September 2005

In your August 1, 2005 issue, Herbert Sauro writes: "Given the statistics on modern chip design, one wonders if, in fact, cellular complexity has been surpassed [by computer technology]. For example, with the recent move to 90-nm fabrication technology, the average transistor is now less than 50 nm in diameter – only 5 times bigger than the average intracellular protein."1 However, proteins are not just static structures of atoms; they also contain dynamic circuits that convey nuclear forc

Philip Skell's opinion highlights the proximate vs. ultimate causation dichotomy that's so familiar to biology students.

On the morning of September 7, Brian Cass, chief executive of contract research firm Huntingdon Life Sciences, was standing in an anteroom of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) chatting to officials, waiting to go onto the floor of the exchange where Huntingdon's US parent company, Life Sciences Research (LSR) was due to be listed.

of being "connected to the profits of the global arms trade."

Larry Rome is a professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania who studies how frogs and fish move.

A Boeing engineer tells me that a modern airplane has about 10,000 sensors constantly recording information, not only to inform pilots about the plane's performance but also to forecast mechanical problems that can be corrected during routine maintenance.

Complex systems beg simplification.

The National Institutes of Health has placed the heft of a large academic collaboration, on par in scale with the Human Genome Project, behind a task usually performed by pharmaceutical companies.

The Y chromosome gets no respect.

The debate continues as to whether telomerase's only function is to promote telomere extension.

California researchers have found a previously unrecognized role for microRNAs: aiding and abeting hepatitis C virus in the liver.

Human embryonic stem cells appear to accrue genomic changes that could make them unusable therapeutically when cultured at length.

The discovery of even a single case of mad cow disease can be economically devastating.

Researcher Willy Walter of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has fairly typical gel-documentation needs: "We take pictures of ethidium bromide-stained agarose gels using a UV transilluminator and of yeast colonies under white light."

Last summer got off to a hot start at the June 2005 American Society for Mass Spectrometry meeting in San Antonio, Texas.

A new, single-cell computational model developed by scientists at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory borrows a technique used in the social sciences to digitally study how random molecular events within a cell influence its behavior.

, says he is appalled by inadequate inventory tracking in academic and government biotech labs.

Take some cells from a patient, grow them in a laboratory for a few weeks, and then inject them back into the same patient.

In 2000, public officials in Boulder County, Colo., were faced with calls from organic farmers, environmentalists, and others to ban genetically modified (GM) crops.

In March, Ligand Pharmaceuticals, a San Diego-based biotech company, suffered a series of setbacks that prompted company executives to scramble to control the fallout and preserve its reputation.

Legislation described as "the most comprehensive change to US patent law" in more than 50 years is pitting research universities and the life sciences industry against the computer and financial services industries.

As an undergraduate at St. Andrews University in Scotland, David Russell fell in love with infection.

How do scientists communicate, with one another and with the public?

won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for his pioneering work characterizing yeast cell-cycle mutants.