The Last Byte: System Testing Ourselves

Column: Every Last Byte

Inheritance powder is the name that was given to poisons, especially arsenic, that were commonly used in the 17th and early 18th centuries to hasten the death of the elderly. For most of the 17th century, arsenic was deadly but undetectable, making it nearly impossible to prove that someone had been poisoned. The first arsenic test produced a gas—hardly something that a scientist could show to ...

Hey, you, get onna my cloud [The Last Byte]

h BACK IN THE mid-1980s PCs began to invade the workplace. Those who ran the mainframes in their glass palaces found that their users preferred having their files and programs on their own machines, and not shared and administered by the IT priesthood. The pitfalls of this approach in terms of backup soon became apparent, but it did not stop the march to the ‘‘personal’’ computer. The pendulum ...

Ourselves

Irradiating Ourselves

Background: Efficient incorporation of the cellular cytidine deaminase APOBEC3G (APO3G) into HIV-1 virions is necessary for its antiviral activity. Even though cellular RNAs are known to be nonspecifically incorporated into virus particles, we have previously found that encapsidation of APO3G into HIV-1 virions is specifically enhanced by viral genomic RNA. Intracellularly, APO3G was found to f...

Waking the immune system at last.

ThisCCR Focus section examines a spate of new immunomodulatory agents, the latest in a long list of attempts to recruit the immune system to overcome cancer. Beginning with vaccines more than 40 years ago, we saw the development of interferon and interleukin (IL)-2 and then adoptive therapy with tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes, convincing ourselves in the process of the ability of the immune sys...