Scientists from both sides of the pond are taking dramatic steps to save animal research.

Days after researchers and animal rights groups staged parallel protests about the future of Oxford labs in the UK, Ohio State University primate researcher Sally Boysen and other protestors physically chained themselves to a gate outside a chimpanzee center slated for closure.

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When our news editor, Alison McCook, emailed me yesterday to tell me that the editors of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) had been sacked, I had a bit of d?j? vu. Just over seven years ago, I received a similar email from a colleague at JAMA, where I had recently finished a stint as co-editor in chief of the medical student section. JAMA?s editor, George Lundberg, with whom I had worked and whom I still consider a close... Click to continue

The Keystone Symposium I?m at this week in Santa Fe is billed as being about two related subjects: the molecular mechanisms of cardiac disease and the molecular mechanisms of regeneration. And while the talks on regeneration ? that translates here roughly into stem cell therapy ? are mostly scheduled for today (Wednesday) and tomorrow, the use of stem cells to regenerate the heart is already the loud buzz at poster sessions, and is at... Click to continue

It?s a no-brainer that people who share last names usually share genes as well. I, for one, am often asked if I?m related to the Indian cricket player Sourav Ganguly. (Sadly, no.) But now there?s a scientific study to back up such questions. The research, which focuses on paternal lineages, verifies what we all would have guessed: that sharing a surname... Click to continue

How do you move from elegantly constructed mouse knockouts like the ones presented at the Keystone Symposium on Molecular Mechanisms of Cardiac Disease and Regeneration here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to pesky wild-type humans who often seem to court heart attacks? If you?re Elizabeth Nabel, director of the ... Click to continue

This week?s advance online publication of Nature Neuroscience details a neat new technique called FACS-array profiling, which should be of interest to anyone studying central nervous system development.

X. William Yang and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, used transgenic mice from the GENSAT (gene expression nervous system atlas) project to compare gene... Click to continue

I think anyone who received last week's Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) newsletter would have been forgiven for wondering why the main article was entitled ?What is Islamism??

ESOF is a science meeting and its emailed newsletters are presumably designed to build interest levels prior to the event. Previous editions had covered fairly routine territory?lasers, neurons, galaxies, microbes, science journalists and the origin of the universe?which made... Click to continue

Epigenetics and chromatin remodeling, it turns out, may play a role in heart disease. In one of two keynote addresses that opened the Keystone Symposia?s meeting on Molecular Mechanisms of Cardiac Disease and Regeneration here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Eric Olson showed why he?s received a number of awards from the American Heart Association, and why one of his earlier papers, linking calcineurin to cardiac hypertrophy, was a ... Click to continue

In the latest of a long line of developments, Columbia University appears to have withdrawn its name from a 2001 study in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine co-authored by Korean researcher Kwang Yul Cha. During the study, prayer appeared to boost the success of in vitro fertilization (IVF), even though infertile couples weren?t aware of the... Click to continue

So the Ohio School Board overturned a previous decision to add wording about ?critical analysis? of evolutionary theory. Though the wording sounds somewhat innocuous several evolution defenders have painted it as the next permutation of Intelligent Design?s grand plans to cram a creation story into science class. So, this is an important victory and only one of the first that can be nearly directly attributed to the outcome of the Dover case. Quotes from the New York Times... Click to continue

When I saw this month?s cover story earned a mention in Monday?s New York Times article called "Reporters find science journals harder to trust, but not easy to verify," my eyes lingered over both the headline of the story and the writer?s take on our article? namely, that the rocketing rate of submissions to top-tier journals was "weakening the screening process."

On the one hand, I see her point. While journals appear to... Click to continue

An urgent plea has gone out from Britain's Royal Society, calling for a ?white knight? to buy some notes written by Robert Hooke in the late 1600s and make them available to researchers.

Hooke worked with Robert Boyle, coined the term 'cell' and helped rebuild London, among other things. He was an early secretary of the Royal Society and the papers in question are annotated and draft minutes from early meetings.

Given all of which, it seems a shame that the Royal Society isn't in a... Click to continue

Little did I know what a treat I was getting at last week?s conference at the New School in New York called "Politics & Science: How their interplay results in public policy." On the second day, attendees heard a meticulous synopsis of the scientific data to support the trend of global warming, presented by James Hansen, the now-beleaguered NASA climate scientist who has accused the U.S. government of suppressing his findings.

Hansen ?... Click to continue

Werner Hoeger, the kinesiologist turned luger we profiled in our February issue, came incredibly close to his goal of four clean runs in Torino this weekend.

On Sunday, the Boise State professor completed the final two runs of the two-day event, finishing in 32^nd place out of 36. Not bad at all for a 52-year-old, the eldest male luger and one of the eldest competitors at the Winter Games. Hoeger took up the sport only eight years ago and... Click to continue

After 27 years, Australia's Lorne Conference on the Organization and Expression of the Genome witnessed a first on Sunday: a session dedicated to the joys of epigenetics .

The session kicked off with Carmen Sapienza from the Fels Institute for Cancer Research and Molecule Biology, Temple University School of Medicine, who showed using a combination of database analysis and lab work that imprinted chromosomal regions are historical... Click to continue

A week or so ago, Ann Maree Pearce, a government cytogeneticist from Australia's island state, Tasmania, and colleagues said in a Nature news report that a nasty facial cancer affecting the Tasmanian devil population, dubbed Devil Facial Tumour Disease, was in fact an infective cell line being passed between the ferocious, foxed-sized scavengers via bites and so on.

At the 18th Lorne Cancer Conference Erskine on the Beach in Lorne,... Click to continue

The 18th Lorne Cancer Conference Erskine on the Beach in Lorne, Australia, closed today, but not before p53 competed with the scenery for scientists' attention. Just as the Keystone Symposia are set up to allow for skiing in the afternoon, Lorne is set up to nice long break in the middle of the day during which delegates play tennis on grass courts, swim at the sweeping beach across the road or just laze on the grass in the sun.

Tony... Click to continue

While doing a little background research for a notebook item running in the March issue, I had the opportunity to type the words ?Brain Transplantation? into Google?s search window. The very first hit you get is for, aptly enough, BrainTrans Inc. which promises to restore health, youth, and vitality the surgical way ? by plopping your cerebrum into the body of a younger, fitter model. Now I tend to be skeptical about such things, but who wouldn?t be... Click to continue

This one day conference focused on the interface between academic research and the commercialization of the fruits of stem cell research. The San Francisco-based Women?s Technology Cluster , whose mission is ?to increase the number of successful women-led companies in the life science, high technology, and clean technology sectors and to leverage their influence,? was the organizing sponsor. They apparently sponsor over thirty events a year to promote that... Click to continue

I?m an obvious beneficiary of medical technology. Without the computer surgically embedded in my skull, I?d be totally deaf. The device, called a ?cochlear implant,? routes past my damaged inner ear by triggering my auditory nerves with sixteen tiny electrodes coiled up inside my cochlea.



It?s not a cure, though, any more than glasses cure vision loss. It?s a prosthesis, a workaround. Compared to the extraordinary delicacy and precision of naturally evolved organs, it?s clumsy. It?s like... Click to continue

Peer review is on every life scientist?s mind lately, it seems. One of the main complaints I heard while researching the February cover story is that the process is inherently difficult to investigate scientifically. Each journal has a somewhat unique system for reviewing papers, and each paper will have a unique journey through a journal?s reviewing machinery.

But I?ve learned that even though peer review has obvious imperfections, it?s the... Click to continue

My past came back to haunt me today. I was an eager attendee of the 2006 International Symposium: Stem Cell Symposium, which was organized by the Women?s Technology Cluster, a business incubator in San Francisco. I had no idea that salamanders would enter the discussions of differentiation and deals. But, as fate would have it, the amphibious creatures served as prime evidence of the possibilities and potential of regenerative medicine. These are the same animals that my friend in fourth grade,... Click to continue

Despite the diversity of topics and speakers, some common threads emerged at the joint structural biology meetings in Keystone this past week. First, structural genomics clearly has hit its stride. The US Protein Structure Initiative deposited some 1,300 structures in the Protein Data Bank between 2000 and 2005, RIKEN added 1,347 of its own between 2002 and 2005, and the Structural Genomics Consortium added another 180 in the past 18 months or so. That?s nearly... Click to continue

Ari Patrinos is ending his stint as associate director of science for biological and environmental research at the Department of Energy to head up Synthetic Genomics, Inc, a J. Craig Venter venture launched this past summer. Having spent ten years leading the DOE?s often budget-crunched biology efforts, I couldn?t help but wonder why he was leaving prior to a huge influx of government money as mentioned in George Bush?s ... Click to continue

There?s a pretty slick paper in the February Nature Methods. Alexander Shekhtman, of SUNY-Albany, describes a novel technique called STINT-NMR (for structural interactions using in-cell NMR), which maps a protein?s structural changes in response to protein-protein interactions in vivo.

Shekhtman presented his work Tuesday (Jan. 31) at the Keystone Symposium on Structural Genomics, and I got the chance to talk to him about... Click to continue

President Bush thinks that science is the key to keeping the US ahead. It will help the country wean itself off fossil fuels, he said in his fifth State of the Union last night, and it will keep the nation?s businesses competitive in the global marketplace. He wants to start with children, whom he?d like to see ?take more math and science and to make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations.?... Click to continue

If they awarded a prize for best seminar title, Zygmunt Derewenda would win it, hand?s down. According to the abstract book for the Keystone Symposium on Structural Genomics, his seminar was to be entitled "Protein Crystallization: From Art to Science." But the University of Virginia researcher decided that was a bit too provocative, so he opted for a more "neutral" title: "Protein Crystallization by Intelligent Design."

Derewenda's point, of course, is that... Click to continue