The grants to Jennifer Doudna and John Ngai, both UC Berkeley professors of molecular and cell biology, are among 78 grants announced today (Monday, May 10) by the foundation in the fourth funding round of Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative to help scientists around the world "explore bold and largely unproven ways to improve health in developing countries," according to the foundation. The winning proposals, selected from almost 2,700 in this round alone, were submitted by scientists in 18 countries on six continents.

Doudna, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, studies ribonucleic acid, or RNA, which is a molecular cousin to the DNA that makes up genes. RNAs in various forms are responsible for an array of functions inside cells, from synthesizing proteins and exporting them from the cell, to regulating the expression of genes.

Jasmine Harman on the genetic weakness that has blighted her mother's life.

Her arms are bronzed and her hair is golden from the enviably hot locations where she spends her time filming.
But Jasmine Harman, the 34-year-old presenter of A Place In The Sun, Channel 4's overseas house-hunting series, is extremely wary of the sun.
For in her family runs a pernicious and common eye disease, and it can be exacerbated by strong sunlight.
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the principal cause of vision loss in the UK. It affects the macula, the part of the eye that allows us to see fine detail, gradually destroying the sharp central vision required, for example, for reading, watching television and driving.
Three million people suffer from it in the UK, about five per cent of the population.
The exact cause of AMD is not known, but there are a number of risk factors. It can be hereditary, but it also becomes more common with advancing age, with women more prone to it than men.

The researchers discovered in fruit flies that keeping the insulin receptor revved up in the brain prevents the die-off of neural stem cells that occurs when most regions of the brain mature into their adult forms. Whether the same technique will work in humans is unknown, but the UC Berkeley team hopes to find out.

"This work doesn't point the way to taking an adult who has already lost stem cells and bringing them back mysteriously, but it suggests what mechanisms might be operating to get rid of them in the first place," said Iswar K. Hariharan, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology. "Plus, if you were able to introduce neural stem cells into an adult brain, this suggests what kinds of mechanisms you might need to have in place to keep them alive."