In the harsh judgment of natural selection, the ultimate measure of success is reproduction. So it’s no surprise that life spends lavish resources on this feat, whether in the courtship behavior of birds and bees or replicating the cells that keep them alive. Now research has identified a new pie...

A serendipitous discovery of deaf zebra fish larvae has helped narrow down the function of an elusive protein necessary for hearing and balance. The work, led by Rockefeller University’s A. James Hudspeth, suggests that hearing loss may arise from a faulty pathway that translates sound waves into...

Michael Crickmore, a Rockefeller University postdoctoral fellow in Leslie B. Vosshall’s Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, is Grand Prize winner in the 2009 GE & Science Prize for Young Life Scientists, an essay competition established and administered by GE Healthcare, Science magazine an...

Two human embryonic stem cell lines, derived by Rockefeller University scientists, are among the first 13 human embryonic stem cell lines for use in research funded by the National Institutes of Health under the NIH Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research adopted in July 2009. The two lines, call...

In trying to explain psychiatric disorders, genes simply cannot tell the whole story. The real answers are in the interaction of genes and the environment. Post-traumatic stress disorder requires some trauma, for instance, and people, for the most part, aren’t born depressed. Now research has rev...

Performance enhancers are the currency of a competitive society. But there’s one that we have always had: For millions of years, segments of our DNA have improved the performance of our genome, revving up protein production at those times we need it most. New research from Rockefeller University ...

Despite its tiny genome, the hepatitis C virus packs a mean punch. The virus is a microcosm of efficiency, and each of its amino acids plays multiple roles in its survival and ability to sidestep attack. But new research from Rockefeller University suggests that this fancy footwork and multitaski...

Two Rockefeller University scientists were named winners of the third annual Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists at last night’s Science and the City Gala hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences. Associate Professor Shai Shaham, head of Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Developmental Genetics, an...

HIV is a wily and lethal replicator. In less than 25 years, it’s killed more than 25 million people. Scientists are exploring exactly how this virus reproduces because they would like to find a way to abort the process. Now, just two years after a group at Rockefeller University was the first to ...

Every day tiny segments of our DNA are chipped or fragmented or get stuck together when they should really be pulled apart. But what our genome necessarily lacks in stability it makes up for with a phalanx of guards that monitor and repair the damage. In new research to appear in this week’s adva...