News

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.

Researchers in the lab of Whitehead Institute Member Rudolf Jaenisch have discovered a mechanism that might enable scientists to multiply adult stem cells quickly and efficiently.

Scientists have known for the last decade that a link exists between wound healing and cancer. Now scientists in the lab of Whitehead Institute Member Robert Weinberg have discovered the process by which tumors hijack normal wound-healing processes and use them for their own purposes.

Whitehead Institute Interim Director David Page is one of 72 new members of the National Academy of Sciences elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Cells are dividing all the time, and that’s a good thing. If they didn’t, our tissue and organs couldn’t replenish themselves, and pretty soon we’d be done for. But when cell division goes wrong, it can have disastrous results, such as cancer and birth defects. Scientists in the lab of Whitehead Member Terry Orr-Weaver have uncovered one of the primary mechanisms governing cell division.

2005 is off to a good start for Whitehead Member David Bartel. In January, he and his colleagues published a landmark paper in the journal Cell. A week later he was honored with the National Academy of Science's prestigious Award in Molecular Biology. And in March, Bartel was appointed Investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

Whitehead Institute has joined ten other leading biomedical organizations in an $18 million, three-year public-private consortium that will create a comprehensive library of gene inhibitors to be made available to the entire scientific community.

Robert S. Langer, the Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, has been named Institute Professor, the highest honor awarded by the MIT faculty and administration.