July 25, 2000
Speakers Bureau Volunteers Recognized
NIH'ers Urged To
OSE Summer
Celebrate World Breastfeeding Week
Sociologist Riley
Letters to the Editor
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'Three Freedoms' Permit NIH Laboratory to Prosper By Rich McManus
It isn't the only laboratory at NIH that has an enviably long track record of combining impeccable scientific achievement with a loose, congenial atmosphere, but NIDDK's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) established in 1960 to break further ground in a field then comparatively new is a fitting poster child for what NIH labs are supposed to accomplish. Some 15 members of the National Academy of Sciences are either there now or have passed through its ranks, and its extensive bibliography is studded with scientific peaks: seminal studies of protease that laid the groundwork for understanding HIV protease; the discovery of DNA gyrase, an enzyme important in developing effective antibiotics; and studies of chromatin and DNA organization that help explain gene expression in higher organisms. M O R E . . .
'Worst Is Yet to Come' By Carla Garnett
Towards the end of 1999, NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci
recalled he was often asked if after 20 years of the epidemic, AIDS
could finally go into the history books as the disease that was. After
all, his questioners reasoned, we have many combinations of
drugs both anti-HIV and those to combat opportunistic
infections that are forestalling the onset of AIDS in
HIV-infected people, and keeping people with AIDS alive longer.
We may not have a cure, but the rate of new cases seems to be
leveling off, and a vaccine is in our not-too-distant future, right?
Fauci said time and again he'd have to shake his head. On the
contrary, he told them, "the worst of the global pandemic has yet to
occur." |