The National Library of Medicine, a part of the National Institutes of Health, is proud to present an extensive selection from the papers of one of the twentieth century’s greatest scientists, Francis Crick, on its Profiles in Science Web site.

Don't miss Crick's sketch of the DNA double helix.

This latest collection on Profiles in Science represents a close collaboration between the National Library of Medicine and the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine in London, which holds the Crick papers. The Crick collection brings to 14 the number of notable researchers and public health officials whose personal and professional records are featured on Profiles. The site is located at www.profiles.nlm.nih.gov.

An international team of scientists has used gene therapy in two separate studies to renew brain cells and restore normal movements in monkeys and rats with a drug-induced form of Parkinson's disease.

The research, detailed online in the scientific publications Brain and The Journal of Neuroscience, essentially describes one strategy to halt Parkinson's disease at its onset and another strategy to treat the devastating side effects that occur when treating the disease in its later stages.

By inserting corrective genes into the brain, scientists studying small monkeys called marmosets prevented brain damage by producing therapeutic levels of a protein that helps nourish brain cells, said Ron Mandel, Ph.D., a scientist with the University of Florida's McKnight Brain Institute and Genetics Institute who was part of the research team.

A series of studies by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center sheds light on the mechanisms used by viruses to thwart a host's immune defenses and may aid in the development of more effective drugs to fight hepatitis C and West Nile viruses, as well as the flu and the common cold.

In a study to appear in a March issue of the Journal of Virology and currently available online, UT Southwestern researchers describe how an essential gene, called RIG-I, turns on a cascade of host immune defenses when the hepatitis C virus (HCV) replicates in cultured human cells.

Those immune defenses should fight off the virus, but in a separate study, scheduled to appear online this week and in an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers show how HCV sidesteps the immune response, allowing the virus to replicate unchecked.

A new study investigating the respiratory system of insects may have solved a mystery that has intrigued physiologists for decades: why insects routinely stop breathing for minutes at a time.

Challenging previous theories, researchers at UC Irvine and Humboldt University propose that insects such as grasshoppers, moths, butterflies, some types of fruit flies, beetles and bugs close off their respiratory systems periodically to keep out excess oxygen, thus preventing damage to their tissues.

Timothy Bradley, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCI, and Stefan Hetz, assistant professor of physiology at Humboldt University, Germany, report their findings in the Feb. 3 issue of Nature.

Alcohol's primary target is the central nervous system (CNS), where it influences neurotransmission to produce intoxication. Scientists can now use microarray technology to study brain function gene by gene. Symposium proceedings published in the February issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research address the effects of alcohol on what is called "gene expression" in the CNS regions of animal models.

Preventive measures are failing to stem the rising rate of HIV infection, warn two senior doctors in an editorial in this week's BMJ.

An estimated 38 million people worldwide, including over 2 million children, are now infected with HIV, and a record 4.8 million became infected in 2003.

The underlying reason for this continuing increase is socioeconomic, but the increase also represents a failure of prevention, write the authors.

As public health officials in China brace for a potential resurgence in SARS (Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in connection with Chinese New Year on February 9, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have published insights into a new protein that could be an important contributor to the SARS virus' ability to cause disease and death.

When the SARS virus first jumped from its still unknown animal reservoir to humans in late 2002, it caused approximately 800 deaths and 8,000 infections in several Asian countries. Months before SARS became available for direct study, Washington University researchers used the SARS genome, finished a mere half-year after the first human infections, to look for potentially important viral proteins.