Word: biochemist
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...scientific team assembled by writers Stephen Hauser and Paul Attanasio, adapting an old Michael Crichton novel, is ragtag and cranky. The chief credential of its psychologist (Dustin Hoffman) is a report on how to handle alien encounters, which he admits cribbing largely from sci-fi tales. The biochemist (Sharon Stone) is a pill popper. The mathematician (Samuel L. Jackson) is a cynic, the astrophysicist (Liev Schreiber) is twittily lusting after a Nobel Prize, and the team leader (Peter Coyote) needs to try a little tenderness. In short, the possibilities for amusing dysfunction are potentially larger than we usually find...
Americans are eating this premise up. And their unlikely guru is Barry Sears, a 6-ft. 5-in., 215-lb. Marblehead, Mass., biochemist who toiled in the labs at the University of Virginia and M.I.T., describes himself as a "pointy-headed scientist," and says things like "I consider myself a messenger. The Zone is my message." Sears' 1995 book, The Zone, has 1.5 million copies in print and has been translated into 14 languages; Sears' second book, Mastering the Zone, spent 11 weeks on the best-seller list. Last month he published Zone Perfect Meals in Minutes (ReganBooks; $21), which...
...genes--begin to fray, rather like shoelaces that have lost their plastic tips. Eventually, such aged cells die--unless, like "immortal" cancer cells, they produce telomerase, an enzyme that protects and even rebuilds telomeres. Scientists have long dreamed of drugs that would inhibit the immortalizing enzyme because, observes M.I.T. biochemist Robert Weinberg, "then maybe cancer cells would run out of telomeres and just poop...
Wishful thinking? Maybe not. In papers published just a week apart in the journals Science and Cell, two teams of researchers--one led by Nobel-prizewinning biochemist Thomas Cech of the University of Colorado, the other by M.I.T.'s Weinberg--have announced a breakthrough that could help bring about such a drug. Both teams have managed to clone a gene that controls the activity of the telomerase enzyme in human cells. That could set the stage for development not only of inhibiting drugs but also of substances that switch on the enzyme--which might help combat degenerative diseases associated with...
...mice, says Caron, a biochemist at Duke University's Howard Hughes Medical Institute laboratory, are high on dopamine. They lack the genetic mechanism that sponges up this powerful stuff and spirits it away. Result: there is so much dopamine banging around in the poor creatures' synapses that the mice, though drug-free, act as if they were strung out on cocaine...