Word: zeus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Those of you who are familiar with Greek mythology will know that the story of Amphitryon is not a particularly humorous one. Unable to win the virtuous Alcmena by any other method, the ever-philandering Zeus recreates himself in the exact likeness of her husband Amphitryon and so wins a night under the sheets with the loving wife. Over time this tale of unwitting adultery has been transformed into a farcical matter, one which has formed the basis for an impressive number of plays. Continuing a tradition started by the Roman playwright Plautus, the 20th century French dramatist Jean Giraudoux...
...17th century French court admittedly serves as a nice parallel to the intricacies of a story that has two sets of identical “twins” roaming the stage. (Mercury takes a stint as an identical copy of Amphitryon’s slave in order to facilitate Zeus bedroom escapades.) But the script, to its own detriment, borrows freely from Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (which was based in part on Plautus’ Amphituo) and in doing so brazenly ignores any and all possible questions or concerns to which this unique and fascinating interaction...
Here in Cambridge, a new industry is quietly taking shape that proposes to do that on a grand scale, as companies with names like Biogen, Genzyme, Genetics Institute and Millennium Pharmaceuticals--Zeus' home--prepare to change forever the way doctors fight disease. They're not alone: spurred by the prospect of scientific glory and enormous profit, big pharmaceutical firms and university and government labs have been joined by scores of new companies, not just in Cambridge but in Montgomery County, Md., Silicon Valley and other high-tech hot spots around the nation. It's a virtual gold rush to mine...
Sifting through the human genome for therapeutically useful gems, though, requires a well-designed search strategy combined with powerful technology. At Millennium, housed in a factory that once stamped out heart-shaped candy boxes for Valentine's Day, that strategy is embodied in Zeus, whose job is to find the handful of genes among the genome's tens of thousands that are key to individual diseases--and thus key to making effective medications...
Then they used Zeus to set up microarray analyses and winnowed the 10,000 down to one promising protein they call ACE-2. Testing the enzyme on tissue cells from different organs in the body, the scientists showed that whereas the original ACE acts broadly on many tissues in the body, ACE-2 is particularly active in heart and kidney cells, where it might be more effective in controlling high blood pressure. Because they already knew on the molecular level exactly how ace worked, Tepper's team also knew precisely which lab tests would determine whether...