2002 News Stories

December 12, 2002

From Seashells to Nanocomputers What can a humble seashell tell us about how to build biocomputers at the nanoscale level—50,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair? Plenty, according to Angela M. Belcher, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Bioengineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

December 4, 2002

The Mouse Genome and the Measure of Man The Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research and the International Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium today announced the publication of the genetic blueprint of a mouse together with insights gleaned from comparing mouse and human sequences.

November 21, 2002

Vaccine Technology Homes in on Cancer Whitehead Institute Member Richard Young's lab has discovered a unique approach to vaccine development, which is now in phase II and III human clinical trials for the cancer-causing human papilloma virus.

November 5, 2002

Ursinus to Bestow Honorary Degree on Director Susan Lindquist Known for groundbreaking work in the study of the stress response and protein folding, Susan L. Lindquist, the Director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, will receive an honorary degree from Ursinus College on Nov. 12, 2002.

October 29, 2002

Whitehead Genome Center Accelerates Effort to Build Haplotype Map The Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research is part of an international research consortium that today launched a $100 million public-private effort to build the next generation map of the human genome. Called a "haplotype map," this effort is expected to make it easier, faster, and perhaps cheaper to find genes that predispose us to common diseases such as diabetes and cancer.

October 24, 2002

Whitehead Launches Affiliate Program In today’s research arena, success requires biologists, physicians, chemists, mathematicians, and bioinformatics specialists to funnel unique expertise into shared projects. At Whitehead, interdisciplinary collaboration has fostered discoveries at the intersection of what were once disparate disciplines and has inspired the Institute to aggressively recruit diverse talent to the lab.

October 24, 2002

Scientists Produce the Script for Life Imagine popping a movie into the VCR or DVD player and watching a list of credits for two hours—no movie, no plot, no dialogue—just the cast. That’s the problem facing contemporary biology. The human genome project has provided researchers with a growing list of genes—basically a cast of thousands of characters, running life inside the cell. But the key to understanding life, both in health and sickness, is the script that outlines how these cellular players interact, communicate, and cue each other.

October 17, 2002

Lindquist Lab Sheds Light on How Prion Proteins Kill Neurons Prion diseases—such as mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans—have stumped scientists for decades with a complex "whodunit" complete with many suspects and a missing murder weapon. Unlike other infectious diseases that are linked to pathogens such as bacteria and viruses, these diseases have a unique and mysterious connection to a misfolded protein.

October 10, 2002

SNPs Reveal Natural Selection in Human Populations Some people carry better genetic armor for resisting infectious disease than others. For example, many Africans have allelic variants of several different genes that provide some resistance to malaria. Geneticists would like to know whether such resistance arose through selective pressure or merely represents random mutations that remain in the population.

October 1, 2002

David Sabatini Appointed to Whitehead Faculty The Whitehead Institute recently welcomed David Sabatini as its newest faculty member. Sabatini, who joined the Institute in 1997 as a Whitehead Fellow, was named an Associate Member at Whitehead and an Assistant Professor in the biology department at MIT.

September 30, 2002

Genome Center Director Eric Lander to Visit His Holiness the Dalai Lama The Genome Center got in touch with its spiritual side last week when it brought together Whitehead’s Tibetian employees—the largest Tibetan workforce in Cambridge—for afternoon tea. Almost fifty members of the Whitehead Tibetan community joined Genome Center Director Eric Lander to discuss his upcoming visit with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

September 11, 2002

Scientists Show Cloning Leads to Severe Dysregulation of Many Genes New results from Rudolf Jaenisch’s lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research confirmed that the cloning process jeopardizes the integrity of an animal’s whole genome. Scientists had suspected this based on studying a mere dozen genes, but the current study, which will be reported online in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science this week, expansively surveyed 10,000 genes for abnormalities.

August 29, 2002

Bioimaging: Exploring Life in the Fourth Dimension When Anton Van Leeuwenhoek first transformed a small glass ball into a magnifying lens, he opened a new window into the world of scientific discovery. Four centuries and millions of magnifications later, researchers are able to see the inner workings of the cell and use their observations to unravel many mysteries of life.

August 5, 2002

Whitehead Member Gerald Fink Receives Lifetime Achievement Award Whitehead Member Gerald Fink got a rousing "thank you" today from his colleagues in the field of yeast biology. The heartfelt recognition came in the form of the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award given at the biennial Yeast Genetics and Molecular Biology Meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. The breadth and depth of his achievements made the decision to select Fink as the first recipient of the award "a slam dunk" choice, said Tom Fox of Cornell University and a former student of Fink's, who presented the award.

July 18, 2002

Harvey Lodish Elected President of the American Society for Cell Biology Whitehead Member Harvey F. Lodish was elected President of the 10,000-member American Society for Cell Biology for the year 2004. Since its founding in 1960, the American Society for Cell Biology has brought together experts in the varied facets of cell biology to advance scientific knowledge, increase public awareness of the importance of biomedical research, and guide national policy on the education, training, and career development of biomedical researchers.

June 24, 2002

Queen of England Honors BOA Member Una S. Ryan Britain's Queen Elizabeth the Second, in her Birthday Honors List, recently awarded Whitehead Board of Associates (BOA) member Una Scully Ryan, with the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to research, development, and the promotion of biotechnology.

June 17, 2002

Systems Biology: Creating the Circuits of Life Whitehead Fellow Trey Ideker often thinks of himself as an engineer and the cell as a circuit. “I see myself looking at all the wires at once to understand how they work with each other and then making the wiring diagrams,” he says. “I want to know which wires are used for what—for example, which wires short-circuit to cause cancer and which need to stay active to keep the body healthy.” Ideker’s approach to understanding cell circuitry, an approach known as systems biology, is part of a new research initiative that is shifting biological science from the local to the global, from the parts to the whole.

May 22, 2002

Building a New Paradigm in Drug Discovery It’s no secret that drug development is a painfully slow and expensive process—a typical new drug takes 15 years and $500 million to come to market, costing the pharmaceutical industry some $20 billion annually. That’s because finding a drug candidate and developing it into a treatment for disease is largely a matter of luck. To make drug discovery a more targeted science, we need to identify the complete set of all human proteins and develop tools to study them in parallel," says Whitehead Fellow David Sabatini, who was chosen as one of the world’s 100 Top Young Innovators by Technology Review magazine.

May 13, 2002

Scientists Find Protein at the Intersection of Genetics, Development and the Environment Environmental stress can reveal hidden genetic variation in plants, resulting in novel traits that might provide an alternative to genetic modification of crops, researchers report in the journal Nature. They have linked this phenomenon to the actions of a particular molecule, the heat stress protein Hsp90. These findings place Hsp90 at the interface of environment and genetics and potentially provide an explanation for a long-standing evolutionary puzzle: how do large changes in form and function requiring the synchronous alteration of several features occur during evolution?

April 25, 2002

Gairdner Foundation Awards Eric S. Lander with International Award for Achievement Eric Lander, Director of the Whitehead Institute Center for Genomic Research, is one of eight scientists to win the 2002 Gairdner Awards, considered one of the most prestigious international awards in medical research. Lander and the other winners were recognized for their outstanding contributions in genomic research.

March 7, 2002

Scientists Combine Therapeutic Cloning, Embryonic Stem Cells, and Gene Therapy to Correct a Genetic Defect in Mice While the promise of nuclear transplantation therapy, commonly referred to as “therapeutic cloning,” has given hope to patients, like Christopher Reeve, and excited the research community and the public, it has never been successfully demonstrated.

February 19, 2002

Nobel Laureate David Baltimore Tackles Issues of Trust From the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center to the Enron scandal, we are bombarded by the break down of trust in society. Drawing upon personal experience and world events, David Baltimore, the founding director of the Whitehead Institute and current president of the California Institute of Technology, tackled these issues in a talk entitled “Building a Community on Trust,” held on February 18 in Kresge Auditorium.

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Last updated December 12, 2002.