Departments

From the Deputy Director for Intramural Research

Valuing Diversity at NIH

By Michael Gottesman, DDIR

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.

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News You Can Use

New Web-Based Material Transfer Agreements System

By Michael Gottesman, DDIR

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.

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The Training Page

From the Fellows Committee

SOS: Service With a Scientific Twist

By Sarah Rhodes, NIMH

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.

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New Methods

Laser Capture Micro-Dissection Gets Automated

By Christopher Wanjek

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.

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Research Briefs

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).

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Colleagues: Recently Tenured

Alexei Bagrov, M.D., Ph.D., NIA

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)

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Announcements

The Annual Kinyoun Lecture

“A Public Health Approach To Infectious Disease Prevention and Control For the 21st Century”

Thursday, November 17, 2011
2:00–3:00 p.m.
Lipsett Amphitheater (Building 10)

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Laboratory Confessions

Medicated Lab Chief

By Name Withheld

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.

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