News

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF) in Research Triangle Park, NC, has named Whitehead Fellow George Daley one of six physician-scientists to receive Clinical Science Awards in Translational Research for 2003.

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.

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.

Faced with an infection, the human body’s first line of defense is to produce millions of antibodies to neutralize the infection. Orchestrating this defense is the human immune cell called the B cell, which has the amazing ability to produce an army of antibodies, each a replica of the other and each tailor made for a specific infectious agent. In fact, maternal and paternal copies of genes can produce antibodies that are not exact replicas, so the B cell must silence one of them to avoid disorders of the immune system. But how a B cell pulls off this stunt has been a mystery.

Genome Center Director Eric Lander was recently awarded the Novartis/ Drew Award in Biomedical Research. Lander accepted the award on November 27 at a scientific symposium hosted by Drew University in New Jersey.

Whitehead Member Gerry Fink was recently awarded the 2001 George W. Beadle Medal by the Genetics Society of America. The Beadle award is named in honor of acclaimed geneticist and Nobel Laureate George Wells Beadle.

In a tour de force in genomics, researchers led by the Whitehead Institute and the Washington University School of Medicine in St.Louis, Missouri, have sequenced and analyzed one of the most complicated terrains of the human genome. This region on the male sex (Y) chromosome, called AZFc, is important for sperm production and, when lost, causes male infertility.

David Bartel’s lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research reported the exciting discovery of a new class of small genes last month. The genes don’t code for proteins, but instead code for tiny RNAs called "microRNAs" —only 20 to 24 bases long—thought to be important in regulating protein levels. The results were published in the October 26 issue of Science along with two other papers with similar findings, one from Thomas Tuschl’s lab at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and the other from Victor Ambros’s lab at Dartmouth Medical School.

Chalking up another victory for comparative genomics, researchers from Genoscope (The French National Sequencing Center) in Paris, France, and the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research today announced that they have produced a six-fold sequence coverage of Tetraodon nigroviridis, a type of puffer fish whose genome is estimated to be 380 million DNA letters long.

Using DNA microarray technology, researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have discovered that a type of human immune cell, known as a dendritic cell, initiates an immune response that is tailor-made for specific infectious organisms. The researchers found that dendritic cells turn on different sets of genes, or a signature pattern of gene response, depending on whether the organism is a bacteria, virus, or fungus. This study shows that even at the earliest stages of infection, the human body knows the nature of the infectious organism, or pathogen, and responds with a specific type of immune response to eliminate the pathogen.