Recently added articles from The Scientist:
Science and Politics
Sep 01, 2008; Gallagher, Richard ... The call for a presidential science debate went unheeded, but it was worthwhile. ON NOVEMBER 4, 2008, VOTERS IN THE UNITED STATES WILL ELECT THEIR 44th President. They also vote in the 111th United States Congress, including all 440 members of the United States House of Representatives ...
THE AGENDA
Sep 01, 2008; Anonymous ... GET POLITICAL * If you'd like to see one of the political figures we profiled in the feature beginning on page 30, you can hear Kenneth Thorpe deliver a keynote at Forum 08, a meeting focused on improving health. Forum 08 is being held Sept. 8 at the Westin Diplomat Resort in Hollywood, FIa. For ...
Mail
Sep 01, 2008; Anonymous ... Write The Scientist 400 Market Street, Suite 1250 Philadelphia, PA 19106 Email mail@the-scientist.com Fax (215)351-1146 If you can predict the outcome of a grant, is it really worth a 5-year $250,000/year R01? Finding more founders In the ...
T cells and tears
Sep 01, 2008; Chi, Kelly Rae ... On the third floor of a molecular biology lab in Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, immunologist Dama Laxminarayana checks his table-top PCR machine, which is humming with samples. On this particular afternoon in his one-room lab, he will load the samples onto a waiting agarose gel ....
Judgment Day
Sep 01, 2008; Borrell, Brendan ... Heartbreak came in three acts at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City this summer: animal, vegetable, and mineral. It was Identification Day and museum-goers lugged their scientific treasures triple-wrapped in newspaper, towels, and Hefty garbage bags and tucked inside rolling ...
Whence this fish?
Sep 01, 2008; Dolgin, Elie ... In February 2005, John Lundberg, an evolutionary biologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, obtained molecular data from a tissue sample that he just couldn't believe. The sample came from a bizarre species of Mexican catfish that no one could identify. But the data said the ...
Maggot sleuthing
Sep 01, 2008; Borrell, Brendan ... Two years ago, entomologist Richard Merritt from Michigan State University pulled an all-nighter in a Toronto hotel room to prepare for seven hours of testimony about a court case so controversial it precipitated the abolition of Canada's death penalty. As part of his testimony, Merritt had to ...
Biotech in space?
Sep 01, 2008; Zielinska, Edyta ... This spring, the Space Shuttle Discovery carried some interesting cargo: Salmonella bacteria separated by a thin seal from their target host, C.elegans. The cargo came courtesy of SPACEHAB, a Texas-based biotech that hopes experiments aboard the International Space Station will bring them one ...
Foundation-led Drug Discovery
Sep 01, 2008; Pacifici, Robert E; Rankin, David P ... Virtual biotechs target and develop translational research. Foundations that support efforts to find treatments for rare diseases have stepped in to fill a significant funding gap caused by increasingly conservative venture capitalists and constraints at large pharmaceutical companies ....
My Favorite Fraud
Sep 01, 2008; Wiley, Steven ... A paper I read more than 25 years ago taught me a lesson I'll never forget. LAST WEEK I WAS AT A SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE IN WHICH CAREER development was a major topic. The audience included mostly scientists at an early stage in their careers, but also a few older scientists, like myself, ...
The Scientist 2008 LIFE SCIENCES SALARY SURVEY
Sep 01, 2008; Zielinska, Edyta ... Are you making too much money, or too little? Could you make more? Our US salary data in the life sciences can help. By Edyta Zielinska When Pfizer announced it was closing its Ann Arbor, Michigan, facility in January of last year, Alia Karnovsky, one of more than 2,000 employees ...
BIOLOGY'S GIFT TO A COMPLEX WORLD
Sep 01, 2008; Holland, John ... How studying biological interactions and evolution yields techniques for predicting the outcome of complex interactions. In the late 1980s, engineers at General Electric used an algorithm to design a new engine for the Boeing 777.1 It broke new ground for aircraft turbine efficiency. In ...
THE FUTURE OF U.S. SCIENCE POLICY
Sep 01, 2008; Anonymous ... With an administration change at hand, research could come out of the shadows and into the political light. In late 2001, the George W. Bush Administration stripped the Office of Science and Technology Policy director John Marburger of his official title - "assistant to the president" - ...
Thinking Big
Sep 01, 2008; Hopkin, Karen ... Marc Kirschner likes to expose biology's essential processes, such as how a simple microtubule can form such a variety of structures. Lucky for biology. Marc Kirschner will probably never win a Nobel Prize. But it's not from a lack of accomplishments. "His lab is probably one of the most ...
Canvassing Protein Complexes
Sep 01, 2008; Secko, David ... HOT PAPERS Two yeast studies begin to identify protein interactions on a genome-wide scale. The drama of biology is played out through thousands of protein-protein interactions. Historically, researchers could only examine these interactions one by one, but genomic sequences and ...
Choosy cortex
Sep 01, 2008; Chi, Kelly Rae ... HOT PAPER IN NEUROSCIENCE The paper: C. Padoa-Schioppa & J.A. Assad, "Neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex encode economic value," Nature, 441:223-6, 2006. (Cited in 76 papers) The finding: Researchers from Harvard Medical School measured neuronal firing rates ...
Mysterious resistance
Sep 01, 2008; Scudellari, Megan ... HOT PAPER IN MICROBIOLOGY The paper: G. A. Jacoby et al. "qnrB, another plasmid-mediated gene for quinolone resistance," Antimicrob Agents Chemother, 50:1178-82, 2006. (Cited in 65 papers) The finding: Eight years after discovering qnrA, the first plasmid-mediated ...
Tomato Tomäto
Sep 01, 2008; Scudellari, Megan ... HOT PAPER IN PLANT GENETICS The paper: N. Schauer et al., "Comprehensive metabolic profiling and phenotyping of interspecific introgression lines for tomato improvement," Nature Biotech, 24:447-54, 2006. (Cited in 51 papers) The methods: To explore the genetics ...
John Rawls: Raising a new model system
Sep 01, 2008; Chi, Kelly Rae ... In John Rawls' basement lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, thousands of spotted and striped zebrafish swim in their shoe box-sized tanks. Some of the eggs the fish lay Rawls will make sterile after fertilization-each time creating a new chance to examine the relationship ...
Middling Measures
Sep 01, 2008; Chi, Kelly Rae ... Avoiding the pitfalls of medium-throughput SNP detection. As researchers busily catalog the sequence variations across human populations in the HapMap Project, instrument developers are ramping up the throughput on platforms assessing single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). New ...