Laboratory environments contain all manner of potential hazards for pregnant women. But most U.S. academic institutions lack sufficient guidelines for pregnant lab workers, leaving women to identify hazards and solutions on their own.
Systems biology seeks to connect the dots between molecular data. It's a hot career field, but success requires making connections between disciplines.
The rapid changes--social and technological--occurring in astronomy research are reflected in the careers of U.S. astronomers Andrea Ghez and William Raphael Hix.
Biology and nanotechnology start-ups may claim most of the headlines, but chemistry, too, offers plenty of entrepreneurial opportunities. The challenge is to find the right problem to solve.
Kris Niyogi has made his reputation by elucidating how Arabidopsis--and the unicellular green algae Chlamydomonas, which can survive even in total darkness--respond to excess light.
Microsoft may be best known for its microcomputer software, but for 750 computer scientists at six facilities worldwide, Microsoft Research is a great place to do good work.
Western pharmaceutical companies are building R&D facilities in China, providing scientific employment opportunities, especially for Chinese nationals trained in the West.
A career in RNA interference (RNAi) is a true work in progress. The field is so new that virtually no one now working in it did graduate work in RNAi. Peggy Taylor, now vice president of research for Sequitur, took a natural path, starting out with antisense work while in graduate school at Harvard University. Her work focused on a particular flavor of antisense called morpholino, which blocks th...
In 1993, Jon Kayyem was a postdoc with Thomas Meade, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Kayyem and Meade had an idea: They decided that they ought to be able to use electrochemistry to detect DNA with a hand-held device. Affymetrix, a biomedical research company?, and its chip technology was just gaining steam; Kayyem and Meade were determined to steer clear of dir...
For the past few decades, biology advisors have been whispering one word in the ears of talented undergrads: genes. It's good advice--molecular biology and genetics have blossomed, creating new tools for research and identifying new targets for treatment of disease. But the new golden word of advice might be the same as an old one: classical pharmacology. As the armies of molecular biologists and...
Life in the biotech industry is a far cry from academia. It isn't pure science. If you make the leap, expect to be indoctrinated into the world of business, because in industry business goals drive research. And even if you join a company as a scientist, you may find yourself moving out of the lab altogether. "There are lots of scientists who get tapped to do things in project management, busines...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX There are molecular biologists, and biochemists, and immunologists. There are toxicologists, and pharmacologists. But there are no pharmacogenomicists. The field is too young and immature to warrant a job title. And most of the time, pharmacogenomics is one of a series of tools--albeit a crucial one--that researchers use to investigate how patients respond to drugs, and ...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Big ideas sometimes require the simplest questions. "It's almost a childlike innocence --you ask questions that adults might never ask, because they have a background where the question is no longer appropriate," says Harmit Singh Malik, an assistant member of the Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's basic science division. Malik should know. His career...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX As many of the articles in this feature have indicated, biology is at a crossroads. Biologists have more data than they know what to do with, and mathematicians have the tools and expertise to begin to make sense of it. But mathematicians lack the fundamental knowledge of biology necessary to understand the results. Meanwhile, biologists grasp the systems they're studyin...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Mathematics has the potential to provide inroads to almost any scientific discipline. No one understands that better than Ben Goertzel, who is currently chief scientific officer of BioMind LLC in Bethesda, Maryland, which applies artificial intelligence to the analysis of microarrays. In college and graduate school, his interests ranged from theoretical physics to psycho...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Plenty of scientists consider their instruments to be finicky, liable to produce bogus data at the slightest provocation. But don't tell Craig Cary (pictured left) that instruments are fragile. He uses them everywhere. On field trips to Antarctica, he has spent long days in a tent, doing DNA extractions and analyzing microbial samples, huddled over a portable PCR machine...
