News

Massachusetts can seize the opportunity to achieve global leadership in the life-sciences economy if the Commonwealth takes a more active state role in the promotion and support of biotechnology, according to a new report issued this month by the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MBC) and the Boston Consulting Group.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.