Reeling in Painkillers

Meet some of the people featured in the February 2014 issue of The Scientist.

Developing nonaddictive drugs to combat pain

February 2014's selection of notable quotes

Many people can “see” their hands in complete darkness, absent any visual stimulus, due to kinesthetic feedback from their own movements.

A 50,000-generation-long experiment shows that bacteria keep getting fitter.

Formosan subterranean termites evade deadly pathogens by building nests lined with their own feces.

Next-generation sequencing of the bacterial assemblages that inhabit a corpse throughout decomposition improve time-of-death estimates.

Until health care becomes truly personalized, race and ethnicity will continue to be important clues guiding medical treatments.

Attracting females to research careers—and keeping them there

Scientists devise a gentler technique for observing viral DNA at single-molecule resolution.

Is it possible to make a nonaddictive opioid painkiller?

Repairing damaged neurons relies on booting a histone deacetylase out of the nucleus so regeneration genes can be turned on.

Human papillomavirus promotes genomic damage by inserting near host genes involved in cancer.

A mouse knockout calls into question the presumed function of a protein long considered important for steroid hormone biosynthesis.

Fueled by her love of visual data and addicted to chromosomes, Abby Dernburg continues to study how homologous chromosomes find each other during gamete formation.

Professor, Chemistry, The Scripps Research Institute. Age: 36

A tour of techniques for measuring DNA hydroxymethylation

A guide to DNA-encoded libraries for drug discovery

Graduate programs at the interface of quantitative and biological sciences set the stage for more interdisciplinary collaboration.
 

Can practitioners of the Eastern religion learn from biologists, or vice versa?

Me, Myself, and Why, RedDevil 4, Neanderthal Man, and Science from Sight to Insight

Electron microscopy led to the first identification of what would later be known as ribosomes.