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For years, scientists have studied the human genome one gene at a time. Today, their view is more global, a vantage point that offers a new look at how genes and proteins work together to produce living cells and organisms.

For stem cell research, this was a “Who’s Who?” gathering. Those taking the stage at United Nations headquarters in New York included Whitehead Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch; Douglas Melton of Harvard University; Roslin Institute’s Ian Wilmut, the Scottish embryologist who cloned Dolly; and Seoul National University’s Shin Yong Moon, who culled embryonic stem cells from the cloned human blastocyst earlier this year.

Obesity researchers made an intriguing discovery in 2001 when they found that large doses of a particular fat-cell protein, adiponectin, caused obese mice to lose weight.

Scientists know a great deal about how tumors originate and develop, but relatively little about how cancer manages to metastasize and invade distant tissues and organs.

Whitehead Member Robert Weinberg is one of five researchers honored with the 2004 Prince of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research, the Prince of Asturias Foundation announced this week in Oviedo, Spain.

Pier Paolo Pandolfi, a molecular biologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, is no stranger to the benefits of publishing in the “best" scientific journals; greater impact, wider readership — and career-boosting citations for his junior colleagues’ CVs.

The human body is assaulted by hundreds of thousands of stimuli every day. Sights: A car is coming down the street, so you step out of the way. Sounds: Someone calls your name and you answer. Touch: A glossy magazine arrives in your mailbox and you thumb through its pages.

It starts out just like every other cell. There's nothing strange about it, no mutations, no odd behaviors—nothing that would distinguish it in any way from the countless cells with which it cohabits inside human tissue. Like all its neighbors, this cell multiplies only when it receives strict orders from its host tissue.

Hamlet provided one of the zippiest summations of the connections among life forms: “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.” Of course, fishing with flies hath also been popular. The flies and worms in this story differ from those preferred by fisherfolk.

Amyloid fibers, those clumps of plaque-like proteins that clog up the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, have perplexed scientists with their robust structures. In laboratory experiments, they are able to withstand extreme heat and cold and powerful detergents that cripple most other proteins.