News

Chop a planarian flatworm in half and you end up with two healthy, wiggly worms. Unfortunately, not so with a lab mouse or fruit fly. Peter Reddien, who joins the Whitehead faculty as Associate Member this August after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Utah, is determined to find out why.

Whitehead Associate Member David Sabatini has been chosen by the W.M. Keck Foundation as one of this year’s grant recipients under the Distinguished Young Scholars in Medical Research program.

Splitting their time between lab and clinic, Whitehead physician-scientists bring research and reassurance to patients.

Deep in your DNA, a gene has gone haywire and is driving up the production of a protein that is messing with your body. Wouldn’t it be great to sift through all your 20,000-something genes, find the offender, and swat it like a fly? Fortunately, a new technique eventually could do just that.

Better understanding of fat-cell hormones will help us attack the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Harvey Lodish, a Founding Whitehead Member and professor of biology at MIT, has pioneered this field.

Whitehead Institute Member David Bartel is one of two scientists to receive the annual Louis-D. Prize from the Institut de France, an organization similar in many respects to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.

The United States should follow the lead of Massachusetts in legalizing responsible human embryonic stem cell research, Senator Edward Kennedy declared on June 2 at Whitehead.

Amyloid fibers are best known as the plaque that gunks up neurons in people with neurodegenerative illnesses such as Alzheimer’s and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease—the human analog of mad cow disease. But even though amyloids are common and implicated in a host of conditions, researchers haven’t been able to identify their precise molecular structures.

Figuring what a gene does is hard work, but it’s vastly easier than it was a few years ago. Back then, you would laboriously isolate a single gene, tinker with it to get some inkling about its purpose, and then start speculating about how it might collaborate with other genes. Now, microarrays let researchers gather exponentially more data about gene expression.

Phillip Sharp, Nobel laureate and founding director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been named to the Board of Directors of Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.