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Earlier this week, a team of scientists including Ó³»­´«Ã½ researcher Rameen Beroukhim, also a physician at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, published from a study of squamous cell lung cancer, a disease linked to smoking. The scientists analyzed samples of lung tumors and discovered a mutation in the gene known as fibroblast growth factor receptor 1 (FGFR1) that was more common in samples of squamous cell lung cancer tumors than those of other types of lung cancer.

In an essay in this month’s Nature Chemical Biology, the Ó³»­´«Ã½â€™s Bridget Wagner describes her view of one of the greatest challenges in chemical biology today – identifying chemical compounds that coax cells to take on new properties. With these compounds in hand, you could transform cells from what they were to what you want them to be.

As a post-doctoral researcher in Harvard Medical School investigator (and Ó³»­´«Ã½ Associate Member) Norbert Perrimon's lab, Serena Silver loved talking to her fellow post-docs about their projects and liked to help them come up with new ideas to try. Now, as Group Leader of RNAi Screening Projects at the Ó³»­´«Ã½, Serena gets to talk to researchers about their projects for a living.

"I really enjoyed listening at lab meetings and thinking through the projects and the controls needed for an experiment - that I get to do that as my job now is extremely satisfying," she says.

We were sorting through scientific images recently, cataloguing and filing in a well-intentioned year-end swirl. This caught our eye: it's an islet of Langerhans that has been isolated from a human pancreas and stained to highlight the expression of insulin and glucagon, the hormones that regulate blood sugar. Beta cells, which produce the insulin needed to help lower blood sugar, show up as red. The green cells are alpha cells that express glucagon, which raises blood sugar. (The cell culture and microscopy was done by Deepika Walpita here at the Ó³»­´«Ã½.)