an elephant live twenty times longer than a mouse? Partly just because it's bigger, but even after correcting for body mass, mammals with fast metabolic rates (high oxygen consumption), such as mice, age and die swiftly, whereas animals with slow metabolic rates, such as elephants, live longer and age more slowly.ILLUSTRATION BY JOELLE BOLTM

FEATUREThe Longevity Dividend The Trouble with MarkersBY MICHAEL O'NEILLEvaluating a potential anti-aging therapeutic poses a unique challenge. When the endpoint is natural death, assessing efficacy in a realistic timeframe requires a surrogate, but biomarkers for aging have been elusive. ARTICLE EXTRASRelated Articles: In Pursuit of the Longevity DividendWhat should we be doing to prepare for the unprecedent

FEATUREWish You Were Here Courtesy of the Kalamazoo Valley MuseumDowntown Kalamazoo, circa 1950'sThe Midwestern city of Kalamazoo lost its pharmaceutical anchor but scrambled to keep its scientists. Is there a lesson for other regions - and researchers?ARTICLE EXTRASRelated Articles: Eight Ingredients to Build a Life Sciences HubCan You Host the Next Biotech Hub?BY KEITH O'BRIENOn a spr

FEATUREWish You Were Here Eight Ingredients to Build a Life Sciences HubCOURTESY OF JEREMY FRECHETTE1) A Rainmaker: When Kalamazoo was in danger of losing its top scientific talent in 2003, Bill Johnston (pictured at left) and the other board members of Southwest Michigan First had the foresight and, just as importantly, the money to do something about it. Johnston estimates that since 1999, his economic development group has poured $

FEATUREWish You Were Here Can You Host the Next Biotech Hub?MAP: TODD HARRISON NUMBER OF COMPANIES IN TOP US BIOTECH STATES Regions vie for companies, but critics question if companies will move beyond the major hubs. Source: Ernst & Young, 2005. "Top Americas Biotechnology Centers"Fifteen years ago, Tom Clark walked into Ted Levine's office at Development Counsellors International (DCI), saw a bunch of weary guys sitting at their de

FEATUREHuman Interactome Project An investment of $100 million should be enough to correlate the genome with function, and identify new basic research and drug targets BY MARC VIDAL© THOM GRAVESMapQuest and global positioning systems have radically changed the way we travel. By showing us where we are relative to where we want to go, these tools simplify the job of getting from point A to point B, and make trave

FEATUREHuman Interactome Project Interactome Yields Data, But Is It Significant? An investment of $100 million should be enough to correlate the genome with function, and identify new basic research and drug targets BY JEFFREY M. PERKELARTICLE EXTRASRelated Articles: Time for a Human Interactome Project?An investment of $100 million should be enough to correlate the genome with function, and identify new

FEATUREHuman Interactome Project Making Money from the InteractomeBY KATE FODOR© THOM GRAVESAs companies consider their roles in the massive human interactome project, they are keeping in mind some hard-learned lessons. Chief among their case studies is Celera Genomics, which proved that databases cannot, per se, be a firm's main revenue source. "Companies don't talk anymore about the raw data they can amass fo

FEATUREBest Places to Work 2006: Postdocs Jason Varney | varneyphoto.comBY TED AGRESWhether they are in North America, Europe, or the Middle East, this year's top-ranking research institutions in The Scientist's Best Places to Work survey offer postdocs such important features as collaborative, intellectually challenging environments, quality research facilities, and flexibility in designing and conducting research projects.

FEATUREBest Places to Work 2006: Postdocs   Top 35 Institutions in North America Rank Rank in 2005 Name/Location Country Type Strengths Weaknesses 1 12 The J. David Gladstones Institutes, San Francisco USA Independent Networking Family Benefits Remuneration 2 2 Fred Hutch

FEATUREBest Places to Work 2006: Postdocs Top 35 Institutions Outside of North America Rank Rank in 2005 Name/Location Country Type Strengths Weaknesses 1 45 Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, Basel Switzerland Independent Facilities Remuneration Value Benefits 2

FEATUREBest Places to Work 2006: Postdocs Most Important Factors Rank in North America in 2006 Rank in the US in 2005 Factor Category Rank outside North America in 2006 Rank outside the US in 2005 1 1 The training and experience I receive as a postdoc will be valuable to me in my future career. Value of the Po

FEATUREBest Places to Work 2006: Postdocs Cancer Centers Court PostdocsBY ISHANI GANGULIARTICLE EXTRASRelated Articles: Best Places to Work 2006: Postdocs The J. David Gladstone Institutes Top 2006 List Feds Win with D.C. Centrality Postdocs Blossom at Plant Science Centers Switzerland: High Standards and Quality Science Long Live the Northland! Life on the Upswing for UK PostdocsTables: Top 35 Institutions

FEATUREBest Places to Work 2006: Postdocs The J. David Gladstone Institutes Top 2006 ListBY ISHANI GANGULIARTICLE EXTRASRelated Articles: Best Places to Work 2006: Postdocs Cancer Centers Court Postdocs Feds Win with D.C. Centrality Postdocs Blossom at Plant Science Centers Switzerland: High Standards and Quality Science Long Live the Northland! Life on the Upswing for UK PostdocsTables: Top 35 Institutions

FEATUREBest Places to Work 2006: Postdocs Top 15 North American Institutions Rank in 2006 Rank in 2005 Name Country No. of postdocs in the life sciences Average annual postdoc salary (or salary range) Postdoc office, assc, or advisor? 1 12 The J. David Gladstones Institutes USA 83 $51,180 Office of Postdoct

FEATUREBest Places to Work 2006: Postdocs Feds win with D.C. CentralityBY ISHANI GANGULIARTICLE EXTRASRelated Articles: Best Places to Work 2006: Postdocs The J. David Gladstone Institutes Top 2006 List Cancer Centers Court Postdocs Postdocs Blossom at Plant Science Centers Switzerland: High Standards and Quality Science Long Live the Northland! Life on the Upswing for UK PostdocsTables: Top 35 Institutions

FEATUREBest Places to Work 2006: Postdocs Postdocs Blossom at Plant Science CentersBY ISHANI GANGULIARTICLE EXTRASRelated Articles: Best Places to Work 2006: Postdocs The J. David Gladstone Institutes Top 2006 List Cancer Centers Court Postdocs Feds Win with D.C. Centrality Switzerland: High Standards and Quality Science Long Live the Northland! Life on the Upswing for UK PostdocsTables: Top 35 Institutions

FEATUREBest Places to Work 2006: Postdocs Long Live the Northland!BY JOHAN NYMANARTICLE EXTRASRelated Articles: Best Places to Work 2006: Postdocs The J. David Gladstone Institutes Top 2006 List Cancer Centers Court Postdocs Feds Win with D.C. Centrality Postdocs Blossom at Plant Science Centers Switzerland: High Standards and Quality Science Life on the Upswing for UK PostdocsTables: Top 35 Institutions in

FEATUREBest Places to Work 2006: Postdocs Switzerland: High Standards and Quality ScienceBY STEPHEN PINCOCKARTICLE EXTRASRelated Articles: Best Places to Work 2006: Postdocs The J. David Gladstone Institutes Top 2006 List Cancer Centers Court Postdocs Feds Win with D.C. Centrality Postdocs Blossom at Plant Science Centers Long Live the Northland! Life on the Upswing for UK PostdocsTables: Top 35 Institution

FEATUREBest Places to Work 2006: Postdocs Life on the Upswing for UK PostdocsBY STEPHEN PINCOCKARTICLE EXTRASRelated Articles: Best Places to Work 2006: Postdocs The J. David Gladstone Institutes Top 2006 List Cancer Centers Court Postdocs Feds Win with D.C. Centrality Postdocs Blossom at Plant Science Centers Switzerland: High Standards and Quality Science Long Live the Northland!Tables: Top 35 Institution

The lot of postdocs may be improving a bit, but a new threat has materialized

The trouble with peer reviewIn response to the challenge offered at the end of the article entitled, "Is Peer Review Broken?"1 I offer the following: Thirty years ago, I submitted a paper for publication that was rejected by one reviewer because the data contradicted other data. I was unaware of the other data and, in fact, that data had never been published. However, only one other person in the world could have produced such data. To overcome this impasse, a colleague su

AGING NEVER GETS OLD On March 15, Jay Olshansky will be presenting the ideas he describes for slowing aging on page 28 of this issue at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization World Forum meeting in Oxford, UK, which runs from the 14th until the 17th.MILLIONS OF PATENTS On March 19, 1991, University of Florida microbiologist Lonnie O. Ingram was awarded the 5,000,000th US patent for "Ethanol production by Escherichia coli strains co-expressing Z

Credit: COURTESY OF SCREEN SIREN PICTURES" /> Credit: COURTESY OF SCREEN SIREN PICTURES If you're trying to impress the nuances of genetics research upon an unknowing public, featuring half-naked, singing deliverymen who shimmy their way up DNA-shaped "ladders of love" might not be the most obvious way to go. But that's what you get in The Score, a stylized laboratory drama that switches at will between goofiness and artful poignancy.The play-turned-film was the brainchild of

For more than two decades, Evan Balaban has honed his skills at manipulating embryonic tissue samples using tiny instruments of his own making. He can cut a small access window into a quail's egg, and using a scalpel no wider than a human hair, excise a few hundred thousand cells from the bird's developing central nervous system. This is only the first step of the intricate process required to place this minuscule brain into another animal's head. Some of these surgeries end in untimely

In the early days of January, the deep and chilly waters off the coast of Antarctica played host to a bitter confrontation between two old foes. As storm clouds rolled overhead, the crew of Japan's scientific whaling fleet found themselves battling once again with members of the environmental group Greenpeace, who had tracked them down with the intention of doing everything they could to stop their killing of whales.Videos of the encounters show the Japanese ships - two obs

Late last year, following the Kansas State Board of Education's decision to treat evolution as a disputed theory in elementary and middle school classrooms, Paul Mirecki, a professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas, announced plans to teach a counter-course: "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism, and other Religious Mythologies." Soon after that, the trouble started.After comments Mirecki made about the course on a privat

To intramural scientists at the US National Institutes of Health whose endgame is being published, scrawled notations, E-mail exchanges and antiquated lab instruments are the flotsam and jetsam of research. But to Victoria A. Harden, founder of the Office of NIH History, these materials are gold. "The American people were putting billions of dollars into the NIH and they were getting a tremendous product for the money, and nobody knew about it," says the 62-year-old Ha

The Journal of Cell Biology's image-screening process could have caught part of Woo-Suk Hwang's fraud. The editors encourage other journals to use it.

Should Sacramento, Albany, and Providence be taking over for Uncle Sam?

Infectious agents are threatening the world's crops

Ulrike Heberlein started out studying fruit fly eyes. So how did she end up inventing the inebriometer?

Uncovering the mechanism of cancer-causing defects in a notorious oncogene

Soon after the surprising announcement that the human genome had far fewer genes than most had expected, researchers began to realize that there were still a great many unexplored transcriptional start sites. Tom Gingeras' team at Affymetrix, along with Kevin Struhl of Harvard University and colleagues, confirmed some of these findings in a 2004 Hot Paper by mapping the binding sites for three DNA transcription factors: Sp1, cMyc, and p53. Using a combination of high-density olig

Credit: COURTESY OF PAUL KENYON" /> Credit: COURTESY OF PAUL KENYONMothering, good or bad, sticks with an individual according to a Hot Paper by McGill University researchers Michael Meaney, Ian Weaver, and Moshe Szyf. In 2004, the authors showed that in rat pups, high levels of licking, grooming, and arched-back nursing (LG-ABN) lowered the methylation state of the NGF1-A binding site of the glucocortoid exon 17 promoter, thereby increasing activation of the glucocortoid receptor gene

Credit: ART WOLFE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY" /> Credit: ART WOLFE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Scientists have long suspected that global warming might cause extinctions. But until a group from the University of Leeds produced an influential model in 2004,1 "nobody had managed to frame the question," says Chris Thomas, the paper's lead author, now at the University of York. Thomas' group modeled relationships between distributions of 1,103 animal and plant species and their habitats across 20% of Eart

K.K. Farh et al., "The Widespread Impact of Mammalian microRNAs on mRNA repression and evolution," Science, 310:1817-21, Dec. 16, 2005.Expression of mRNA carrying the conserved 7 nt sites matching microRNAs can be strong at developmental stages before microRNA expression but is reduced at a later stage. Genes preferentially expressed at the same time and place as microRNAs have evolved to avoid sites matching the miRNAs by adopting non-conserved sites.Fritz EcksteinMax Planck I

In order for the anthrax toxin to enter a cell, its receptor-binding subunit must heptamerize, thus allowing the two enzymatic subunits to join prior to endocytosis. Laurence Abrami and colleagues at the University of Geneva and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases recently revealed that endocytosis is regulated by counteracting posttranslational modifications in the receptor itself. Palmitoylation of the receptor's cytoplasmic tail facilitates endocytosis of the tox

Small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) have never before been implicated in alternative splicing. Stefan Stamm and Shivendra Kishore, of the Friedrich-Alexander University Institute for Biochemistry, suggest that HBII-52, a non-coding RNA located on chromosome 15 regulates alternative splicing of the serotonin receptor 2C located on the X chromosome.1 The snoRNA locus is maternally imprinted, and loss of paternal expression results in Prader-Willi Syndrome, a congenital disease

Credit: D. SAMUEL MARSH PHOTOGRAPHY" /> Credit: D. SAMUEL MARSH PHOTOGRAPHY As a medical resident specializing in psychiatry, Karl Deisseroth was tired of being served neurotransmitter soup. Brains are intricate, electrical structures, so why is mental illness so often framed as a chemical imbalance? To him, it made more sense to think in terms of circuits. "Talking to a patient that's depressed," he says, "you get a sense that activity is not flowing appropriately."Dei

Prefab kits blunt technical creativity. Have your students devise their own solutions.

If you answer 'yes' to these four questions, you probably do.

Credit: ILLUSTRATION: ANDREW MEEHAN/ACKNOWLEDGMENT: CLAUS LARSEN, BMG LABTECH" /> Credit: ILLUSTRATION: ANDREW MEEHAN/ACKNOWLEDGMENT: CLAUS LARSEN, BMG LABTECH View enlarged diagramThe days of single-mode microplate readers are over; multimode readers have taken over the lab. One such instrument, BMG Labtech's PHERAstar (shown here), can acquire fluorescence intensity, fluorescence polarization, time-resolved fluorescence, luminescence, absorbance, and PerkinElmer AlphaSc

Opportunities and challenges for biotechs follow people on health holiday

Will a bid to improve efficiency end up costing industry and academia?

ClinicalTrials.gov registrations are up, but how useful are the data?

Credit: GETTY IMAGES" /> Credit: GETTY IMAGES The eBay of intellectual property will launch this April, allowing Fortune 500 companies and mom-and-pop organizations to buy and sell technology patents both on the auction floor and online. The first large-scale, live intellectual property (IP) auction, initiated by Chicago-based merchant bank Ocean Tomo, will take place April 5-6 at the Ritz Carlton San Francisco and will be simulcast online. While only 15% of IP will be in the life sc

More comprehensive records will be available to international patent searchers with the unveiling this year of a major overhaul to the International Patent Classification (IPC) system, which more than 100 countries use as their major or sole method in organizing patent information. The new classification features two mutually compatible levels, core and advanced, meant to cater to the diverse needs of global intellectual property offices with varying sizes and resources. The core level

How to uncover a person's potential value when conducting a job interview

New programs can expand and broaden your skill set and improve you career prospects

While the question of bioethics has been receiving increased attention at business schools and within the scientific community, a new program at Harvard Law School seeks to match a study of ethics directly with the question of law. The recently opened Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics (www.law.harvard.edu/programs/petrie-flom) will promote research to address healthcare policy, biotech patent law, the bioethics of reproductive technologies, and other a

Credit: Photo: © Sam Ogden" /> Credit: Photo: © Sam OgdenKnown not only for her ability as a researcher but also for her skill at explaining to both her colleagues and the public what she does, Susan Lindquist was recently awarded Sigma Xi's recognition for outstanding science and science communication, the 2006 William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement. The prize brings further recognition for Lindquist, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Whitehead In

Credit: © AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY" /> Credit: © AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY Leading into World War II, American scientists scrambled for a way to determine what vitamins, particularly vitamin A, were in food in order to keep US soldiers well-nourished. But state-of-the-art ultraviolet and visible (UV-vis) spectrophotometry, which measures electronic transitions of a wide range of molecules as they absorb light, was cumbersome and expensive. In July 1941, Arnold