September 2005

Peer reviewers for the National Institutes of Health are faced with the impossible.

The Dalai Lama is known for supporting peace, as his 1989 Nobel Peace Prize attests.

On the phone, John Ioannidis comes across much more cheerfully than you might expect from a man who has made a career out of pointing out the more questionable aspects of others' research endeavors.

A new scientific field is being born, one that seeks to understand which organisms have subjective states, what purpose theymight serve, and how distinct states of consciousness come about.

Integrins serve as the cell's conduit to the outside world, sensing the external environment and passing on instructions: differentiate or not, adhere or move on, live or die.

Before a cell can do its job, it needs to get oriented.

These papers were selected from multiple disciplines from the Faculty of 1000, a Web-based literature awareness tool http://www.facultyof1000.com.J. Lu et al., "MicroRNA expression profiles classify human cancers," Nature, 435:834–8, June 9, 2005.This article makes the surprising discovery that microRNA-expression profiles can be better predictors of cancer outcome than mRNA profiles. This conclusion is based on the use of a novel, bead-based flow-cytometry approach to examine the expressi

Without a sufficient cell culture system, researchers have had little success designing and testing drugs for the treatment of the hepatitis C virus (HCV).

Insect immunity may display hitherto unsuspected molecular complexity.

During most of the 1990s, a linguistic chasm divided the worlds of flies, worms, mice, and other model organisms.

Researchers at Chiron made virology history in 1987 when they discovered the hepatitis C virus (HCV), not by isolating viral particles, but by cloning and sequencing its genome.

Cloning DNA fragments using restriction enzymes is like flying from Seattle to New York via Phoenix.

What is 30 times brighter than fluorescent markers, impervious to photobleaching, and won't leach heavy metals and other toxins into biological samples?

Most gas sensors, such as the carbon monoxide detectors found in many homes, monitor for the presence of a single volatile compound.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission recently launched a formal investigation into possible insider trading at the Cambridge, Mass.-based biotechnology firm Biogen Idec.

Before 2001, the company now known as Biovitrum was a group of workers with roots in Pharmacia Corp.'s Swedish research division, which was deemed redundant after Pharmacia merged with Upjohn in 1995.

Not too long ago, filing a new drug application with the US Food and Drug Administration could mean sending four 48-foot trucks stuffed with 100,000 pages of documentation off to the agency's headquarters in Rockville, Md.

After two pipe bombs damaged their buildings in 2003, and after employees had been repeatedly harassed at their homes by animal rights activists wielding bullhorns and sirens, Chiron Corp. decided enough was enough.

It's been a good year for salaries in the life sciences: Median salaries have gone up by 3.8% since last year, surpassing the consumer price index rise of 3.2% from July 2004.

salary survey shows that women are coming up short in terms of compensation.

Whatever the entertainment and artistic merits of the movie "The Constant Gardener," released at the end of last month, the pharmaceutical industry could do without it.

found out 25 years ago that Francis Crick had been mulling over the same big questions he was on how a tangle of neurons can lead to complex thoughts, he decided it was time to get serious about consciousness.

Jack London once said that he would "rather be ashes than dust."

it occurred to me that there is a recognized disease that seems to parallel the fears of nanoparticle absorption through the skin.

Re: "Plant Neurobiology Sprouts Anew."1 Your readers should know that E.J. Lund and colleagues in the Department of Biophysics at Austin, Texas, published a book entitled Bioelectric Fields and Growth University of Texas Press) in 1947. Also, while Tompkins and Bird's The Secret Life of Plants (Harper & Row, 1973) did sell well and influence the thinking of the lay public, its message was effectively debunked by a subsequent article entitled "The not-so-secret life of plants."2 This article

Re: "Wanted: Scientific Heroes."1 If you consider the way Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, not to mention Linus Pauling and Rachel Carson, were trashed by scientists, the scientific establishment, and the science academies when they stepped into the public domain as "scientific heroes" it is not at all surprising why there are no scientific heroes.It's distressing to see that scientists do not fare well in the public's ranking of the greatest Americans.1 Some deceased scientists are remarkable role

Regarding "A Ban on Estrogenics?"1 we must be wary also about a possible cancer risk from long-term exposure to bisphenol A (BP-A) and other estrogenic endocrine disruptors as well. Steroidal/non-steroidal and postmenopausal estrogens and diethylstilbestrol (DES) as examples at low doses are long-known human carcinogens.2 In 1980, the National Toxicology Program in public session reported on the carcinogenicity of BP-A.3 With renewed emphasis on endocrine disruptors,4 we decided our bioassay fin