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Volume 402 Issue 6758, 11 November 1999

Opinion

  • The influence of commercial interests is highlighted by recent reports of deaths during trials of gene therapies. The loosening of public scrutiny of such studies needs to be reconsidered.

    Opinion

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  • Charges faced by a Ukrainian scientist could have a chilling effect on the future of international collaboration.

    Opinion
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News

  • London

    The Ukrainian government denied accusations that a prominent marine biologist, had been arrested and charged for sending secret information abroad and handling foreign currency illegally.

    • Natasha Loder
    News
  • Washington

    A powerful conservative member of the US Senate has testified in favour of allowing stem cell research at the National Institutes of Health, increasing the chances that the Congress will allow public funding of such research.

    • Meredith Wadman
    News
  • Washington

    A powerful conservative member of the US Senate has testified in favour of allowing stem cell research at the National Institutes of Health, increasing the chances that the Congress will allow public funding of such research.

    • Colin Macilwain
    News
  • Sydney

    A radical plan by Australia's education minister to regulate the country's 37 universities has backfired, leaving the system in a policy vacuum but turning higher education into a highly-charged political issue.

    • Peter Pockley
    News
  • Munich

    Germany's highest appeals body has upheld a ruling that two retired medical professors from the University of Cologne must repay several million deutschmarks of extra income gained from private diagnostics work.

    • Quirin Schiermeier
    News
  • Moscow

    Four of Israel's 16 publicly supported high-tech entrepreneurship incubators to help immigrant scientists from the former Soviet block to develop profitable ventures are to close next year.

    • Carl Levitin
    News
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News Analysis

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News in Brief

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Correspondence

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Book Review

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Millennium Essay

  • Nineteenth-century physicists couldn't agree about the speed of light.

    • Brian Pippard
    Millennium Essay
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Futures

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News & Views

  • Many asteroids have a porous structure, which helps them absorb energy from collisions without being smashed to bits. This shows how planets might have formed, but could be bad news should an asteroid ever threaten Earth.

    • Erik Asphaug
    News & Views
  • Transposons are mobile chunks of DNA that insert themselves at random in the genome. This is dangerous, particularly in germline DNA (which is passed on to offspring). A new mechanism for suppressing transposon activity in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans is proposed, and it involves the until-now mysterious phenomenon of RNA interference.

    • Rueyling Lin
    • Leon Avery
    News & Views
  • During the production of sperm, there is a 50:50 chance that any sperm will contain either copy of a chromosome pair. But there are exceptions. One is the so-called mouse t-haplotype, an unusual variant of chromosome 17 that can be inherited in up to 99% of cases. The molecular basis of such skewed inheritance ratios is starting to be unravelled with the identification of a protein central to the process.

    • Keith R. Willison
    News & Views
  • The nature of the glass transition is a long-standing problem in condensed-matter science. New work shows that the motion of a small atomic species through a bulk metallic glass is due to two diffusion processes -- one that dominates below the transition and one that dominates above it.

    • A. Lindsay Greer
    News & Views
  • The cell cycle consists of four phases: S phase (in which genetic material is duplicated); mitosis (during which it is segregated between two daughter cells); and two 'rest' phases, G1 and G2. The transition between mitosis and G1 needs to be precisely timed, and one of the molecular steps involved in controlling this transition has now been pinned down to a protein known as Cdc20.

    • Susanne Prinz
    • Angelika Amon
    News & Views
  • Although advances have been made in plant genetics, many species still cannot be studied owing to the lack of efficient methods for disrupting genes. This is no longer a problem for leguminous plants, thanks to the development of a technique for generating mutations. A marker transposon called Ac is inserted into the genome, and, if it is excised again precisely, it allows the affected gene to be sequenced with ease.

    • Herman P. Spaink
    News & Views
  • Continuing this week's asteroidal theme, Daedalus has a plan for what we could do should a stray asteroid or comet smash into the Earth. His idea is that a defence system could be placed in a high Earth orbit. But this system would not consist of nuclear missiles -- rather, it would be another asteroid.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Brief Communication

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Article

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Letter

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New on the Market

  • Monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies, immunoassays, immunoetcetera.

    New on the Market
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Careers and Recruitment

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Collection

  • Throughout its 130-year history, Naturehas provided readers with news and comment about scientific careers. ThisNatureCollection provides a repository of invaluable websites and other data essential for the serious jobhunter who wants just the right opportunity.

    Collection
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