QnAs with Peter N. Devreotes. Interview by Prashant Nair.

QnAs with John A. Rogers. Interview by Prashant Nair.

N ature is full of curves. So it is only natural that manmade devices meant to interact with nature emulate its elements of design. That is the line of reasoning behind the innovations of John Rogers, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a professor of materials science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Rogers’ innovations have inspired an array of approaches to re...

QnAs with David Baltimore. Interview by Prashant Nair.

A t the age of 37, David Baltimore accomplished what many researchers dream of but few achieve: reversing an entrenched dogma, eventually leading to a new view of life. In the early 1970s, Baltimore, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology, discovered reverse transcriptase—an enzyme found in some tumor viruses whose genet...

QnAs with Karel Svoboda.

When Karel Svoboda describes his decades-long efforts to visualize the brain with ever-greater precision, the unmistakable impression is that of a man driven by an insatiable urge to expand the frontiers of technology in the service of science. Since the mid1990s, when he and his colleagues developed transformative imaging techniques to peer at brain cells with unprecedented clarity, Svoboda, a...

QnAs with Rodolphe Barrangou.

The past decade in biological research might well be christened the age of CRISPR, a once-curious feature of bacterial genomes that spawned a handy tool for editing genes. Using CRISPR-based tools, researchers are making leaps in basic clinical research, and biotechnology companies are racing to launch trials of gene therapies for an array of diseases. Yet the immediate gains from this game-cha...

G Protein Linked Signal Transduction Pathways in Development: Dictyostetium as an Experimental System Review