Word: labs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When scientists in Texas reported in January that they had successfully used antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to prevent HIV transmission in lab mice, colleagues received the news with great enthusiasm - and no small amount of concern. Positive study results like these offer hope that ARVs may someday help stem the rate of new infections worldwide, but public-health experts in the U.S. worry that they may also prompt people in affluent at-risk communities to leapfrog the emerging science and self-medicate. "It's inevitable," says Dr. Warner Greene, director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology at the University...
...That's not an overstatement. The genome in Venter's lab in Rockville, Md., could revolutionize genetics, introducing a new world order in which the alchemy of life is broken down into the ultimate engineering project. Man-made genomes could lead to new species that churn out drugs to treat disease, finely tuned vaccines that target just the right lethal bug, even cells that convert sunlight into a biofuel...
...from the oceans of the world. Venter would circumnavigate the globe with a crew of scientists and sailors and every 200 miles (320 km) would dip canisters into the ocean at various depths, filter whatever life-forms floated in - mostly microscopic - and send them back to his newly created lab, the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville. Over 2½ years, the journey yielded 6 million new genes and 400 new microbial species. "Most people thought the ocean was a homogenous soup," Venter says. "But 85% of the species we found were unique...
...shuttled between his ship and his lab, Venter was overseeing another, equally grand and potentially revolutionary science project: creating life in the lab. Among the organisms he and his team sequenced in the years leading up to the human-genome work was Mycoplasma genitalium, an unlovely bacterium whose preferred target on the animals it infects is evident by its name. That organism, which the team sequenced in 1995, has one of the smallest known chromosomes of any self-replicating life-form - just 485 genes. What, Venter wondered back then, was the minimum genome an organism needed to survive and reproduce...
...Such painstaking cut, study and paste eventually did the job. Not only did Venter's team members succeed in building their own mycoplasma at their own lab benches, they also took the opportunity to rewrite its genetic score. First, they introduced a mutation that would prevent it from causing disease. Then they branded it with a series of watermarks that would distinguish it as a product of their lab. Using a code built around selected genes, they spelled out five words that Venter coyly refuses to reveal, saying only that any molecular-biology study can suss them out and promising...