May 1998

More than five million people visit Lancaster County, Pa., annually. They crowd small towns to catch a glimpse of a Mennonite family on the way to church in a horse-drawn buggy, and they jam country backroads to marvel at an Amish farmer and his mule plowing a field. To many visitors harried by the pace of modern living, the Amish and Mennonites represent a simpler, purer, and more pious way of living. To others, they represent a rich source of scientific data. Each year investigators in medi

A wave of anxiety is sweeping the nation's 125 medical schools. These schools and their affiliated teaching hospitals--the academic health centers where new doctors are minted and where cutting edge biomedical research and medicine is practiced--are being squeezed financially by cost-conscious health maintenance organizations. Managed care providers steer their members who need medical care to nonteaching hospitals where costs are lower or, when their members do see doctors at academic health c

As Mark Twain may--or, according to some sources, may not--have said about the weather, everybody has grumbled for years that National Institutes of Health peer-review study sections are stacked against clinical research, but nobody ever does anything about it. Now, that's changing, along with a lot of other standard operating procedures in NIH's peer-review system. NIH's Center for Scientific Review (CSR), which runs the panels that review about 70 percent of NIH grant applications, is about

Vectors in development seek to benefit from earlier trials The gene therapy field resembles a toolbox containing instruments researchers haven't quite mastered, and the number of devices--viral and nonviral vectors--in this toolbox keeps increasing. "There are all these different tools out there," notes A. Dusty Miller, researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. "People are still trying to figure out what tools to use for what diseases." Photo: Richard Lobell Photography

The article by Barry A. Palevitz and Ricki Lewis, "Show Me The Data: A Nobel Lesson In The Process Of Science" (The Scientist, 11[24]:8, Dec. 8, 1997) is excellent. The day before I got my hands on the article, I discussed with my colleagues at Tulane University Medical School how Peter Duesberg's recent visit to our institution left me with an empty feeling about the power democracy bestows upon those who have much to say with little to prove. I listened attentively to Duesberg's seminar and m

I cannot agree that, "Science's pivotal role is to...convince both Congress and the public to reduce CO2 emissions. . . ." (P. Smaglik, The Scientist, 12[1]:1, Jan. 5, 1998). The role of science should be to research the global warming problem and lay out all of the relevant facts. The article fails to mention: That the warming of the past 100 years occurred before 1940, well before the bulk of the greenhouse gases had been emitted; That it was followed by a cooling in both hemispheres lasti

G.S. Omenn, G.E. Goodman, M.D. Thornquist, J. Balmes, M.R. Cullen, A. Glass, J.P. Keogh, F.L. Meyskens Jr., B. Valanis, J.H. Williams Jr., Scott Barnhart, Samuel Hammar, "Effects of a Combination of Beta-Carotene and Vitamin A on Lung and Cardiovascular Disease," New England Journal of Medicine, 334:1150-55, 1996. (Cited in at least 226 publications to date) Comments by Gilbert S. Omenn, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor HALTING FINDINGS: Michiga

J.M. Graff, A. Bansal, D.A. Melton, "Xenopus Mad Proteins Transduce Distinct Subsets of Signals for the TGFß Superfamily," Cell,85:479-87, 1996. (Cited in at least 120 publications to date) Comments by Jonathan M. Graff, Center for Developmental Biology, Department of Molecular Biology and Oncology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas FROG FLIPSIDE: Jonathan M. Graff of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center discovered that Xmad1 induced ventral mesoder

Viruses have long been recognized as useful vehicles for delivering genetic information into cells, from the earliest days of molecular genetics and pioneering work of Hershey and Chase on transducing bacteriophages. And since the development of techniques for disabling the virus-production machinery, viral vectors have been used extensively for cloning and expressing genes in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic systems. Adenovirus is one of a handful of eukaryotic viruses in use today--the only no

BugStopper from Whatman, Inc. Out with the old and in with the new. Progress. Change. These ideas come to mind when one first encounters the BugStopper™, a new product from Whatman, Inc. Offered as a high tech replacement for the ubiquitous cotton plugs used for sealing culture flasks, the BugStopper revolutionizes the late 19th century's cotton plug with 21st century materials and technology. Resembling a large, hollow rubber stopper, the BugStopper is manufactured from transparent, me

he search for methods to visualize proteins resolved by electrophoresis on everything from cellulose acetate strips to polyacrylamide gels goes back to the origins of the electrophoresis itself. When DISC electrophoresis was introduced in the early 1960's (B.J. Davis, Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 121:404, 1964), amido black was the protein stain used most frequently. As the need for staining methods with increased sensitivity and staining uniformity grew to meet the demands of pro

Date: May 11, 1998 Author: Deborah A. Wilkinson Products for the Chemiluminescent Detection of DNA t's late at night. You've added radiolabeled probe to your Southern blot and just placed it in the incubator. Time to go home! But not quite. Now you have to clean up the radioactive waste that oozed out while you were sealing the bag. "There has to be a better way," you think. Well, you might want to consider one of the nonradioactive, chemiluminescent detection systems. The high backgrounds and