November 2006

ELITE HIV RESEARCHERS » On November 17, the Institute of Human Virology, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, will hold its 2006 International HIV/AIDS meeting in Baltimore. No doubt, elite controllers of HIV - the subject of a feature on page 26 - will come up at least a few times at the conference, which features many of the top researchers in AIDS. For more, see www.ihv.org/meeting/index.html. BIOMARKERS IN VIENNA » If Emanuel Petricoin and Lance Li

SPARRING PARTNERS: Jo Handelsman and Daniel Lee Kleinman Credit: © MARTHA BUSSE" />SPARRING PARTNERS: Jo Handelsman and Daniel Lee Kleinman Credit: © MARTHA BUSSE Daniel Lee Kleinman and Jo Handelsman first sparred in 1995, when the University of Wisconsin, Madison sociologist spent six months as a guest in Handelsman's plant pathology lab. The sociologist's goal was to find out how financial incentives - say, profits from selling microorganisms as therapeutics - might shape the

Shivani Sud (right) with Jan Davidson of the Davidson Institute. Credit: http://www.LEPOLDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM LEPOLDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM _blank" />Shivani Sud (right) with Jan Davidson of the Davidson Institute. Credit: http://www.LEPOLDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM LEPOLDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM _blank When Shivani Sud was six years old, a member of her immediate family had surgery to remove a brain tumor. Desperate to help, Sud dragged a stepstool to the kitchen sink, sprinkled soap on a sponge and began w

Caroline Snyder Credit: COURTESY OF CAROLINE SNYDER" />Caroline Snyder Credit: COURTESY OF CAROLINE SNYDER It was sometime in the late 1990s that Caroline Snyder first read news reports about a couple in Greenland, NH, who were blaming recycled sewage sludge - also known as biosolids - for the death of their son. Although she was an environmental scientist, Snyder didn't really know anything about sludge, but the story piqued her interest because she had recently retired to New Hampshi

On a brisk August morning in southern Australia, 16 recent PhD graduates and postdocs from around the country are sitting in a windowless room, fretting about the way science is portrayed in the media. They're attending a weeklong media-training boot camp, and the fraying of their nerves is palpable as they talk about what worries them most: the superficial way their research might be handled, overhyping, and how to handle difficult questions. "What's the point of science communicati

When the space shuttles Discovery and Atlantis blasted off in the direction of the International Space Station (ISS) this year, passengers of a more botanical variety vastly outnumbered the seven astronauts on board. Secured in small seed cassettes, some 1600 seeds of the cress species, Arabidopsis thaliana, took the flight for a research project designed to help tease out the tropic influences of gravity and light on plant growth, while perhaps helping to find a way to grow crops for lo

What states and the Federal government should do to ensure progress in the life sciences.

Two models of histone incorporation Credit: © 2004 ELSEVIER" />Two models of histone incorporation Credit: © 2004 ELSEVIER The paper: H. Tagami et al., "Histone H3.1 and H3.3 complexes mediate nucleosome assembly pathways dependent or independent of DNA synthesis," Cell, 116:51-61, 2004. (Cited in 146 papers) The finding: Yoshihiro Nakatani's group at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Geneviève Almouzni's group at Curie Institute in France identi

Credit: COURTESY OF ANDRE FIALA AND THOMAS RIEMENSPERGER" /> Credit: COURTESY OF ANDRE FIALA AND THOMAS RIEMENSPERGER Using light to activate specific brain cells that release chemicals implicated in positive or negative experiences, Andrâ Fiala and colleagues at the University of Würzburg identified neurons that are responsible for assigning value to a neutral odor in the Drosophila.1 "It is a very elegant study revealing both impressive technical and scientific findings," says Facu

When combined, the effects of mutations in different genes often deviate from what would be expected by looking at them separately. Researchers at the University of València in Spain have shown that an organism's genomic complexity may predict these epistatic gene interactions.1 It is a "fascinating new synthesis of published experiments," writes Faculty of 1000 member Richard Lenski of Michigan State University, adding that it is "sure to stimulate empirical and theoretical research fo

R.J. Dawson and K.P. Locher, "Structure of a bacterial multidrug ABC transporter," Nature , 443:180-5, Sept. 14, 2006. "This paper reports the first high resolution crystal structure of an ABC transporter carrying out multidrug efflux. This structure from the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus may be useful to interpret the mechanism of cystic fibrosis and other human diseases." Andrè GoffeauCatholic University of Louvain, Belgium

Credit: JASON VARNEY | http://www.VARNEYPHOTO.COMVARNEYPHOTO.COM_blank" /> Credit: JASON VARNEY | http://www.VARNEYPHOTO.COMVARNEYPHOTO.COM_blank Commenting on the immaculate desk of Sohyun Ahn elicits an embarrassed giggle, but practically any other question gets a thoughtful look from behind her blue cat's-eye glasses. Throughout her career, Ahn has made a habit of stepping back and studying the situation before acting. "It's important to take a break and think about thing

Musings on a product catalog.

The MicroArray Quality Control consortium released gigabytes of data and two exhaustively characterized RNAs, but little actionable guidance.

How one company used the growing nonprofit funding pot to jump-start its development program, and how you can do the same.

To attract not just more candidates but the right ones, pay attention to the basics and follow these tips.

Russian scientists are testing a proposed system to bring a more merit-based approach to the doling out of funds supplementing basic salaries. The effort by the Russian Ministry of Science is meant to address criticism of the current system, "a crazy combination of uniformly low pay with distribution of extras by the will of the management," says Mikhail Gelfand, a scientist at the Institute for Information Transmission Problems in Moscow. Paychecks for Russian post-docs are about 5,000-

Graduating from a mid-ranked university may put you at even more of a disadvantage than finishing a life sciences doctorate at a lower-ranked school, according to research by Laurel Smith-Doerr, an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University. Smith Doerr sampled 2,062 life scientists who were on average 5 years out of grad school. As she reports in the June issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, those who had completed their PhDs at elite universities were mu