Most traits that are inherited, including those that predispose individuals to certain diseases, are conferred not by single genes but by combinations of them. That’s both good news and bad news, says Charles Boone, an HHMI international research scholar at the University of Toronto.
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On May Day 1999, Jennifer Chamberlin,* a 43-year-old secretary in the Midwest, stayed home to recuperate from back surgery and spend time with her three daughters, on spring break from school. Walking into her kitchen, Jenn fainted and fell to the floor. She soon regained consciousness but never returned to her normal self.
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Also read Separated at Birth?
It all began some 30 years ago, when the two physician-scientists were 20-some-thing medical students at Duke University. Being a year apart, “we didn’t know each other at all,” Ginsburg recounts, “but we discovered just a couple of years ago that we had dated the same girl!”
For a cell, destroying proteins is as essential as building them. The job of mincing proteins is performed by enzymatic machines called proteasomes. “Proteasomes affect almost all biological processes in the cell,” Verma says. By their deliberate destruction of regulatory proteins, they orchestrate activities from cell division to cell death. read in full issue (pdf)
Although he has never taken a biology class, Gene Myers’s work gets a lot of notice from biologists. Fifteen years ago, Myers, whose formal training is in computer science, mathematics, physics, and engineering, co-wrote an article for the Journal of Molecular Biology that would become the most highly cited scientific paper of the decade. read story
It might make for an interesting, albeit exhausting, research project to follow Roland Strauss as he moves through his world observing the ways insects maneuver through theirs. The 43-year-old neurobiologist and gadgetry guru never seems to sit still.
Meet Toddler, a walking robot that mimics the human gait. Created by computer engineer Russ Tedrake in the lab of computational neuroscientist and HHMI investigator H. Sebastian Seung at MIT, Toddler uses customized learning software to teach itself to walk in less than 20 minutes. The robot “doesn’t walk too much like a human, but we think it learns like a human,” Tedrake says. read in full issue (pdf)
Max Delbrück, the physicist-turned-biologist who became a founding father of molecular biology, often told his students that “if you have to use statistics to interpret your experimental results, they can’t be true.” read in full issue (pdf)
Gene therapy, a high-tech approach that aims to fight diseases with genes rather than drugs, may one day become the chosen means for treating many medical disorders. Scientists seeking a gene therapy approach to ALS face some formidable hurdles but are making progress. read story
PTC124 sticks to ribosomes — the cells’ protein factories — and prompts them to interpret a premature stop codon as a normal codon. Instead of aborting assembly of the protein, the ribosome inserts a protein building block — an amino acid — and continues making a complete protein chain until it encounters the normal termination codon, which the ribosome correctly interprets as a stop. read story
At a recent seminar, HHMI investigator Larry Goldstein flashed a slide of Godzilla, the monster of Japanese sci-fi, towering over a cityscape, devouring a string of railroad cars. The next slide showed Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian, bedecked in fur loincloth and sword, muscles bulging. read in full issue (pdf)
Sidebar: Conducting the Choir