On Monday, the Karolinska Institute will announce the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, kicking off a week of science Nobel announcements. And millions of Jews around the world will be in synagogue, observing the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. Orthodox Jews, and even some Conservative Jews, like my family, don?t answer the phone on the holiday, even if they?re home. So that begs a question: What if an observant Jew is among the winners of the Physiology or Medicine... Click to continue

In May, James Shapiro wrote in our pages about progress using the Edmonton Protocol to transplant islet cells into patients with type 1 diabetes. In this week?s New England Journal of Medicine, he and a number of colleagues around the world report the results of a phase 1-2 trial of the protocol in 36 patients. The findings were consistent which previous studies that Shapiro... Click to continue

Research!America today launched the 2006 Your Candidates ? Your Health Voter Guide -- a site designed to help voters figure out how the candidates seeking their support feel about scientific research. The group sent 10 questions on subjects such as the CDC budget and basic science funding to all House and Senate candidates. To find out how they responded, plug in your zip code.

This is an important and timely effort, with the US midterm... Click to continue

Announced today: The 2006 Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research is shared by Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, Carol Greider at Johns Hopkins University, and Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School for their research on telomerase, the enzyme responsible for maintaining the length of linear chromosomes.

In addition, Joseph Gall of the Carnegie Institution is being honored for his lifetime of discovery and innovation as... Click to continue