May 1998

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

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

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

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

Date: May 11, 1998 Author: Steve Bunk Do apes have feelings? Do they recognize and understand emotions? Behavioral and biomedical scientists are beginning to put aside old differences concerning such questions and combine their efforts to shed new light on what nonhuman primates may reveal about human evolution. A national leader in this emerging interdisciplinary approach is the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. In September of 1977, the university establ

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

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

It seems like such an obvious idea once it's stated: With the explosive growth of scientific literature and the concomitant fragmentation of the scientific community into narrow specialties, there must be undisclosed connections lurking. Suppose one field of science has linked medical condition A with symptom B, and a completely different field has linked dietary deficiency C with that same symptom B. The literature then would contain an implicit logical link between A and C, but unless a resea

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

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

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

Date: May 11, 1998 At the Primate Speech Center, Mokobo Tries Some Stand-Up Comedy

NEW AND IMPROVED: Hoechst Merion Roussel's new research facility (inset) in Bridgewater, N.J. will house activities in biotechnology, automated screening and robotics, computational and medicinal chemistry, molecular modeling, and biophysics. Automated high throughput screening (above) will allow researchers to search huge chemical libraries for promising therapeutic compounds. OPENING DAY AT HOECHST Hoechst Marion Roussel (HMR) Inc., based in Frankfurt, Germany, marked the beginning of a new

Both tenure and the involvement of academic faculty in research are under increasing attack by legislators and other leaders outside of academia. These critics from the business and other worlds often show little understanding of what makes a great university or the reasons for its procedures. Indefinite tenure is not a lifetime guarantee for an individual but rather a distinguishing characteristic of certain positions in some institutions--including, but not exclusively, universities. U.S. S

Date: May 11, 1998 Author: C. Subah Packer and Nancy J. Pelaez Current pressure on science teachers may have little to do with science as an endeavor. Science curricula have become many isolated small topics with low demands. According to A Splintered Vision: An Investigation of U.S. Science and Mathematics Education (W.H. Schmidt et al., eds., Dordrecht, The Netherlands, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), the average United States science textbook at the eighth-grade level discusses between 5

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

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