LMB In The News

“Alexander Gann and Jan Witkowski unveil newly found letters between key players in the DNA story. Strained relationships and vivid personalities leap off the pages… It turns out that this lost correspondence was never thrown out, but became mixed in with Sydney Brenner’s papers. Brenner and Crick shared an office in Cambridge from 1956 to 1977. They moved offices and buildings several times – from the Cavendish Laboratory to the ‘Hut’ to the new Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), and between offices within the LMB.” More…

“British scientists have developed a new way of joining and rebuilding molecules and used it to refine the anti-wrinkle treatment botox in an effort to improve its use for Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy and chronic migraine. Researchers at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology said their results also open up ways to develop new forms of Clostridium botulinum neurotoxin, commonly known as botox, which may be used as long-term painkillers.” More…

“BBC radio Cambridge 7.20am 21.10.10: Dr Matthew Freeman, MRC LMB Group Leader, welcomes the LMB funding decision outlined in the spending review” More…

“How the bundles of neurons in the brain controls behaviour remains an ongoing mystery. Researchers from the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), in Vienna, Austria, and the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB/MRC), Cambridge, United Kingdom, have mapped neurons of the fruit fly, Drosophila, that controls sexual behavior. “We literally untangled the mess of wires in the fly brain and laid the ground plans for investigating a complex behavior in a simple organism,” says Jai Yu, whose doctoral work is published in Current Biology. This article is no longer available from the source website.

“From helping to decipher the genetic code to establishing the worm C. elegans as a model organism, and from directing the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge to advising research institutes around the world, Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner has had a long and impressive career. Few scientists have achieved as much as Brenner in both research and administration of science, and he has done so while enjoying a well-deserved reputation for iconoclasm and irreverent wit. The new book Sydney Brenner: A Biography, written by Errol C. Friedberg and published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, documents Brenner’s game-changing discoveries in the field of molecular biology, all brightened by his entertaining personality.” More…

“The hot spot for life on early Earth may have been a very cold place. Tiny pockets and channels that form inside ice can contain and protect replicating molecules, researchers report September 21 in Nature Communications. The paper suggests that life could have sprung from icy slush covering a freshwater lake, rather than a broiling deep-sea hydrothermal vent or the “warm little pond” proposed by Charles Darwin. And perhaps the frigid, icy surfaces of other planets are not as barren as they appear, proposes the research team from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.” More…