News

Feverishly hot climates. Dizzying alcohol and sugar binges. Heavy metals. Toxic drugs. Genetic mutations. Over the years, yeast, fruit flies, mustard plants and mice have struggled through their own versions of an extreme reality TV show in the laboratory of Whitehead Member Susan Lindquist.

Scientists at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have successfully demonstrated that a theoretical-and controversial-technique for generating embryonic stem cells is indeed possible, at least in mice.

How do organisms carry out signaling between and within their cells? Leading biologists detail their advances in understanding cell circuitry.

Researchers in the laboratory of Whitehead Member Susan Lindquist have identified a key mechanism that enables pathogenic fungi to evolve drug-resistant capabilities with such distressing rapidity.

Leah Cowen, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Whitehead Member Susan Lindquist, has been selected by a Whitehead committee to receive the Genzyme Postdoctoral Fellowship at Whitehead Institute.

Whitehead Institute Fellow Thijn Brummelkamp has been chosen as one of the world's 35 Top Young Innovators by MIT's Technology Review magazine. The TR35 consists of 35 individuals under 35 years of age whose innovative work in business and technology has a profound impact on the world.

Researchers working with human embryonic stem cells have uncovered the process responsible for the single-most tantalizing characteristic of these cells: their ability to become just about any type of cell in the body, a trait known as pluripotency.

Whitehead researchers discover that, unlike other cancers, melanoma is born with its metastatic engines fully revved.

The human and the chimpanzee Y chromosomes went their separate ways approximately 6 million years ago. But ever since this evolutionary parting, these two chromosomes have experienced different fates, ne research indicates.

Chemotherapy or organ transplantation not only take a huge toll on patients, but they can compromise the immune system and leave patients vulnerable to infections from microbes such as pathogenic fungi—the fastest-growing cause of hospital-acquired infections.