May 2003

Frontlines | A League of Their Own ©2002 The University of Newcastle It was a soccer match that truly belonged in its own league: eight small dog-shaped robots, four to a side, kicked, caught, and scored, as their human programmers watched from the sidelines. Earlier this month, Carnegie Mellon University hosted the first International RoboCup Federation's American Open, gathering more than 150 researchers from North and South America to Pittsburgh, Pa., to witness the games. Carnegi

Frontlines | EU Power and Stem Cells Courtesy of Dennis Steindler A bit of a tussle is happening in the European Union over which official body can ban, or not ban, human embryonic stem cell research. The familiar ethical controversies are mixed with considerable legal confusion. A report released this month by the European Commission, which directs EU-funded research, says regulation of the research is in the hands of member states. However, the European Parliament voted to ban some forms

Images courtesy of Merck & Co. For the pharmaceutical industry, the numbers do not add up. Investment in drug development has tripled in the past 10 years to more than $30 billion (US), but the industry has fewer new drugs to show for it. After peaking at 131 in 1996, the number of new drug applications filed with the US Food and Drug Administration dropped to 78 in 2002. In response, pharmaceutical companies are scrambling to realign and reinvent research and development operations. Mass mer

Foundations | 'Unlimited in its Implications...'  Click for larger version (30K) One cold night in 1945, a Columbia University medical school student named Joshua Lederberg read Oswald Avery's 1944 landmark paper that identified deoxyribonucleic acid as the chemical that carries genetic information. Lederberg wrote his immediate reactions in a diary entry the next day: "I had the evening all to myself, and particularly the excruciating pleasure of reading Avery ... Terrific and unlimi

First Person | Sean B. Carroll Courtesy of Howard Hughes Medical Institute Sean B. Carroll, developmental biologist, rock 'n' roll lover, a man who will stand in five feet of water all day dredging for shark teeth, is dreading his advancing years. He's all of 42. A self-described jeans-and-sneaker-wearing regular guy, Carroll says his age is "very hard to get used to. I don't know, it seems I've been doing this too long." Earning his PhD in immunology at the age of 22--which he attributes

Science Seen | A Mortal Coil Courtesy of Greg Matera  A MORTAL COIL: Sandra Wolin of Yale University and Gregory Matera of Case Western Reserve University identified a new type of suborganelle, which they termed the perinucleolar compartment (green dots). Similar to coiled bodies (pink dots), the researchers hypothesize that the new suborganelle may be involved in ribonucleoprotein biogenesis. function sendData() { document.frm.pathName.value = location.pathname; result = false

So They Say "I was a dentist for years, but I never even thought about baby teeth until I looked at my daughter's carefully." --Sontao Shi, National Institutes of Health, on discovering a new stem cell source--baby teeth. From UPI "People who don't even know how to spell RNA are able to use this successfully in diverse biological systems!" --Thomas Cech, head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, on new genomics technology. From BioIT World Magazine "We had all these follow-on 'omic

5-Prime | Drug Development: Clinical Trials Who gets tested in Phase I Trials? As many as 80 healthy or sick human beings. Phase I trials occur after animal tissue and whole-animal studies have determined that the agent appears safe and effective for its intended use. This stage discerns mainly whether the agent is safe for humans and provides data to determine the pharmacological effects. Phase I studies, which last from two to six months, are observed closely so that the entire trial can

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." --Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) This applies equally to women and men. On April 2, 18 basic science grants from the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) were "defunded."1 Months previously, the successful applicants were informed by telephone that funding had been approved (the peer review process took place in November 2002), and they had budgeted on that basis. But on the day after the grants

Ned Shaw Columnist George Will has observed that when the Titanic steamed into that iceberg, the disaster was not democratic: 56% of women sailing in third class died, while only four of 143 women in first class perished. You don't need to ask which class was traveling near or below the waterline. When it comes to healthcare research, development and delivery--or, to be more precise, the lack thereof--those closest to the "waterline" are less-developed countries. Health-related R&D has b

One Link Found, Many To Go Researchers at the UK's Cambridge Institute of Medical Research (CIMR) and Merck & Co. reported a link between cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated protein 4 (CTLA-4) and autoimmunity (H. Ueda et al., "Association of the T-cell regulatory gene CTLA4 with susceptibility to autoimmune disease," Nature, e-pub ahead of print, doi:10.1038/nature01621, April 30, 2003). The researchers used positional cloning to search a 330 kb region surrounding the CTLA4 gene for polymorp

Images: left courtesy of CDC; right courtesy of Dana Johnson/Vanderbilt University Medical Center In the mid-1950s, AIDS did not exist, chemotherapy was in its infancy, and people with genetic immune deficiencies died. At that time, smallpox was a genuine health threat and vaccinations were required, for some people once every three years. Everyone carried a World Health Organization (WHO)-approved vaccination card with their passports. Parents needed them when their children changed schools.

Courtesy of Linda B. Schultz CHECK POINT: The 53Bp1-dependent checkpoint pathway. DNA double-strand breaks are caused by irradiation and other geotoxic events. The ATM [ataxia-telangiectasia mutated] molecule phosphorylates H2AX at or near the break, an event required for 53Bp1 phosphorylation and localization into nuclear foci. Nearly 15 years ago, Saccharomyces cerevisiae researchers at the University of Washington discovered the function of Rad9, the first DNA damage-checkpoint protei

Erica P. Johnson The dark side of the moon is a misnomer. Light reaches la luna's entire surface, but one half is unviewable from Earth. The human genome, the now essentially decoded1 map of life, likewise has a light side--the genes encoding mRNA and protein--and a dark side, which is coming into view for the first time. The dark side encompasses more than its opposite: The majority of the genome comprises intronic regions, stretches of repeat sequence, and other assorted gibberish that has a

Courtesy: Larry Marsh and Judit Pallos  IN A FLY'S EYE: The regular repeating structure of the Drosophila melanogaster compound eye is disrupted when polyglutamine (polyQ 108) is expressed, making the fly eye an excellent model for huntingtin-derived pathology. Dissecting the mechanism of neuronal demise in Huntington disease (HD) has had its share of twists and turns. It took a decade to go from marker1 to gene,2 and now, after another decade, the details are beginning to come together.

PATENT WATCH | Smaller, Better, Faster Transfection Assays Courtesy of Akceli Cambridge, Mass.-based Akceli has been awarded a US patent for a reverse-transfection assay method (US patent 6,544,790, issued April 8, 2003). Akceli says the method condenses more than 6,000 data points on a single microtiter plate, which can be imaged in about 20 minutes. "Our technology allows us to do very rapid compound profiling and target ID and validation," says David Chao, president and cofounder of Akc

Courtesy of UC Davis Medical Center  COMBI-KING: Kit Lam brings his expertise in combinatorial chemistry, an innovative technique for creating millions of new chemical compounds in just days, to the UC Davis Cancer Center. It's the new mix and match. In the computer industry, programmers refer to modularity--the ability to shuffle different sections of computer code to create new software. In the life sciences, the modules are peptides or molecular fragments that can be combined to yield

TRAINING @ | The Yeast Congress Courtesy of Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health WHAT: XXI International Conference on Yeast Genetics and Molecular Biology WHERE: Göteborg, Sweden WHEN: July 7-12, 2003 WHY: Yeast are model systems for genome evolution, biotechnology, cell and molecular biology. ADVANTAGES: Workshops, run by international yeast researchers, provide free exchange and access to information and research tools. DEADLINE: First come COST: (I

Courtesy of Bryan Sugar Nanotechnology has the intellectual property community buzzing about all the potential patentable technology coming out of nanotechnology spin-offs. But many intellectual property practitioners are sitting by idly as they watch this new emerging industry make the same trademark blunders as the last emerging technology, the Internet. The Internet industry, in naming companies, products, and services, placed the prefix "e" before descriptive or generic terms to inform th

Scientists cheered in 1972 when Congress created the Office of Technology Assessment, a PhD-laden think tank that was dedicated to providing policy analyses and technical evaluations for the House and Senate. They wept in 1995, when, in a burst of political pique and boastful penny-pinching, Newt Gingrich and his Republican Revolution abolished OTA. Resuscitation efforts started then, and continue--in futility. Thus, in the current Congress, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), one of the few scientists i