It’s been more than two decades since the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first “test-tube baby,” and now one of the pioneers who helped make in vitro fertilization (and, by extension, Brown herself) a reality has been tapped to receive the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
Nobel Prize-winning biologist David Baltimore has told his peers that researchers are no closer to discovering an HIV vaccine after decades of study. He called for new approaches and said the challenge was difficult because “to control HIV immunologically the scientific community has to beat out nature, do something that nature, with its advantage of four billion years of evolution, has not been able to do.”
A UC Berkeley biologist announces that a new fossil discovery links the famous “Lucy” skeleton (~ 3 million - 3.6 million years old) to an even more ancient human ancestor—from about 4.1 million years back.