November 2002

Artwork ©2001 Alan Campbell Studios COSTA RICA BEAUTY: Campbell's work includes images like this Costa Rican banana tree. Alan Campbell's studio in a second-story loft overlooking downtown Athens, Ga., has the unmistakable stamp of a painter. Daylight streams through large windows; brushes, paints, and tools sit in assorted cans and mugs; canvasses and prints stand on easels, lean against walls, and lie flat on tables. The University of Georgia's (UGA) north campus quad, home to th

Image by Joel Ito and P. Michael Conn The first clinical trials to test protein misfolding therapies are so new that researchers haven't yet agreed on a collective name for the compounds being administered. Variously dubbed chemical chaperones, pharmacological chaperones, and pharmacoperones, these small molecules correct the misfolding of proteins that recent research has implicated in a host of diseases, both rare and prevalent. In such "conformational" diseases, misfolded proteins may lose

Image: Erica P. Johnson The UK Biobank aims to recruit 500,000 people for population studies of the interactions among lifestyle, genes, and disease, but some opponents question whether the massive effort is structured properly to do an adequate and ethical job. Ian Gibson (Labour, Norwich North), chair of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, is to host a meeting in December of members of parliament and the project's funding bodies and critics. UK Biobank has yet to

Photo: Courtesy of Lee Petersen Researchers from Ascent Power Systems examine a large-area fuel cell component. Could the world's waste--peanut shells from Georgia, coconut shells from the Philippines, pig-farm waste from China, or even left-over gas from Japanese-beer kegs--be the answer to the next energy crisis? Probably not, but a number of companies and individuals are touting the benefits in a variety of ways. Talk abounds about fuel cells and the "hydrogen economy," spurred by rec

Graphic: Courtesy of Scott Stevens  ASSEMBLY INSTRUCTIONS: In the penta-snRNP model, all five spliceosomal snRNPs interact with the substrate pre-mRNA as a single, discrete particle. Spliceosome assembly in yeast extracts also could occur by interaction of the U1 snRNP with the pre-mRNA, followed by a tetra-snRNP joining to form a functionally identical particle. (Reprinted with permission from Elsevier Science, Molecular Cell, 9:31-4, 2002.) In multicellular organisms, the earliest prod

Image: Courtesy of Karl Malcolm SAFETY RING: This X-ray image depicts the position of the silicone intravaginal ring in vivo. When researchers learned that the spermicide nonoxynol-9 (N9) killed HIV in vitro, they were hoping that they had a cheap, ready-made, effective topical microbicide that women could use to block sexual transmission of HIV. But clinical trials showed that N9 increased vulnerability to HIV infection because it damaged mucosal cells, making the mucous membrane more p

Photo: Courtesy of Michelle Lizott Waniewski  DROP AND GIVE ME 20! Attendees at the 2002 NEB workshops labor through basic training. If you've ever been confused by the jargon of molecular biology, you are not alone. With biotechnology in the news day by day, it is easy to forget that for many of us--even for some readers of The Scientist--the tools, techniques, and concepts that undergird much of this research are foreign. To help keep up, some scientists are queuing up to learn the bas

Photo: Courtesy of Applied Biosystems The Auto-Lid Dual 384-Well GeneAmp PCR System 9700 from Applied Biosystems. Used to be, researchers used thermocyclers for PCR. But times have changed. Once called PCR machines thermocyclers are now required for a wide range of common applications such as sequencing and genotyping. Murray Anderson, director of core PCR for Applied Biosystems, Foster City Calif., observes, "When we first launched the dual 384-well [thermal cycling] systems, the primar

Photo: Getty Images Scientific swindlers, beware. Universities are policing fraud and misuse of public funds better than ever before, according to federal regulators, who point to a surge in misconduct findings during the past 18 months as evidence of successful sleuthing. Each year, 30 to 40 institutions report to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) that they have investigated claims of falsification, fabrication, or plagiarism (FF&P) in scientific research. In the past decade, about 3

Illustration: Erica P. Johnson Every five or six years, the United Kingdom's academic establishment sets out to perform an experiment on itself. Called the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), the vast endeavor involves 60 research panels, each investigating a specific discipline, from musicology to genomics. The panels, consisting of about 15 eminent researchers per panel, evaluate the research output of every participating university and institute. In the end, each institution receives a rank

Image: Anne MacNamara Researchers disheartened by the slowdown in private money for genomics projects should keep an eye on the Congressional budget, under debate now. US Government agencies are stepping up their spending on the search for genomic keys to disease. "It's a great time for genomics, as far as we're concerned," says Maria Giovanni, assistant director for microbial genomics and related technology development for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). NI

Photo: Courtesy of Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago  ART CREATING LIFE: Eduardo Kac's Genesis project enables viewers to create bacteria mutations. A stroll through an art museum can mirror a walk outdoors, as nature has inspired artists since people first used charcoal to draw on cave walls. Today, ambitious artists and accessible technologies have modernized the marriage of biology and art into bioart, coupling imagination and science to create animate, often interactive, works that put