NIH may seem like a highly diverse scientific community. After all, our intramural program is made up of male and female scientists who represent almost all races from around the world. But among our principal investigators and senior leaders, many groups are significantly under-represented.
Got materials? Before you share them, document them. NIH Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs) are agreements that govern the transfer of tangible research materials between two organizations when the recipient intends to use the material for his or her own research purposes.
Felcom’s role is to serve the fellows’ community here at NIH; each subcommittee is tasked with enriching different aspects of our NIH training. However, during one Felcom meeting in fall 2010, members decided it was time for Felcom to reach out and help others. So the Service and Outreach Subcommittee (SOS) was formed.
You’d think it would be hard to top laser-capture microdissection, or LCM. This technique, developed at the NIH in the 1990s, uses lasers and other specialized instruments to carve out sections of tissue as small as a few cells from across a complex specimen and then lift them away almost magically, undamaged, for further analysis.
NIAID: Priming with DNA Vaccine Makes Avian Flu Vaccine Work Better
The immune response to an H5N1 avian influenza vaccine was greatly enhanced in healthy adults if they were first primed with a DNA vaccine expressing a gene for a key H5N1 protein, according to a NIAID study that described results from two clinical studies. Most study volunteers who received the DNA vaccine 24 weeks before receiving a booster vaccine made from whole, inactivated H5N1 virus produced high concentrations of antibodies thought to be protective against the globular head region of the protein hemagglutinin (HA).
Senior Investigator and Head, Hypertension Unit, Cardiac Function Section, Laboratory of Cardiovascular Science
Education: Saint Petersburg State I.P. Pavlov Medical University, Saint Petersburg, Russia (M.D.); I.M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg (Ph.D. in pharmacology)
I confess that I like my lab chief better on painkillers. I’m not entirely sure what he’s taking. I think it is Vicodin or some hydrocodone-based drug to relieve his periodic back pain. He’s lucid, of course, and in fact as sharp as ever. Under his leadership, our lab still continues to pump out papers in high-quality journals, including those coveted journals with single-word titles. Nothing at all changes in terms of productivity, and we certainly aren’t publishing papers with psychedelic titles along the lines of “Lucy in the Lab with c-Jun N-Terminal Kinases.” It’s just that being in the lab is more pleasant when he is medicated.
