Issue | November 2006 | November 2006 | The Scientist Magazine®

Contributors

Lance Liotta (top) and Emanuel Petricoin (bottom) made a splash in 2002 when they used mass spec techniques coupled with pattern matching software to identify proteomic signatures indicative of ovarian cancer. Now co-directors of the Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine at George Mason University, they continue searching for diagnostic signals in blood serum, which they write about on page 32. "In some ways we're even more optimistic as to the potential and

Uncategorized

The Government's Assessment

The Government's Assessment In the current mixed legal climate, where diversity programs have been ruled constitutional and litigation continues over their appropriate boundaries, federal agencies are by and large continuing to fund programs aimed at increasing participation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) by underrepresented minorit

The Government's Assessment

Show Me the Money

1 Nothing much had changed by 2004, when another study of faculty in academic medicine showed that even when controlling for total publications, years of seniority, and hours worked per week, female faculty members were paid on average $12,000 less than their male peers. 2 The gender wage gap is frequently attributed to women taking time off to have children or working fewer hours a week to take care of their families. There may be s

Old Problem, Old Solutions

By Kirsten Weir Old Problem, Old Solutions Failure to question conventional wisdom contributes to persistent leaks in scientific pipeline. © Getty Images/Jan Stromme Monique Ferguson nearly slipped through the cracks. Though she was a top student in high school and college, she faced a bumpy road as an African-American woman pursuing a science career in what she felt was "a good-old-boys

Back to Nature

By Anthony H. Williams and Carole Williams-Green Environmental education center gets city kids started down the path to science. Just a stone's throw from streets sprinkled with shattered glass, in a largely African-American west Philadelphia neighborhood, exists a convergence of labs, volunteers, educators, and most importantly, eager students. We established the Cobbs Creek Environment

Continental Shift

By Anne Harding Diversity efforts are unexplored territory for many European nations. The November 2005 riots across France made it clear why efforts to diversify Europe's workforce are important, and why these efforts may pose a particular challenge here. Frustrated at being shut out of the nation's economic and educational

Andrea Stith, 33

By Juhi Yajnik Andrea Stith, 33 Program Officer for educational grant programs, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) COURTESY OF COLELLA PHOTOGRAPHY EDUCATION: PhD in biophysics, University of Virginia HOMETOWN: West Point, NY WORK/RESEARC

Maria Thelma Ocampo, 29

By Juhi Yajnik Maria Thelma Ocampo, 29 Postdoc, London Research Institute COURTESY OF MARIA OCAMPO HOMETOWN: Manila, Philippines, until she was 8 years old, then Arleta, Calif. WORK/RESEARCH: Ocampo works on DNA packaging and the cohesion complex that holds sis

Sebastián Vélez, 33

By Chandra Shekhar Sebastián Vélez, 33 Third-year graduate student at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University COURTESY OF SEBASTIÁN VÉLEZ HOMETOWN: Bayamon, Puerto Rico WORK/RESEARCH: Vélez's research is centered o

Gwen D. Fewell, 40

By Kirsten Weir Gwen D. Fewell, 40 Open Biosystems, Huntsville, Alabama; RNAi Product Manager COURTESY OF OPEN BIOSYSTEMS EDUCATION: PhD in neuroscience from Florida State University HOMETOWN: Bombay, India WORK/RESEARCH: Fewell is in charge of developin

Toolkit

Do you have the right tools to create or reinvigorate a diversity initiative that's effective? Who is (or should be) responsible for its success and how do you measure that success? This section offers proven approaches to meeting these common challenges - in both business and academic settings - shared by those who've already experienced success. There's also a new business case for diversity that s

Shared Challenges, Shared Solutions

1 Another stereotype claims that inadequate K-12 education in the United States is to blame for students' lack of interest in pursuing college-level science study. Data from our own and other institutions indicate that students of color and from all educational and income levels enroll in introductory courses in biology and chemistry (the disciplines on which we have focused) at representative levels. Yet they disengage during their earliest experi

Confronting Risk

Challenges to your business - both daily and long-term competitiveness - lurk in surprising places. Here's how to protect your company. By Bruce Belzak ARTICLE EXTRAS Case study:A medical device component manufacturer faces nervous senior executives Case study:What happens when a fire strikes your production facility? Four ways to save money – and your business Five Things Not to Forget When ForecastingForecast models can become complex, but the principles for gathering

Hitting the Ground Running

By E.J. Mundell Hitting the Ground Running Summer 'boot camp' and early lab experience give Meyerhoff scholars a head start on the road to research. The Meyerhoffs (bottom right) with UMBC President and Mrs. Hrabowski, III, and Meyerhoff graduates. COURTESY OF JIM BURGER

Case Study: Product Risk Assessment

PRODUCT RISK ASSESSMENT By Donald Esker and Robert Gauss FEATURE ARTICLE Confronting RiskChallenges to your business - both daily and long-term competitiveness - lurk in surprising places. BRUCE BELZAK explains how to protect your company. ARTICLE EXTRAS Case study:What happens when a fire strikes your production facility? Four ways to save money - and your business Five Things Not to Forget When ForecastingForecast models can become complex, but the principles for gatherin

Diversity: The New Business Case

By Anne Harding Diversity: The New Business Case Helping different departments collaborate is part of diversity's new meaning. For Paul Graves of Schering-Plough, managing diversity is about much more than hiring minorities — although that's certainly part of it. It's really about helping people from very

Case Study: Business Continuity Planning

CASE STUDY: BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING By Fred Klapetzky FEATURE ARTICLE Confronting RiskChallenges to your business - both daily and long-term competitiveness - lurk in surprising places. BRUCE BELZAK explains how to protect your company. ARTICLE EXTRAS Case study:A medical device component manufacturer faces nervous senior executives Four ways to save money - and your business Five Things Not to Forget When ForecastingForecast models can become complex, but the princi

Getting Results

By Charles Q. Choi Getting Results You've started a diversity program. But how do you know if it's having any effect? Harvard Medical School has offered a voluntary diversity-training program every year since 2000. Immediately after each session, organizers asked how much volunteers liked learning about the importance of diversity for organizations. People

Getting Results

Four Ways to Save Money and Your Business

Four Ways to Save Money - and Your Business An underwriter reveals the must-do items he looks for when evaluating a company for coverage. By Philip W. Fiscus FEATURE ARTICLE Confronting RiskChallenges to your business – both daily and long-term competitiveness – lurk in surprising places. BRUCE BELZAK explains how to protect your company. ARTICLE EXTRAS Case study:A medical device component manufacturer faces nervous senior executives Case s

Who's in Charge?

By Charles Q. Choi Who's in Charge? What it takes to manage diversity. © JENNIFER TRENCHARD Ten years ago, a chief diversity officer or vice president of diversity was almost unheard of, but today about one in five Fortune 1000 companies have diversity ma

The Scientist 2006 Life Sciences Salary Survey

The Life Sciences Salary Survey Compensation soars as demand for highly-skilled professionals heats up. By Karen PallaritoRelated Articles: Salary by Highest Degree Earned Salary by Area of Specialization Salary by Gender Salary by Ethnicity Salary Map: salaries and costs of living in 19 US metropolitan areas Salary Charts Salary by Job Activity, type of research, age, and job title 2006 Salary Survey Methodology Salary Survey ArchiveThe que

Resources

Resources More Information The Athena Project www.athenaproject.org.uk Joint government/university effort to promote women's participation in science, engineering and technology in the UK. European Commission Science and Society

2006 Salary Survey Methodology

The Life Sciences Salary Survey: Methodology By Karen PallaritoRelated Articles: Salary by Highest Degree Earned Salary by Area of Specialization Salary by Gender Salary by Ethnicity Salary Map: salaries and costs of living in 19 US metropolitan areas Salary Charts Salary by Job Activity, type of research, age, and job title 2006 Salary Survey Salary Survey ArchiveThe survey, ?Compensation of Life Scientists in the USA,? was conducted by Abbot

Diversity Supplement 2007: Cobbs Creek Slideshow

var FO = { movie:"http://images.the-scientist.com/supplements/20061101/xmlSlideshow.swf", width:"577", height:"600", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); Cobbs Creek Slideshow Please download the Adobe Flash Player to view this content: To learn more about the center, visit CobbsCreek.org

Editorial

End this Stem Cell Racket

Once the Bush Administration policy is fixed, there's another problem that's at least as large.

Mail

Letters

Are we training too many scientists? It's not that we're training too many scientists,1,2 but that we are not training too many scientists well. My institution receives hundreds of applications for faculty position openings, but most of them do not even make the first cut. I believe that this is because many principal investigators (PIs) are irresponsibly allowing people to earn PhDs without really deserving them. In the lab where I got my PhD, of every four students who started a

The Agenda

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

Notebook

Scientists under the microscope

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

The cancer-fighting teen

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

Snyder, sludge fighter

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

Column

Saving Bison, Losing Tigers

Wildlife conservation approaches to anthrax and poaching have divergent results.

Six Things You Won't Find in the MAQC

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

Profiles

The Fast Track to Success

Laura Landweber was 33 when she received tenure at Princeton. Oxytricha, beware: She's got a lot of science ahead of her.

Books etc.

On the Trail of a Point Mutation

The discovery of a blood-cancer gene raises tantalizing questions

Hot Paper

SNPs for diabetes

The paper: K. Silander et al., "Genetic variation near the hepatocyte nuclear factor-4á gene predicts susceptibility to type 2 diabetes," Diabetes, 53:1141-9, 2004. (Cited in 68 papers) The finding: A team of Finnish and US researchers, led by University of Michigan professor Michael Boehnke, found that several single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) around the transcription factor, hepatocyte nuclear factor-4á (HNF4A), were associated with dia

Tetramer model trashed

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

Why hormone therapy fails

Finasteride, an antiandrogen Credit: © 2003 DIVISION OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION, AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY" />Finasteride, an antiandrogen Credit: © 2003 DIVISION OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION, AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY The paper: C. Chen et al., "Molecular determinants of resistance to antiandrogen therapy," Nat Med, 10:33-9, 2004. (Cited in 176 papers) The finding: Using gene-expression profiling, Charles Sawyers then at the University of California, Los Angel

Papers To Watch

Papers to Watch

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

New technique IDs odor-related neurons

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

How to predict epistatic gene interactions

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

Scientist To Watch

Sohyun Ahn: Thinking Things Through

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

Lab Tools

Lab Equipment You Need - Sort of

Musings on a product catalog.

BioBusiness

Getting Your Gates

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

Pulse Oximeter

Classified Ad Confidential

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

Making Better Leaders Out of Alpha Males and Females

Credit: © JAMES PAULS" /> Credit: © JAMES PAULS Ellen McMahon was a rising star as leader of the cardiovascular research group at Pharmacia before its merger with Pfizer. But she started to get grumbling from her team, and talks about management style from her bosses. McMahon says her staff "was struggling with my leadership, they didn?t feel involved in making decisions. I was more in the mode of driving towards goals rather than considering team dynamics." McMahon, an acknowledg

Third-tier Grads Do Better Than Mid-ranked Grads

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

Russian Scientists Test New Merit Bonus System

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-

Foundations

The Discovery of Estrogen Receptor β

In situ hybridization showing ERβ expression in prostatic epithelium (near left) and ovarian granulosa cells (far left). Below is a notebook page describing the phenotypes of ERβ knockout mice. Credit: IN SITU IMAGES: © 1996 THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES / NOTEBOOK: COURTESY OF JAN-ǺKE GUSTAFSSON" />In situ hybridization showing ERβ expression in prostatic epithelium (near left) and ovarian granulosa cells (far left). Below is a notebook page describing the phenotyp