The Scientist articles from January 2005

The Scientist archives from January 2005

Science and politics: don't give up.(Editorial)(Editorial)
January 31, 2005... Many scientists in the United States who staunchly opposed a second presidential term for George W. Bush were probably in a somewhat less-than-festive mood during the inauguration in Washington earlier this month. Some were likely thinking,...

The biosafety mess: it's time to end regulations of some organisms, says a former bacteriophage collection curator.(Opinion)
January 31, 2005... For 20 years, I was the curator of the world's largest bacteriophage collection: the Felix d'Herelle Reference Center for Bacterial Viruses (HER 607). The collection, now transferred to another laboratory at Laval University, houses some 450...

Women's health and the tsunami.(Notebook)
January 31, 2005... As infectious disease experts around the world assess the impact of last month's tsunami on the current and future health of the people in the devastated region, the lessons of the past, particularly those involving women, are front and...

Europe's CDC.(Notebook)
January 31, 2005... By May of this year, the European Union is aiming to have a new Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in operation to help combat communicable diseases among its 25 member states. High-profile critics have worried publicly that the...

Doubts about allergy-free cats.(Notebook)
January 31, 2005... Geneticas, a Los Angeles-based animal cloning-related company, has made some big claims since its founding in 2002. CEO Simon Brodie says the company will produce a hypoallergenic cat based on RNAi by 2007, it will be able to announce in July...

RNAi screens seek cancer genes: high-throughput dragnets snare malignancy-related suspects.
January 31, 2005... RNA interference (RNAi) is fast becoming an essential tool for academic and industrial labs searching for genes that promote or inhibit cancer. Munich-based Xantos Biomedicine, for example, once relied on cDNA overexpression, a decades-old...

Retroelements guide adaptation: findings help fuel a phage-research resurgence.
January 31, 2005... With inquisitive minds and tools as simple as a Waring blender, the work of early phage researchers such as Max Delbruck, Seymour Benzer, and Alfred Hershey generated much of the knowledge underlying contemporary molecular biology. But in a...

Genetic cartography: courses charted with deCODE's human recombination map and the LD map for Chromosome 22.(Hot Papers)
January 31, 2005... While the DNA sequence is the ultimate fine-scale physical map of the human genome, working out that sequence--as was the goal of the Human Genome Project--has hardly put an end to mapping studies. The sequence itself is still continuously...

Looking at Deja Vu for the first time: false-familiarity experiences may fit a plausible framework.(Vision)
January 31, 2005... As a culture, we have difficulty letting go of the outdated notion that memory is a reliable tape recorder. Even memories for important events, such as eyewitness accounts of crimes, are usually riddled with imperfections, distortions, and...

Nuclear interference.(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... RNA interference (RNAi) takes place in the nuclei of human cells, according to a group from the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Tariq M. Rana, a coauthor on the study, says that until now researchers thought that human activated...

Statins reduce amyloid-induced inflammation.
January 31, 2005... Statin drugs appear to reduce inflammation associated with Alzheimer disease (AD) in a cholesterol-independent manner, say researchers from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. Gary Landreth, professor of neurosciences and neurology,...

Faculty of 1000.(Interdisciplinary Research)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... These papers were selected from multiple disciplines from the Faculty of 1000, a Web-based literature awareness tool (www. facultyof1000.com). S.E. Williams et al., "Hemoxygenase-2 is an oxygen sensor for a calcium-sensitive potassium...

Optical topography and the color of blood: OT gives neuroscientists a new and faster view of the brain, and an alternative to fMRI.(Technology)
January 31, 2005... Anyone who has been subject to a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan knows its limitations: the claustrophobia-inducing tunnel, the machine gun rattle, the instruction not to move--none of which is conducive to relaxation. For confused...

Proteins in parallel: the protein marketplace continues to grow, but options remain limited.(Technology)
January 31, 2005... AS yesterday's genomics breakthroughs become today's common laboratory techniques, the cutting edge of biology is increasingly found at the level of the proteome. According to Zachary Zimmerman, Senior Research Analyst at Life Science...

Proteomics Power to the People! Mass spectrometry has proved its mettle in functional genomics work; now we need to make the tool available to all.(Vision)
January 31, 2005... In the postgenomic era, there are the haves and the have-nots. Some resources, such as the genome sequence data that underlies functional genomics, are available to all. But mass spectrometry (MS), the signature tool for proteomics and a...

Improving Lab-on-a-Chip: Agilent increases throughput with new microfluidics system.(How It Works)
January 31, 2005... Agilent Technologies of Palo Alto, Calif., (www.agilent.com) has upped the ante in microfluidics-based gel electrophoresis. The company's new 5100 Automated Lab-on-a-Chip Platform (ALP) integrates the process of resolving both nucleic acids...

The immune system as a tool for directed evolution: new method takes advantage of iterative somatic hypermutation to generate novel fluorescent proteins.(Tools & Tech)
January 31, 2005... A team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego, has harnessed the body's ability to tweak antibody genes to drive protein evolution in the lab. The group, led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Roger Tsien, used...

Deciphering drug mechanisms: novel method reveals how drugs affect a wide range of cellular processes.(Tools & Tech)
January 31, 2005... A team of Harvard scientists has found a high-throughput way to tie drugs with the cellular functions they affect. (1) Comparing the profiles of uncharacterized compounds with those of well-studied ones, the group also predicted modes of...

ELISA assays, sans Plates: Bender MedSystems introduces bead-based immunoassays.(Tools & Tech)
January 31, 2005... Vienna-based Bender MedSystems (www.bendermedsystems.com) offers a new tool for researchers who want the flexibility of ELISA, without the increased error rate involved with running a separate test for each sample. Bender's FlowCytomix...

The politics of science: policy changes made in 2004 will affect science in 2005.(BioBusiness)
January 31, 2005... By many measures, 2004 was a tumultuous and high-profile year for science around the world. The US Congress, faced with an increasingly expensive war in Iraq and the biggest deficit in history, limited science-budget increases and cut funding...

Cloning for profit: cloned kittens are cute, but how profitable are animal cloning companies?(BioBusiness)
January 31, 2005... When San Francisco-based Genetic Savings and Clone announced in December it had sold a cloned kitten to a Texas woman, the public seemed caught between feelings of revulsion and excitement over the idea of cloning the family pet. The Maine...

Birth of a baby biotech: it takes a certain kind of scientist to survive the growing pains of a startup.(BioBusiness)
January 31, 2005... Frank Eeckman, cofounder and chief scientific officer of Centient Consulting, a San Diego firm that advises biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, once heard a venture capitalist describe a biotech startup company as a "boat on fire,"...

German university plan thwarted.(Update)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... The latest attempt by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's government to win approval for a $2.56 billion (US) plan to create a system of elite universities in Germany has failed after opposition from at least one state government. The...

Connecticut may fund stem-cell research.(Update)(Brief Article)
January 31, 2005... Following in the footsteps of California and New Jersey as well as other states the Connecticut legislature may consider a bill allowing both adult and embryonic stem cell research. If it passes, the state's governor, Jodi Rell, says she will...

Missouri stem-cell ban possible.(Update)
January 31, 2005... When Missouri's elected representatives arrived for the 2005 legislative session, they had their hands full of material about the ethics and implications of a proposed statewide ban on somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). The material...

New recombinant phosphatases.(Guide)
January 31, 2005... BIOMOL continues to expand its offering of recombinant phosphatases. In addition to the new protein tyrosine phosphatases listed below, turn to BIOMOL for innovative products like BIOMOL Green[TM], useful for colorimetric detection of free...

Soar with this Eagle[TM].(Guide)
January 31, 2005... These new adjustable pipetters have the same feel as more expensive instruments, yet a set of any six is only $665 with stand. Volume ranges are 0.2-2 *|, 0.5-10 *|, 2-20 *|, 20-100*|, 50-200 *|, 100-1000 *| and 1,000-5,000 *|, and an array...

Comprehensive Primer design tool.(Guide)
January 31, 2005... Primer Premier is a Windows and Mac program for PCR, hybridization, sequencing, nested and multiplex primer design. It uses ClustalW to design cross species primers automatically in regions of low degeneracy and reverse translates peptides to...

Laboratory/ultraviolet products catalog.(Guide)
January 31, 2005... UVP designs and manufactures a large selection of laboratory and ultraviolet products for applications in science and industry. The products include line of imaging/analysis and gel documentation systems, hybridization ovens, FirstLight UV...

Interested in reducing your cost of DNA sequencing tenfold?(Guide)
January 31, 2005... Say Hello to Finch on Sun For only $13,995 or about 10x LESS than it would cost to develop a similar software system in-house, why not consider Geospiza Finch (R) Suite for taking your labs sequencing and genotyping data management and...

Active Motif's new 2005 cell biology catalog.(Guide)
January 31, 2005... Active Motif's 2005 catalog features products for studying the activation & regulation of transcription factors and signaling proteins, including DNA-binding & phospho-specific ELISAs, reagents for chromatin immunoprecipitation, EMSA, gene...

What the aviator left out: visionary Howard Hughes Medical Institute had trouble taking off in its early days.
January 31, 2005... For many scientists, Howard Hughes is synonymous with a gold mine for biomedical research, even if the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is not mentioned in The Aviator, a recent film about Hughes' early career. But it hasn't always been...

Who's minding the drug store?(Editorial)(Editorial)
January 17, 2005... But remember, we don't actually sell our products. All of the resources we put into "sales and marketing" is really to make sure that physicians and patients are fully aware of all the information around the risks and benefits of the...

Citizen scholars: research universities must strive for academic engagement.(Opinion)
January 17, 2005... Public research universities face enormous challenges in the 21st century, perhaps none more compelling than the obligation to serve society. A 2004 National Academy of Sciences report, for example, represents the latest in a series of calls...

The rise--and fall?--of the NIMR.(Notebook)
January 17, 2005... Britain's science community has never seen anything quite like it. The Medical Research Council (MRC) is caught up in a damaging public row over the future of the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), one of its flagship...

Vidal scores 10 in 1.(Notebook)
January 17, 2005... Publishing 10 papers in one year is difficult for most scientists. But try publishing all 10 in a single journal issue, as Harvard Medical School geneticist Marc Vidal recently did: His name appeared on 10 articles in a recent special issue...

Have Rhodes, get quick PhD.(Notebook)
January 17, 2005... In the mid-1970s, the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, the program that gives US recipients the chance to study at Oxford for two to three years, included just one or two future scientists per year, out of 32 awardees. Now that the Rhodes no...

Dieting for the genome generation: nutrigenomics has yet to prove its worth. So why is it selling?(Research)
January 17, 2005... More than 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates wrote: "Leave your drugs in the chemist's pot if you can heal the patient with food." Scientists may finally be catching up with the Father of Medicine. One of the newest fields of nutrition science,...

Did enzymes evolve to capitalize on quantum tunneling? Quantum mechanics challenges classical, and leaves questions in its wake.(Research)
January 17, 2005... In the early years of the 20th century, a new theory, quantum mechanics, revolutionized physicists' understanding of nature. But delving into the subatomic realm meant rethinking some fundamental assumptions: Here, information passes...

HIV/host interaction elucidated: research uncovers a deaminating defense mechanism that HIV bypasses.(Hot Papers)
January 17, 2005... Viruses are masters of disguise when it comes to slipping past host-mediated defenses. But one disguise in particular, which HIV uses, appears a particularly vulnerable target that renders the virus harmless in some cells. Virion infectivity...

Interdisciplinary research faculty of 1000.(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... R. Ando et al., "Regulated fast nucleocytoplasmic shuttling observed by reversible protein highlighting," Science, 306:1370-3, Nov. 19, 2004. The authors describe a new fluorophore (Dronpa) that has a high quantum yield as well as being...

New adipocytokine found.(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... Adipose tissue does more than store triglycerides. It has become increasingly apparent that fat tissue serves as an extensive endocrine organ. According to Iichiro Shimomura and his team at Osaka University in Japan, a newly discovered...

ATP-free phosphorylation.(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... For the first time, scientists have described a way for cells to add phosphate groups to proteins that doesn't involve an ATP donor. A group at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore synthesized diphosphoinositol pentakisphosphate (IP7) and...

Twenty years of the magnificent seven: with decades of discovery on seven transmembrane receptors, why haven't we saved the day?(Vision)(Cover Story)
January 17, 2005... To any movie buff, TM7 refers to the 1960 John Sturges movie, The Magnificent Seven, in which a 30-year-old Steve McQueen burst onto the scene fighting alongside Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, and James Coburn to defend the...

Building high-speed lanes on the information highway: new meganetworks are putting the world's databases and supercomputers on researchers' desktops--and changing the way science is done.
January 17, 2005... The information highway is adding lanes. These new thorough-fares aren't designed for trucks carrying bulk E-mail or bus-loads of sightseers cruising along the Web. The new infobahns are strictly for science, and they're changing the way...

RNA therapeutics enter clinical trials: with human testing now underway, it's time for RNAi therapeutics to silence or shut up.(Technology)
January 17, 2005... Traditional gene therapy is built on a simple premise: If the absence of a gene product causes disease, then adding the missing gene will cure it. But recently some researchers have turned that idea upside down, using gene therapy to silence...

Antisense and sensibility in RNA therapeutics: RNAi may be the media darling, but other mRNA-targeting tools are making strides.(Technology)
January 17, 2005... These days RNA interference seems to be everywhere. A bona fide hit in research labs worldwide, the sequence-specific gene-silencing approach is now making inroads in drug-development circles. But RNAi is not the first targeted nucleic...

Mass spectrometry goes offsite: new sampling method has forensic, pharmaceutical applications.(Tools & Tech)
January 17, 2005... Scientists at Purdue University, led by Graham Cooks, professor of analytical chemistry, recently reported a novel method for processing samples for mass spectrometry (MS) analysis. (1) More than just a technological tweaking, it's an...

Cytogeneticists embrace molecular karyotyping: array-based techniques highlight chromosomal variations at the molecular level.(Tools & Tech)
January 17, 2005... For decades, cytogeneticists have pored over images of metaphase chromosomes from tumors, noting the many gross aberrations these karyotypes can reveal. As classical techniques give way to fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH),...

Cleaning up T-cell expansion: Dynal biotech mimics APCs with paramagnetic beads.(Tools & Tech)(antigen-presenting cells )(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... Oslo-based Dynal Biotech (www.dynalbiotech.com) has built an entire company around its Dynabeads, which are tiny paramagnetic particles that bind target cells, proteins, or nucleic acids, and can be removed in seconds with a magnet once their...

When science has a potential payoff: tech transfer offices are increasingly sophisticated, but business acumen varies.(Bio Business)
January 17, 2005... In a recent three-hour session at a Chicago hotel room, the University of Wisconsin's technology transfer office hammered out the final details of a licensing deal that granted Durham, NC-based Inspire Pharmaceuticals the right to use several...

The outlook for European biotech in 2005: a number of startups plan to go public and changes could ease the way.(Bio Business)
January 17, 2005... Much like an uncertain weather forecast predicting sun and patchy clouds, industry analysts see mixed prospects for European biotechnology companies in 2005. Geopolitical problems such as the war in Iraq aren't helping to soothe jittery...

The plight of the whistleblower: vindicated or not, life is never the same for those who disclose.(Bio Business)
January 17, 2005... After garnering data on the harmful effects of dust from sewage sludge used as fertilizer on US and Canadian farms, David Lewis, former microbiologist with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), spoke out in Nature articles. (1,2) The...

New frontiers in commercialization: universities need to make innovative moves to maximize the potential of intellectual property.(Vision)
January 17, 2005... Two decades ago, in the high-flying 1980s, there was great hope for licensing newly described molecules, compounds, and targets as potential diagnostic and therapeutic agents. Monoclonal antibodies, novel peptides, and other small molecules...

ACS sues Google over Scholar.(Update)(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... The American Chemical Society says Google's new academic and scientific search engine, Google Scholar, is infringing on its established search product, Scifinder Scholar. The ACS filed a statement of claim in US District Court in the District...

German biopatent law at odds with EU.(Update)(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... Germany's belated attempt to bring its biotechnology patent law into compliance with an EU directive issued in 1998 appears to contradict what the European Union mandated, meaning the issue could end up being debated in the European Court of...

Asian network forming.(Update)(scientific community formation)(Brief Article)
January 17, 2005... Developmental biologists in Asia have taken steps to forge a closer scientific community in recent months. A handful of scientists based in the region's top research institutes and universities are forming a pan-Asian network, which was first...

Gene expression & molecular biology.
January 17, 2005... AVAILABLE SOON--EPICENTRE'S 2005-2006 CATALOG Introduces a variety of unique new products to: * Amplify mRNA, including from a single cell. * Ligate ssDNA to prepare templates for Rolling Circle Transcription or Replication. ...

Comprehensive Primer design tool.
January 17, 2005... Primer Premier is a Windows and Mac program for PCR, hybridization, sequencing, nested and multiplex primer design. It uses ClustalW to design cross species primers automatically in regions of low degeneracy and reverse translates peptides to...

Interested in reducing your cost of DNA sequencing tenfold?
January 17, 2005... Say Hello to Finch on Sun For only $13,995 or about 10x LESS than it would cost to develop a similar software system in-house, why not consider Geospiza Finch (R) Suite for taking your labs sequencing and genotyping data management and...

A new & better way of transfection.
January 17, 2005... siPORT[TM] NeoFX[TM] Transfection Agent was developed to streamline siRNA transfection procedures, cutting time and increasing reproducibility. This novel lipid-based formulation can be used to efficiently transfect adherent cells while...

Pre-owned lab equipment.
January 17, 2005... * Savings of up to 80% off manuf. list * Remanufactured with warranty * Turn unwanted equipment into cash * Get more for your budget whether buying or selling, or if you just want a quote PEGASUS SCIENTIFIC, INC (800)...

Glass bottom dishes introductory prices.
January 17, 2005... WPI's new series of optical quality glass bottom dishes (with lids) provide exceptional imaging clarity. Availalbe in two sizes (35mm and 50mm diameters) with a choice of five different glass diameters (12mm to 40mm), all dishes are steril...

Black cats on the black sea: don't try putting cell-death researcher Yuri Lazebnik in a box--he'll radio for help.(Biography)
January 17, 2005... One summer in the late 1980s, Yuri Lazebnik needed to sort some cells. A graduate student at St. Petersburg State University in the Soviet Union, Lazebnik was studying proteins involved in regulating the cell cycle. The project required...

Co-regulation of mouse genes predicts function.(Research news)
January 17, 2005... Large-scale microarray analyses reveal that transcriptional co-regulation patterns can be remarkably helpful in predicting the function of novel mouse genes. Every eukaryotic genome-sequencing project to date has revealed the presence of...

All systems GO for understanding mouse gene function.
January 17, 2005... Abstract It is widely supposed that the tissue specificity of gene expression indicates gene function. Now, an extensive analysis of gene expression in the mouse reveals that quantitative measurement of expression levels in different...

The functional landscape of mouse gene expression.(Research article)
January 17, 2005... Abstract Background: Large-scale quantitative analysis of transcriptional co-expression has been used to dissect regulatory networks and to predict the functions of new genes discovered by genome sequencing in model organisms such as...