May 2005

Like many fellow California human embryonic stem cell researchers, I am looking forward to taking full advantage of the remarkable opportunity that the state's voters have offered us in the form of $3 billion in funding over the next 10 years.

This month, National Geographic and IBM launched the Genographic Project, an ambitious attempt to trace human migration out of Africa during the last 50,000 to 60,000 years.

For untenured professors, the pressure to publish is intense.

Dimitri Bonnville got cardiac stem cell therapy. Now he's suing

Scientists have established that gene therapy can cause cancer.1 But after more than a decade of clinical experience, formal evidence is mounting that gene therapy can cure cancer as well. The allure has attracted sufficient attention to launch a journal, Cancer Gene Therapy, in 1994. And burgeoning literature documents progress in the field.2 A landmark event late in 2003 was approval of the first such therapy. China's Shenzhen SiBono GenTech now markets an adenoviral vector that expresses wild

Much has been written about a perceived lack of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, as it relates to productivity.

Integrated viral sequences can dysregulate genes.

During autophagy-literally "self-eating"-cells deliver cytoplasmic constituents, including whole organelles, to the lysosome for degradation.

a last resting place for worn-out, misfolded, or otherwise unwanted proteins.

The same family of transcription factors directs the epidermal wound repair in mice and flies, according to two research teams.

Researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science report that lymphocytes rolling on high endothelial venules stop abruptly in response to chemokines presented by endothelial cells.1 Their findings suggest that chemokines stop lymphocytes in a fraction of a second, faster than previously thought.Ronen Alon and colleagues found that chemokines trigger instantaneous extension of the LFA-1 integrin – an adhesion molecule that changes between an inactive, bent conformation and an active, e

Protein aggregates generated in a test tube were found to infect wild-type hamsters with a disease much like scrapie.

Two years ago, cell biologist Vladimir Mironov of the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, created a buzz in the tissue-engineering world by predicting that in the not-so-distant future, scientists would be able to print whole replacement organs, and eventually whole bodies, using machines similar to desktop printers.

Kinases, the enzymes that catalyze phosphorylation events, have been implicated in hundreds of different diseases, including cancer, inflammatory diseases, and neurological disorders.

For all the hype about nanotechnology, sometimes small isn't quite small enough.

Have you ever needed a red fluorescent version of a protein, but only green was available?

-Slides, that enable both culturing and high-resolution microscopy of live cells.

The power of a synchrotron facility can now be found in a laboratory X-ray source.

of Huntingdon, UK, recently released a new Plate Arraying module compatible with its BioRobotics MicroGrid II and GeneMachines Omni-Grid Accent contact printers.

In March, Geron Corporation of Menlo Park, Calif., teamed up with Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's (HKUST) Biotechnology Research Corporation to find new drugs that would activate telomerase and, it is hoped, result in a treatment for age-related diseases.

The pressure is building on Institutional Review Boards.

As a young scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, Andrew Murray once attended an opera wearing a red rubber dress.

As we write, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has just been formally installed as Pope Benedictus XVI.

, a human embryonic stem cell researcher at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, Calif., returned to academia a year ago after 15 years in biotechnology.

You write that the cost of daycare "is dwarfed by the costs to innovation of not having half the world's population adequately represented among scientific faculty members, which is the clear result of a lack of daycare."

Jay Buckey describes well the three chief biomedical problems facing manned missions to Mars.1 Although I find his discussion of the radiation problem too pessimistic, we do need to think carefully about mission design and engineering in overcoming it.Above all, one needs to shorten the transit time to Mars and therefore study the trade-offs between the cost of extra propulsion versus the obvious gains (from reducing exposure to radiation and zero-G, as well as reducing the complexity and weight